It Rains In Triplicate

Finished off The Android’s Dream by Scalzi last night. Good book, very fast read. Started reading it while waiting around O’Hare last week after finishing off last month’s Analog, so probably eight hours of reading all told.

I’m slowly making my way through Scalzi’s books. I got Old Man’s War when Tor was offering it for free. Since then, I’ve grabbed at least three more by him for my Kindle. Hey, what do you know, Tor’s ebook play worked.

The big reveal was a little telegraphed, it seemed somewhat clear when the character was introduced, but the journey to get there was worth it.

My next two or three books will be work related (next on the queue is Making Things Happen by Scott Berkun, a book about project management), but Ghost Brigades is in there soon after.

Mostly so I don’t forget, I want to write three iTunes AppleScripts:

First, an AppleScript to TVShow-ify videos. I have a video file that is a TVShow. When I import it into iTunes, it ends up under Movies. Putting them into the TVShow section takes some work and time, and should be automate-able.

All my TVShows are have a common filename format of TvShowNameInStudlyCapsSxEy, which should translate into “Tv Show Name” Season x, Episode y.

Second, an AppleScript to do real random playlists. That is, when I create a smart playlist that is random, the playlist becomes locked in place. I want a real random playlist for putting on my iPod, one that is randomly generated so that I get a different mix on my iPod each time.

Lastly, an AppleScript to automate the Convert to iPod Format work. As stated previously, I can’t just drop my AppleTV format videos on my iPod, but I can use the iTunes Convert to iPod Format function, but doing so does take a few hours per movie, so I want to create two smart playlists, one that has all my AppleTV movies, and one that has all my iPod movies (and maybe a similar set for TV Shows). The AppleScript should create the iPod format video files, shove them in the smart playlist and, optionally, load them onto the iPod.

You knew it was going to be bad, but nothing quite prepares you for just how bad it could be. There is a point about 3/4 through the movie where the director Got Religion, and has to let you know all about it. It would have been just ordinarily bad without that piece.

There is something vaguely amusing about starting a new book on the kindle and have the front matter page come up which says

This book is printed on acid-free paper

I have a lot of mp4s in iTunes. They tend to be at HD resolution (i.e., handbrake at the AppleTV setting) and look pretty good on my SDTV, hooked up to my mac mini in the living room.

When I travel, I copy them from the media drive, run them through ffmpegx to change their resolution to something my archos won’t throw up on, and load them on the archos.

Now that I have a decent sized iphone, I’d much rather use that. It’ll also save ~1.5 lbs of weight from my bag.

However, iTunes will not load these movies on the iphone because of the resolution.

So, my choices are:

1. Stick with the status quo, which is keep my archos with me on trips
2. Keep two versions of every mp4 in itunes, one at the AppleTV resolution and one at the iPhone resolution
3. Use FileMagnet to manually load up the movies, which is really, really, really slow.

Sigh. iTunes is broken, it should handle this case better.

So I need to find a good reference manager, that is, something to keep track of the dozen or so academic papers I read in the course of a week, allow me to take notes, and allow me to insert selected references into whatever paper I’m working on.

Back in grad school, I lived in bibdesk, which handled bibtex reference management wonderfully. I had a large SVN repository of PDF files, which had the bibtex file checked in at the root level, and everything worked. I could use it on every machine, since it was a simple flat file and directory structure.

So I now need to do all my writing in Word, complete with its horrible, horrible equation support. So I go searching for a new reference manager.

I’m evaluating papers, sente, bookends, and endnote.

Papers, which I really want to like is BROKEN. Let’s count the ways:

• It is a mechanism for reading academic papers, like iTunes. Great idea, but managing is more useful than reading. That’s fine.
• It provides no synchronization mechanism, because everyone has a single computer that they do all their work on. Bleh.
• It provides no mechanism for actually doing bibliographies or interfacing with word or other editors. So I use it to read my papers, maybe take notes, and then the interesting papers, I’ll copy into word or endnote by hand?

Let’s talk about what a good paper workflow looks like:

1. Constantly collect, index, and annotate research papers
2. Write your own material
3. Create bibliographies and insert references into your work as you write it
4. Goto 1
5. Complete the paper and send it out

Papers could be great, but it has no value in a real paper workflow.

EndNote looks like a beast, and I didn’t particularly like v8. Sente is a good option, but bookends does synchronization, so it is the winning contender at the moment.