My 2007 Toyota Prius has a fairly good 5-disc slot-loading MP3 CD player. The trouble with it is the user interface is pretty poor. In particular the display of music track names.

Although you can set the user interface to display metadata from the mp3 files – whenever you accelerate, the information blanks out. Apparently the user interface designers felt looking at track names could be distracting! Incredible, I know.

The alternative interface is to actually look at filenames (these don’t blank out!). The trouble here is that you end up looking at something like the following:

Ugly. ROOT FOLDER? .mp3 extension?

The numbers at the start of the filenames is a common saved file convention in iTunes. The Prius adds its own numbers to the files when you look at the file list, so you end up seeing the following:

An ugly mess. No idea what band is playing either (well, you would if you liked Guns N’ Roses I guess).

Anyway, there is a trick to cleaning all this up.

First, if you put all your tracks inside a folder at the root level of the disk, the folder name will be displayed instead of ROOT FOLDER. That by itself is a huge improvement. Use the name of the band and things start to look up.

The next thing is that the filename actually displays only 16 characters. This is another example of how poor the user interface is – there is room probably for twice that. Anyway, the trick here is to remove any numbers from the start of track filenames, and add spaces BEFORE the .mp3 extension, so that the extension is out > 16 characters and thus not shown.

To do this, I wrote a quick Perl script on my Mac and ran it over the folder of MP3 files I created ready to burn to CD.

#!/usr/bin/perl
@files = <*.mp3>;
foreach $file (@files) {
    $orig = $file;
    $file =~ s/^\d* //;
    $file =~ /(.*)\.mp3/;
    $file = sprintf("%-40s", $1).".mp3";
    `mv "$orig" "$file"`;
}

I put all this in a folder named “Guns N' Roses“, and burnt it to CD. The result:

It’s not perfect, but it is a big improvement over the default display.

Where are all the good user interface designers? Do they all work at Apple?

˙ʇno ʇı ʞɔəɥɔ ˙ə|qɐ|ıɐʌɐ ʍou sı ʇ|ınq ɹəʌə suoıʇɐɔı|ddɐ ʇsəʇɐəɹɓ əɥʇ ɟo əuO ˙h əuoɥԀı puɐ pɐԀı ɹoɟ ə|qɐ|ıɐʌɐ ʍou sı uoıʇɐɔı|ddɐ uʍopəpısd⋂ ʎW

Apple’s press conference on the iPhone 4 antenna problems revealed some interesting facts about Apple and their testing procedures.

One of the highlights of the conference was that we got to look at Apple’s “state-of-the-art” antenna test labs. Incredible images and an amazing video. But this video revealed more than just a cool, expensive, lab setup.

Notice anything from this still from the video (taken at around 45 seconds in)?

What is that? Is that a Dell PC?

And seconds later we see a close up of the screen – that’s Windows running there (can’t tell what version of Windows – it could be XP, though it could also be Windows 3.1).



This explains a lot really. Substandard testing hardware running substandard software. No wonder the iPhone has antenna issues!¹

But the most amazing leak comes from later in that video:

That’s right – those geniuses at Apple are working on a stargate!

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¹ Why would Apple be using a PC? My guess is that Apple bought all the testing hardware from an external company – the same company that supplies this stuff to other mobile phone manufacturers. And that hardware uses old serial ports – ports that Apple removed from their machines years ago but you can still get on Dell machines. The hardware probably also came with software written years ago that runs only on Windows. Still, you’d think Apple would be a bit more selective in what they show to the public then – though in this case they probably had to make this video in a hurry. Michael Dell probably finds this amusing.

Another TV Week Logie Awards has come and gone.  Continuing the tradition, here is my review.

After last year’s abysmal ceremony – possibly the worst ever – this year was actually pretty good. Bert Newton was great – as expected. He was charming, at ease, funny, and received a standing ovation. Everyone loves Bert.

I’ve got to say though, I was worried. With Hey Hey back on Nine, I was sure we would be treated to stupid Hey Hey inspired comedy skits. Fortunately there were none. And fortunately Hey Hey didn’t win any awards. There is hope for Australian television after all.

Straight out of the gate we had Shaun Micallef. The guy is a comic genius, and his acceptance speech was hilarious as always. In fact, Shaun, or at least the show he hosts, won 3 awards. So we saw a lot of Shaun that night.

I’m still annoyed that we have to have “international” guests at the Logies. I don’t get why we can’t seem to stand on our own feet? Couldn’t we have had Paul Kelly instead of John Mayer for example? How good would that have been?!

Having said that, k.d. lang was brilliant. Absolutely magnificent.

It wasn’t all roses though. There was not enough Bert for a start. It started well, and then Bert disappeared for most of the night. We had a rather lame Don Lane tribute (Don’s son PJ seems rather talentless, yet keeps showing up each year at these awards). And the night went on far too long.

We were also witness to a new trend in Australian television award ceremonies – when you win an award, you must stand up with every cast member and backstage hand, spend 10 minutes finding each other, hug, kiss, congratulate each other, and then slowly wind your way through the tables in order to bring the entire mob up on to stage with you. No wonder it went on so long.

Ray Meagher winning the Gold Logie added some Aussie colour to the proceedings with a comment about winning a chook raffle. That brought some life back in to a long night – but unfortunately, that was the end of evening.

Anyway, overall one of the better Logies.  Would be great though to one day just celebrate Aussie talent.