My new Rio Riot, unlike most other portable MP3 players on the market, ignores paths and filenames when determining artist/album/song/genre information. Instead, it relies exclusively on the ID3 identification tags for artist/album/song/genre organization.

So it goes, only a small fraction of my 60 gigs collection has normalized ID3 tags. (For some reason, the folks on Audiogalaxy and Kazaa don’t seem care much about metadata.) Editing them all by hand would’ve taken months, so I started looking around for a good ID3 tag editor. By far, the best I’ve found is Tag&Rename. It’s fast, usable, and feature-rich. One of the more inspired features is the ability to import album information from Allmusic.com (including genres, album reviews and cover art). It can also export your collection to comma-separated values, query CDDB/FreeDB, rename MP3s/paths based on ID3 tag information (and vice-versa), and so on.

That’s hard to beat, but if you’ve found a better ID3 editor, speak up.

The Onion has some interesting keywords in the meta tags on their front page, with references to Smoove B, Marilyn Manson, Phish, the NBA, “All your base,” ferrets, and Taco Bell. Keyword jamming like this is common, but particularly dumb in this case. If the Onion is trying to attract search engines with keywords, then why are they excluding all search engines from indexing their content?

March 6, 2004: In hindsight, it’s so clearly a joke. It’s hard to believe I ever took it seriously. I just checked, and they’ve updated their meta tags with more relevant keywords. It’s very odd.

Continue reading “The Onion's Meta Tags” →

While in Arizona this weekend, I managed to drop by SonicBlue’s branch office in Scottsdale. I scored a refurbished Rio Riot jukebox (20 gigs!) out of the visit, and a few great photos of their office and internal paraphernalia.

Don’t miss this poster spelling out their corporate motto: AWESOME. I guess it could be worse.

Continue reading “SonicBlue is Awesome” →

Get free DVD/VHS rentals from Blockbuster Video until August 15. Just fill out this form, preferably using a temporary e-mail address from a site like Spamgourmet or Spamhole. They’ll e-mail you the URL for a free rental coupon. Repeat as necessary. Enjoy! (Thanks, Phil!)

Update: The promotional offer has long since passed.

After installing SpamAssassin last March, the spam on my 7-user server dropped from roughly 80-100/week to one or two a month.

So it’s not a big surprise that e-mail marketing firms are getting nervous, starting with a smear campaign against SpamAssassin. Gord Sears’s column in his marketing newsletter calls it a violation of free speech, demanding a law against server-side filtering software. Paul Myers, in his You HAD Mail column on Talkbiz.com, claims that SpamAssassin could bounce valuable mail like “discussion list posts,” “newsletters that you requested,” and “LOTS of personal emails from friends and family.”

I want to clear up a couple misunderstandings: First, the recommended SpamAssassin configuration flags e-mail as spam before forwarding it to the user, allowing for simple filtering in the client. It doesn’t delete the mail, although you can configure procmail that way, if you like. Any ISP that quietly deleted e-mail without consent wouldn’t be very popular for long.

Second, Spam Assassin has to be tailored for the individual. For the first week after installation, I had to add a few newsletters and discussion lists to the “whitelist,” which tells Spam Assassin never to filter e-mails with a particular “From” address or subject. After that, Spam Assassin very rarely accidentally flagged good e-mail as spam. And it has never once mistakenly flagged an e-mail from someone I know as spam.

It’s not a perfect system, but it’s a depressing necessity.