Matthew Skyrm’s .Plan in Japan

I have noticed quite a few of my friends who haven’t been to Tokyo believe that Akihabara is some kind of haven for DVD movie and video piracy. That really couldn’t be further from the truth. After spending many, many weekends going through every little corner of “Akitown”, I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve seen anything related to piracy. I have seen a few guys on the street selling video game ROMs for absurd amounts of money (¥30,000 or about $300 for one disc full of Neo Geo game roms) and cable TV decoder boxes, but that is about it.

However, Dragon Computer is a physical shop that carries mod chips for both the Xbox and PS2. That’s not to say I believe the only reason to buy a mod chip is for piracy purposes (legit uses include playing personal game backups or running homebrew software) but usually pirated games and tools that enable piracy (i.e. mod chips) can be found in the same place. Dragon Computer doesn’t appear to be selling any games, just chips. I haven’t bought anything from Dragon Computer and can’t vouch for them in any way.

If you download Podcasts and use iTunes, you’ve probably noticed the disorganized mess that your library has become due to the lack of standardization and suitability of Podcast ID3 tags when using iTunes. The problem is even worse when you are trying to navigate your music or Podcasts using the little screen on your iPod. To solve this problem, I’ve come up with an AppleScript that I call Podcast Cleaner. As this was my first AppleScript, and I was shooting for quick results rather than elegance, the code is another disorganized mess to say the least. It does, however, do the job.

The way it works is as follows — I hardcode the name of each Podcast’s Playlist (iPodder Lemon creates a playlists for each Podcast), then I further hardcode the new Genre/Artist/Album for each Podcast I subscribe to. Lastly, I take the existing Song Name, Album, and Artist and concatenate that all together and replace the Song Name with the result. I use an unused field in the ID3 tag to indicate whether a file has been “cleaned” and check it first so I don’t “clean” the same file twice.

Due to all the hardcoding, I have to edit the AppleScript every time I subscribe to a new Podcast or a Podcast changes its name. Other than that, it’s pretty seamless. I simply run Podcast Cleaner each morning before I synchronize my iPod with the latest Podcasts.

See the screenshot below of my nice clean iTunes Library.

Click this link Podcast Cleaner.zip to download my personal version of Podcast Cleaner. To use it, you’ll firstly need a Macintosh; Windows doesn’t support AppleScript. Secondly, edit the file to suit your particular list of Podcasts (should be self explanatory and obviously amateur to anyone that has taken a basic programming class) and place into “/Users/username/Library/Scripts” without the quotes and substituting username with your username. You may need to create the Scripts folder yourself.

I am not sure how iTunes 4.9 will handle Podcasts, but I’m hoping I won’t need Podcast Cleaner anymore.

Hello all and welcome to my blog.
I am going to start simple and slowly build this into my .plan / weblog /
personal site with info about me and businesses I’ve been involved in. I’ll be
focusing mostly on my technology and business interests rather than personal
matters, but don’t be surprised by the occasional random post.
Thanks for reading!