Screencast/tour of ~300 digitized LPs

Took most of 2011 to tackle the stack of 500 LPs I’ve been wanting to digitize forever. Turned out that a lot of them I had re-purchased as CD or MP3 in the meantime, and those didn’t need encoding. And some were just too far gone to be worth copying. As for the rest, I used the workflow I outlined at the beginning of the year. Got really anal about having good cover art for everything; what I couldn’t find online I photographed myself. Here’s a quick (silent) tour of the covers.

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Hallejuah

Stopped to watch a bearded guy playing a fantastic acoustic cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallejuah” (via Jeff Buckley). Really getting swept up in it, when a Muslim dude came by, realized it was prayer time, got down on his knees and started praying to the East, praising Allah. Thing was, he was just a few feet in front of a BART ticket machine, so it kind of looked like he was praying to a mechano. All very surreal and beautiful.

Raising #OWS from Protest to RealPolitik

The goals of the #ows movement have been well-communicated by now, and continued encampments are starting to do more harm than good in the public perception. It's time for an effective political movement to grow from this soil, and seeds for the real politics of #ows may lie in Lawrence Lessig's new book,

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress — and a Plan to Stop It

which apparently gets both parts right – what corruption is, AND what to do about it. Lessig's book could become the "manual" for the future of #ows. Sounds like a great read.

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Has a Harvard Professor Mapped Out the Next Step for Occupy Wall Street?
His call for state-based activism on behalf of a constitutional convention could provide the movement with a political focus

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El Caminito del Rey

"El Caminito del Rey (English: The King's little pathway) is a walkway, now fallen into disrepair, pinned along the steep walls of a narrow gorge in El Chorro, near Álora in the province of Málaga, Spain. The name is often shortened to Camino del Rey (English: King's pathway)."

Reshared post from +Kevin Bourrillion

An old favorite. You haven't lived died a thousand gruesome deaths inside your mind until you've seen this video.

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Added to my Bucketlist! (check the amazing videos there).

An iTunes annoyance… and a solution

If you store your music on an external drive, and that drive becomes unreadable for some reason (disconnected, or read-only as mysteriously happened to me), iTunes will silently start storing new tracks on the internal drive, and will switch the storage preference from the external path to the internal one. Result is that your collection gets split across multiple devices, without you knowing about it.

When you finally discover this has been happening, you could have hundreds of albums stored in the wrong place. Here’s the fix: After re-attaching or repairing the external drive, re-set the storage location in preferences, then select all tracks (tens of thousands is just fine), right click on the selection, and choose “Consolidate Files.” This will trigger a script that examines the location of every track referenced in your library and copy it to the preferred location if it’s not there already. Nice.

PhotoStream

One Lion/iCloud feature I didn't really pay much attention to but that I'm starting to really love is the PhotoStream. I regularly work on four different Macs (two at work, two at home). Having all my recent photos, taken with any device – available everywhere always without ever having to sync – is turning out to be super useful.

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