Dear LJ brain trust,

Upgrading a browser is a dangerous thing because you never know what'll happen to your add-ons (or UI experience in general, really) until you get there, and rolling back isn't always smooth. In the past I've used my iBook to test-drive new versions of Firefox before committing on the machine where it really matters, but apparently OS 10.4 is no longer good enough for Firefox (and the iBook isn't good enough for newer operating systems, which I knew when I bought it).

I was hoping that I could just visit the pages at the Mozilla add-ons page for the add-ons I care about to find out the latest versions of Firefox on which they're supported. No dice. I can apply Google one at a time to look for evidence one way or the other -- for example, I found a Stylish user script to change something in the Firefox 8 UI, which suggests it works with Firefox 8 -- but is there a better way?

I know some of you are already using Firefox 7 or 8, so just in case there's overlap in our add-ons, I'd appreciate it if you could let me know if you have direct knowledge (and for which versions of Firefox) for any of the following: AddBlock Plus, Flashblock, Ghostery, Greasemonkey (I assume, but...), HTTPS-Everywhere, Image Zoom, NoScript, Stylish. I use others, but these are the important ones.

Thanks.

PS: I'd also appreciate hints about major UI changes.

So Netflix just raised my subscription fee 60% (effective September 1). They did this by splitting streaming and DVDs into two separate plans, each costing $8/month, instead of bundling streaming with DVD plans as they do now. They argue that the price increase is due to the high cost of (and demand for) streaming (see recent news about them and Sony, for instance), but if so their pricing doesn't make sense. They didn't raise the price of the current streaming-only plan, and they are now asserting that DVDs cost $8/month to support (for one out at a time) instead of the $2/month suggested by the current pricing model. My current plan is $10/month for streaming + one DVD at a time. If streaming is $8 of that, then they have just raised DVD-rental fees 400%. (Ok, less half the overhead of having a customer account -- but I'm betting that's pennies a month.)

I, unlike others, am not looking for an alternate streaming service. Netflix has the largest streaming catalogue out there (though it has many deficiencies) and it already works for me. I want easy DVD rental because of those gaps in the streaming catalogue. What alternatives do I have for that?

Dear LJ Brain Trust,

We recently received a Keurig coffee maker as a gift. This is one of those gizmos that takes individual packets for making coffee (or tea or cocoa). Pour in water, put in individual packet, push the button, and out comes a cup of hot drink a couple minutes later. As the pitch goes, if you and your spouse like very different things, this gadget's for you.

To my surprise, I have found a coffee-based drink that was actually pleasant. This is a first, so I turn to you, o brain trust, to guide my further explorations. Because while this was fine, it isn't exactly healthy. Also, I'd kind of like to know about non-dairy options (for meat meals), assuming any exist that I'd like. For this experiment I started with Dani's mantra that coffee is a good source of calcium.

What worked: a French vanilla packet turned into 8oz of coffee (the gadget supports 6-10), about 4oz (!) of half-and-half (didn't have cream in the house), and about two heaping tableteaspoons of sugar (ack). These were added incrementally, alternating half-and-half and sugar in small quantities until it tasted good. So possibly a better answer is more milk product/no sugar, and I don't know how cream versus half-and-half will play out. There is also the question of other coffee bases to try, particularly if I can find them in variety packs or something so I'm not committing to a whole box of something we turn out not to like. I am categorically uninterested in decaffeinated coffees (defeats the purpose of coffee for me).

For calibration, I also like most black teas. For a "regular" tea I default to English breakfast. I do not care for Early Grey but Lady Grey is ok. I like most strongly-flavored or spiced teas, so my instinct is to look for coffees with some flavor additive. (This is why I gravitated to the French vanilla, and I have my eye on the hazelnut packet.) I think what this all means is that I don't like bitter flavors. What does that imply about coffee roast types? I see a variety of descriptors in that space but I don't know what they tend to mean for flavor. And how should I be thinking about the trade-off between stronger coffee flavors and brew strength?

MP3s ripped from CDs or bought digitally (usually) come pre-tagged, including "genre". "Genre" has an eclectic set of options including folk, rock, soundtrack, children's, Christmas, gospel, international, electronic, and electronica/dance, to name just a few. Some CDs of Jewish music came tagged as Christian (!) or gospel, and I changed those to Jewish (a new category) at the time. An MP3 can have at most one genre (hence options like folk-rock, I guess).

Some of these genres are orthogonal to each other. Jeff Wayne's "War of the Worlds", "Pirates of Penzance", and "West Side Story" are all soundtracks, but they are not similar musically. Children's isn't a genre; it's an audience or application. "Nowell Sing We" and "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer" are both Christmas songs, but they're not the same at all (I would sort the former with "early", another category I had to invent because "classical" just doesn't fit the middle ages and renaissance). (Ok, I wouldn't have the latter in my collection, but work with me here...) I have no idea what the difference between "electronic" and "electronica/dance" might be, and how the latter differs from "dance".

I think the makers of the tagging system conflated style and purpose. We're running into this a lot with international dance music (often dances are set to folk songs), or with everything from folk to blues to rock ending up together because they're "Jewish", or SCA dance music being scattered across "SCA" (this must have been a custom category for someone), "dance", "classical", "folk" (?), and probably others. And I'd like to be able to tag the subset of folk music that is children's music (for selective exclusion), without losing its folk-ness.

I'm coming to the conclusion that the correct way to do this is to use "genre" for what it is musically and some other tag for usage (if it has a primary usage). Looking at the tags available to me in iTunes, it looks like I should use "grouping" for this. (I've never seen this field filled in, so I don't know what conventions surround it.) So early music is early music and some of it might be grouped as "dance", folk is folk and rock is rock and some of each might be grouped as "Jewish" (or perhaps "Jewish liturgical", since that's what I'm really after), and the Hebrew folk songs that are used for Israeli dances would "folk" (genre) and grouped as "dance", and so on. (Maybe we want to distinguish SCA dance and international folk dance; that's an implementation detail.) But before I try to do anything along these lines I'd like input: how do you capture multiple dimensions of your music? (Another option, just to throw it out there, is to use playlists as buckets. We're doing some of that but it doesn't feel sustainable to me.) I want to be able to find music by genre or by purpose, which says to me I want two searchable fields.

We are currently using the comments field to support tags iTunes doesn't give us. For example, there's no off-the-shelf way to tag the language of a song! So for the languages we care about we have entries in the comments field like LANG_HEBREW. We're also doing something similar to tag the Child ballads (TAG_CHILD_#_) so we can easily find the dozen variations on "Maddy Groves" scattered through the library. (Child ballads are a special interest of Dani's.) We're also using this field for meta-data about our own recordings (e.g. TAG_WEAK); "comments" probably isn't a good place for that but those were the first tags we added so we grabbed the obvious field and now we're kind of stuck unless we want to do a lot of work.

A problem with using "comments" is that you can't systematically add to a comment field, only replace it. So if we wanted to use it for other tags (like usage) and wanted to apply those in bulk, we couldn't without stomping some of our existing tags. Well, we could write a perl script, I guess, but I looking for something a little closer to the GUI.

So how do the rest of you track extra information? Or are we the most finicky among our circle of friends? :-)

15 most strange buildings in the world is bizarre. While it's not the strangest, I am fond of the library that looks like a shelf full of books.

Dani's comfort foods include shepherd's pie, which was not part of my upbringing. I've made the version from Cooking for Engineers a couple times, substituting margarine for the butter because of kashrut and beef for the lamb because of availability, but he says it's not quite right. I asked him to do some searching and he reports that everything that looks right involves milk or cheese, which is of course a problem. Do any of my kosher or lactose-intolerant readers have a favorite recipe?

A friend recently burned DVDs from some treasured old videotapes, but our DVD player won't play them. (The computers will.) Google tells me that this is a common problem, especially with older players. There are the competing standards of DVD+R and DVD-R; the documentation for our player mentions neither by name. (These discs are DVD+R.) This happened once before and I assumed a bad disc; now I suspect the problem is the player. We bought our DVD player, a region-free Sampo, when the first season of The West Wing was released in the UK, which was apparently 2002.

I could get this video adapter for my iBook for $19. There might be other benefits to that too, though streaming Hulu might not be one of them (video seems jumpy). Or it appears that region-free DVDs have come way down in price, so maybe we should replace our player. Maybe with this ($58 and I've heard of the manufacturer) or this ($40, no reviews, and never heard of the maker). These are the results of half an hour of surfing; if anyone reading this has opinions, I'd love to hear 'em.

Recently I've seen a few "bot" LJ accounts go by -- users that seem to subscribe to people at random but don't do anything else (so they're not, say, making harrassing comments), and then the accounts get nuked. The last one I got was Russian, as I gather many are. I don't really care if such accounts show up as subscribers, but I find myself wondering two things: what do they get out of it, and why do some folks get upset enough to get the accounts suspended? What am I missing?

Query to the brain trust: I have USB headphones that include a microphone. What free software can I use to record voice from that microphone (preferably on Windows XP but I also have an iBook with OS 10.4 available) and produce something like WAV files? (I know I'm not going to get stellar audio quality from this setup; that's ok. The immediate goal is to record torah chanting -- think "teaching tapes", except no one uses tape any more.)

Followup on UJF: I spoke with the campaign manager on Friday and she was very apologetic. She promised to take appropriate action. (I've updated the original entry to reflect this.)

This week my employer's landlord started giving preferred parking spots to people driving green vehicles (definition not provided). Not that I'm going to turn down the convenience (my Honda Fit qualifies), but as one of my coworkers pointed out, are those the cars for which they want to minimize driving? (Should we try to get the gas guzzlers to stop on the first floor instead?) I used to always park on the top indoor floor, mostly so I could park in the same place every day and not have to worry about remembering at the end of the day. Now that I think about it, that decision represented about 2-3% of my commuting distance.

You know that "25 things about me" meme that's been going around? Maybe it's older than you thought. Or maybe not. :-)

The local SCA got some decent TV coverage recently.

Via jducoeur: Facebook company secrets were revealed by someone who applied paper analogies to digital media. Oops. No, white-out doesn't work on bits. (From the news story it sounds like it might have been the court that screwed up, which presumably means they can't sue anyone for the leak.)

Birkat ha Chamah is a once-every-28-years observance, and it's coming up this April. I wonder if anyone local is doing anything for this. It sounds kind of peculiar, but it'll be a while before I could next satisfy my curiosity. (The timing is inconvenient with respect to Pesach, however.)

Glow-in-the-dark body cream, pointed out by browngirl.

Thanks to xiphias for pointing out this comic to me: ( moderately-large image )

Dear LazyWeb,

I have one -- count it, one -- DVD from which I would like to extract the audio. Google leads me to many, many software offerings, some trustworthy; alas, the half-dozen I've tried so far all have built-in limits of 3 to 5 minutes for the free trial. If I were going to be doing this a lot I'd buy the software (as I have for other pieces of the great digitization project), but I really just want to do this once. I'd pay a small one-time-use fee if that were available. Because I only want to do this once, I'm not fussy about user interface and features -- if it does DVD in and WAV out without quality loss, I really don't care about anything else. Any suggestions?

(Clam Chowder, "Kosher", in case you're wondering. I want to be able to listen to it on my non-video-enabled iPod.)


Update: I ended up with a two-pass approach. HandBrake (recommended by some of you) turns DVDs into several other video formats, including AVI and MP4, but no audio-only formats (as documented). However, this free tool converts MP4 to MP3. Both of these have a batch mode, so I can just set 'em loose in turn. A small trial worked just fine, so now I've got the big job running. Thanks, everyone.

Dear LJ brain trust,

I'm looking for virtual-desktop software for Windows XP with the following properties:

• Supports six or more desktops. Microsoft's Virtual Desktop Manager fails here, being limited to four.
• Can switch desktops with a single click on a grid (or something similar); I'm not interested in apps that run only on hotkeys or require cycling. VirtualWin fails here, requiring me to cycle through them by repeatedly clicking on something in the task bar.
• Doesn't get confused by multiple windows from the same app being on different desktops. (I usually keep a few Firefox windows around.) Cool Desk appears to fail here; it's making my second Firefox window sticky when I don't want it to. This will probably get some more testing, as the app is otherwise decent (once you swap out the default skin).
• Doesn't interact badly with some unknown OS update that landed in the last two months (sigh). JSPager, which I've been using happily for years, is now implicated in unplanned Windows restarts. ("Implicated" is the wrong word in that it's probably not really JSPager's fault, but my attempts to debug it have all failed, including the ones involving hardware.)
• Commonly-found features that I care about: can make windows sticky on demand; can send windows from one desktop to another easily; task bar for a desktop shows only that desktop's windows.
• Nothing that would obviously bar it from being approved by a corporate IT department (unverifiable executables from Russia or Iran, for instance).

Features I do not care about: per-desktop wallpaper, per-desktop desktop shortcuts, live preview, changing resolution for different desktops, support for multiple monitors.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

Dear LazyWeb,

Dani and I have a lot of albums and cassettes that we don't play any more, so we have begun the process of figuring out how to upgrade to digital media (while culling the stuff we don't care about any more). Some albums exist as CDs or downloads; others we'll have to burn ourselves (we have hardware for that). Mostly we're replacing albums, we think, and not just grabbing the "good tracks". But not all albums were reissued as CDs, so there are some individual tracks in our future assuming we can find them. (We're only through "folk, A to C" so far so expectations could change, but this is what it's looking like now.)

Even though most of this is going to end up as MP3s anyway, I prefer to buy physical CDs where we can. Yes, it's extra work to then burn them and we have to store the CDs, but I want both the liner notes and the security of knowing that some digital nanny isn't going to prevent me from moving that album to a new computer or iPod. It's also easier to browse; cover art and location on the shelves are meaningful guideposts for me, and iTunes' "genre" is not nearly rich enough for sorting; I need multi-level catagorization.

First questions: where besides Amazon should we be looking online for reasonably-priced CDs, some obscure? Is anybody beating Amazon on price consistently enough to look into? (I realize that the Amazonians among my readers might not want to answer that. :-) )

Now, about downloads. We haven't bought much music in this form before. We want it to be as easy as possible to play whatever we buy on multiple computes and iPods, including future ones and future tech. Sometimes this is prevented (DRM, I presume) -- I bought a song from iTunes and we were unable to play it on Dani's computer. Other times things appear to work fine -- Dani bought a song from Amazon and I could play it just fine. Next questions: are these typical experiences for those two vendors? Are there other vendors we should look at?

Thanks.