Domestic Geek

So Marcus and I spent a good part of this weekend ripping some of our DVD collection to our iTunes Server (with a handy little program called Handbrake so we can view them on our AppleTV. What sucks about the iTunes information palette is it is geared towards songs/music. What to do if you want to add metadata to the movie files so that you can see the rating, synopsis, director, actors, etc? You go download a cool little app called MetaX that I found through the Handbrake forums. It can grab the data from Amazon for you and then embed it into the movie file or you can enter in all that info yourself, if you're so inclined. It's pretty darned cool!

I've had the most interesting day today. Since Marcus was out mountain biking with Mike, I decided I was going to go browse a couple of my old shopping hangouts.

My first stop was Album Memories, an independent scrapbook store at 64th and Monoco St. in Commerce City. The woman that owns that store is one of the neatest ladies I've ever met. She and I have a lot in common and she even used to be a pizza manager. I haven't been to visit her since right after I lost my job last July and I was kind of afraid that she'd no longer be in business. Fortunately, she was still there and open, so I stopped in. She doesn't have the biggest variety of things, but she does carry things I don't see in the big chain stores. She's also the biggest Sizzix dealer in the country and she does the best demos of what those products can do. I'm in love with the new machine that's out and want to get it. Unfortunately, I don't really have the money to spend ($100 for the machine plus the dies are extra) on something crafty like that. I will one day, though. Those things are freakin' cool. I noticed that there is a die to cut out those cardstock embroidery floss bobbins that I use to wind my cross stitch floss. Anyway, I felt really good and positive after leaving her store. Talking to her about how different and better my life is now than when we last met really made me grateful for where I am now.

The next stop was Black & Read, a cool independent music/book store over at 80th and Wadsworth. My purpose there was to get some used Stephen King books and start working on my summer goal of getting and reading all of my missing King novels. I love browsing that place. I also found an Orson Scott Card novel I was missing. I was chatting with the guy at the counter while he was ringing up my purchases about Stephen King. He was quite knowledgeable about the dude. He asked if I had seen King on television recently in his band. I hadn't, although I knew that King performed in a group consisting of other writers. The woman behind me told me the group was called The Rock Bottom Remainders, so I made a mental note to look that up when I got home. I didn't realize Dave Barry was in it, though. I was watching some videos they had posted on YouTube of the band interviewing with Steve Martin. I'll have to watch more of that at a later date. Funny stuff.

When Marcus got home later in the afternoon, I was telling him about how I had a list of missing King books that I had made that I took with me when I was looking for books. He asked if I kept a database of my books or something and I told him that I had gotten the bibliography off of StephenKing.com and had made myself a checklist in a table in Word. He then asked if I had ever heard of a program called Delicious Library made by the company Delcious Monster. I hadn't. It's an Apple award winning cataloging program to keep track of books, music, movies and games. The company and program are the product of programmer Wil Shipley, founder of The Omni Group, makers of some really cool Apple Mac apps such as Omni Graffle and Omni Outliner.

He told me the program uses an iSight camera as a bar code scanner to input your items into the database. I was intrigued and so I downloaded the trial and I'm hooked! I can't believe how freaking awesome this program is. First off, the interface is really slick. It looks like you're looking at a bookshelf. The icons are relative in size to the actual item they portray. You have the ability to keep track of who has borrowed your stuff via your address book. You can group your stuff into collections (similar to playlists in iTunes). You can view similar items to one you select on Amazon. I'm just blown away by this thing. There is a third party program called DeliciWeb that allows you to publish your library to a web page. You can see a test file over at the Domestic Geek Library. There's also a third party program to bring your iTunes Library into it. I'll have to wait until I raise the $40 to purchase a license before I can try that one, though. I want this software so bad!!!!!



Anyway, I guess that's enough about my day today.

While I was over at Apple's site this morning, I saw the front page had a big announcement that in June you will be able to view YouTube content through your AppleTV. That's pretty cool.

We listen to the station 99.5 The Mountain a lot at work. It's great because I keep hearing songs that I need to add to my iTunes library.

The other day I heard a song I love by Paul McCartney and Wings called "1985." I knew they had just released the Paul McCartney catalog on iTunes, so I checked as soon as I got home and all I could find was that tune by Bowling for Soup (which I already have, btw). I did several Google searches and that's the way every kept spelling the song title — in numbers. Yesterday I decided to search wikipedia and decided to start going through the discography. Since the song ended with "Band on the Run, " I decided to start there and lo and behold: it's spelled out "Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five!" I went to download the song and it was being offered as iTunes Plus, the DRM-free (without Digital Rights Management) version, so I paid the $1.29 of of my balance and it is all mine. I made Marcus stop watching his show on the AppleTV so I could hear it through the stereo.

I applaud EMI records for being the first to agree to get rid of this DRM crap. It's so easy to get around it, anyway. I will gladly pay a little extra for a song I can play anytime on any device.

It never fails that when one bad thing happens, more come in a cluster.

The battery in my UPS died recently and it started a chain of battery failures. My camera batteries will no longer hold a charge. The motherboard battery on my mac is getting weak. My laptop's battery won't hold a charge for more than about 20 minutes (kind of misses the point of being portable when I always have to find a plug right away). I have to be really close to my car for my door remote to lock/unlock. Heck, even Marcus mentioned that he thinks he may need to get Watch Batteries soon.

It's frustrating trying to purchase these locally because even the nearby specialty battery store didn't carry my laptop battery when we stopped in. Fortunately we have the Internet and online stores like LowCostBatteries.com to make our life easier. I checked and they carry every single battery I need to replace right now. They even carry the hearing aid batteries that my father uses. I'll definitely be making a purchase from these guys in the very near future.

Do yourself a favor and save yourself the gas money and the headaches and just get your batteries online and delivered to your door. Do something fun, like draining the battery on your video iPod instead!