Monthly Archive for August, 2007

id3.exe – ideal tool for tagging and renaming MP3 files

Published on August 29, 2007 in audio-video, music and tool. 4 Comments

I want to mention a little tool that helped me out twice in the last week, and that I find very little info about online. It’s a Windows command-line MP3 file tagger and renamer called id3.exe. Since I forgot where I downloaded it from and Google doesn’t give me a clue either: here’s where you can download id3.exe.

ID3.exe can do several things, of which I will just cite the things I actually used:

  • it can obviously set ID3 tags in MP3 files (that is, ID3v1 and v2). The first time it adds ID3v2 tags which are stored in the beginning of the file (necessary when you need the info right when you start reading the file, like with streaming), the whole file has to be rewritten, but subsequent modifications are really fast.
    id3.exe -1 -2 -g [genre] -c "[Copyright notice]" -l "[Album name]" "%OUTPUT%"
  • set the ID3 tags of one file to those of another. I needed this when I transcoded MP3 files to a lower bitrate with LAME. LAME does not copy the existing ID3 tags to the new file. So I used ID3.exe to just copy those from the source file.
    id3.exe -D %INPUT% -1 -2 "%OUTPUT%"
  • Rename the file according to the MP3 tags. I had a big collection of MP3 files called “01 Track01″ without any MP3 tags. I first set the ID3 tags based upon the folder structure (the folder name was the Album name), and then renamed them to “[Artist name] – [Album name] - [Track N°].mp3″.
    id3.exe -2 -f "%%a - %%l - %%t.rbs" "%OUTPUT%"
  • Id3 can also deduct album names, artist, song titles and track number from the complete filename + path.

Continue reading ‘id3.exe – ideal tool for tagging and renaming MP3 files’

My first picture in the papers

Published on August 23, 2007 in Belgium, Tango and photography. 3 Comments

De Morgen: artikel
An Baccaert wrote an article in De Morgen about Nathalie and Andrés, who are representing the Benelux in the ‘Mundial de Tango‘ in Buenos Aires. She wanted a nice picture to include with the article and came across one I made at the Tango Marathon in June.

She asked me if she could use it, and because An is a friend of mine, because I know Nathalie, because I use a Creative Commons license and maybe also a bit because I like the idea of having an image of mine in the papers, I agreed. So there it is: my first newspaper publication!

(hat tip to Clopin for getting me the PDF version!)

What Google Agenda currently misses

Published on August 22, 2007 in Google and Web2.0. 3 Comments

I am using Google Agenda as the central repository for the milonga.be Belgian tango agenda, which I edit together with half a dozen other tango enthusiasts. While the principle of a central, hosted calendar storage works wonderfully, I (have to) use a modified PHPiCalendar to display different views on the agenda (’only Brussels’, ‘only workshops’, ‘1 week in advance’, ‘1 month in advance’, …). There are actually a couple of features that I’d like to see in Google Agenda, and what better place to list them but here:

Google Agenda: desired features

Metadata/Folksonomy

Currently an event in the agenda has the fields Title, Date/time (with recurrency, if any) , Location and Description. What I really miss is Tags (or categories, keywords, whatever you want to call them). Tags would allow me to attribute events to categories so that I can easily slice and dice them: only display the “milonga’s”, the events in Antwerp, the events in a specific place. Now I had to write a modified ‘filtered printable view’ for PHPiCalendar so that I can search on specific words in the event title, but that is really a hack. E.g. I now ask every editor to create the event titles as

“[TYPE]: [name of the event] @ [LOCATION]“

so that I can filter on “CONCERT:” or “@ Gent”. With the tags “concert, gent, polariteit, openair” it would be so much easier.

The iCalendar specification even mentions a ‘Categories’ field, although Google Agenda currently does not use it.

Continue reading ‘What Google Agenda currently misses’

Weekday colours (Ayurveda)

Published on August 21, 2007 in color. 4 Comments

My girlfriend recently introduced me to the fact that the days of the week have associated colours, and that one might take these into account when choosing what to wear, to eat or  -in my case- what to drink. The colours are defined by the Ayurveda, the “ancient system of health care that is native to the Indian subcontinent“.

Since I always forget what colour of underwear to put on on which days, I’ll write it down here:
ayurveda colors

Monday: Lord Shiva rules on Mondays. White is the colour for Mondays and therefore wearing white dresses and keeping white flowers at home are recommended on Mondays. It is a good day for men seeking favours from women and for making new friends. Taking honey and cucumber on Mondays is likely to yield good results. Continue reading ‘Weekday colours (Ayurveda)’

K2 Sidebar modules vs. widgets

Published on August 13, 2007 in Wordpress. 0 Comments

I upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress recently, and in the process my K2 Sidebar modules were deleted because now Wordpress has ‘widgets’ built in. Having used both systems for a while, I can only conclude: it’s a big step backward.

K2 Sidebar modules

k2-sidebar

The K2 theme comes with this plugin installed and it is the perfect sidebar framework:

  • it has an HTML, navigation, RSS, calendar … block and if you really need to do something very specific, there’s always the PHP block.
  • per block you can decide on which type of pages it should be displayed. E.g. you can show the navigation only in the static pages, and your recent comments only in the blog section. You can even exclude the showing on individual pages (e.g.: if on one page you need an IFRAME of 800 pixels wide, you can disable all sidebar modules.)
  • the blocks show the name that you gave them: you don’t have blocks named ‘Text 1′, ‘Text 2′ but e.g. ‘About’ and ‘Adsense’. This is much clearer if you want to change the order afterwards.

Just compare this: the RSS block for K2 and Widgets:
k2-sidebar-feed wp_widgets_rss

Which is why I dove into the Wordpress forums to find a way to disable those simplistic widgets and get my original sidebar back. Here is the trick: the disable-wordpress-widgets plugin (also on code.google.com - via wordpress.org) disables the Widgets. I then installed the lastest stable version of K2 (0.9.6) over my Wordpress 2.2.1 and not only are the sidebar modules active again, the sidebar was recovered as it was (from the database, probably). Awesome! Throw out those widgets!

David Boschmans

Published on August 8, 2007 in Belgium. 0 Comments

Microsoft David2

David Boschmans was a kind, thoughtful and much appreciated man. He has left us way too early. My condoleances to his family, friends and colleagues.

also: Ine, Pietel

my PersonalDNA

Published on August 7, 2007 in Society. 0 Comments


If you want to hear a lot of compliments about yourself that sound more-or-less correct, take the PersonalDNA test.

  • You’re in touch with what is going on around you and adept at remaining down-to-earth and logical.
  • Although you’re detail-oriented, this doesn’t mean that you lose the big picture.
  • You tend to find beauty in form and efficiency, as opposed to finding it in broad-based, abstract concepts.
  • Never one to pass on an adventure, you’re consistently seeking and finding new things, even in your immediate surroundings.
  • Because of this eagerness to pursue new experiences, you’ve learned a lot; your attention to detail means that you gain a great deal from your adventures.
  • The intellectual curiosity that drives you leads you to seek out causes of and reasons behind things.
  • …
  • You don’t mind being in social situations, as you feel comfortable enough with people to be yourself.
  • Your caring nature goes beyond a basic concern: you take the time to understand the nuances of people’s situations before passing any sort of judgment.
  • You’re a good listener, and even better at offering advice.
  • You’re concerned with others at both an individual and societal level—you sympathize with the plights of troubled groups, and you can care about people you’ve never met.

via bnox

Point and shoot badly

Published on August 6, 2007 in music and photography. 3 Comments

Luciano Supervieille I went to the concert of Bajofondo Tango Club in Brugge last Friday. Of course I took my Canon 350D along and shot a lot of pictures. I never use a flash for concert pictures, certainly not since I started using a 50mm f/1.8 and I can grab quite a lot of light with it. I usually use ‘Aperture priority’ mode (with aperture on 1.8, obviously) and use the automatic focus, because I’m not good enough at doing that manually. You sometimes have to wait for the right podium lights to go on, include some light spots in the frame so that your camera uses a shorter shutter but above all, you have to be lucky.

The pictures that came out rather well are in my Flickr Bajofondo Tango Club album.

I did have some fun with a guy in front of me with a ‘point-and-shoot’ camera, it might have been a Canon Ixus or something. He added a twist to the common ‘people-using-a-camera-flash-from-a-distance’ error. He would see a beautiful image in his viewer, push the button and a totally awful grayish picture would show up as a result. For his sake and that of other P&S’ers, here’s two rules for using it in a concert where you’re in the audience.

Rule #1: do not use your camera flash

You have a simple small flash in your camera that might reach as far as 5m maybe, but it is of no use for a podium 20m away. Your camera will think that the subject of your photo will receive a bunch of light from it and choose a faster shutter. The light of your flash will never reach those musicians, but chances are some will fall on members of the audience that are standing nearby, so the only thing that will light up is some bald heads, a fake blonde and a lot of dandruff.

Switch the flash to ‘off’ or use the ‘landscape’ setting! If your camera permits it, set the ISO-setting to as high as 800ISO (if you own a 1000€-plus camera, 1600ISO is safe too, but you shouldn’t be reading this then). This will make the image grainier, but will make the shutter time shorter. If the scene is still too dark and your camera uses shutter times of more than 1/20 sec, try to include more light in the composition. Don’t zoom in too much, it will only make things worse. You can always crop the picture when you’re home.

Remember: when you’re using a small flash at a concert, or even worse, a mobile phone with the built-in flash from 30m away, you look like an utter amateur.

Rule #2: do not hold your finger in front of the flash

This one cracked me up: the guy in front of me held his left index finger right in front of his flash. So most of his pictures were extremely dark, with the odd one that included a completely white fragment of his finger. The only times that this wasn’t the case, was when he took pictures in portrait, turning his camera 90 degrees to the left, which brought his flash even lower and added quite some very bright shoulders to the composition.

So, if your flash photos are way too dark, and your finger feels very warm whenever you take a picture, check where the flash sits on your compact camera and make sure you put no bodily parts in front of it.

Bajofondo Tango Club