Nintendo Wii and 50 Inch Plasmas

We played Wii over at my friend’s place last night, who had just bought a 50″ Samsung plasma TV. The Wii only sends out 480i/p, which really shows up as a problem when it’s on a 16:9 ratio at 50″. There’s a setting on the Wii that enables a widescreen mode so that it compensates for the 4:3 to 16:9 change, but it only helped marginally. We were playing with old school cables (not component) which made it force to 480i. Hopefully if played with 480p it’d be a lot better, but it’s still only in the 480 range. The modern games were a lot less fun to play with the poor video quality, so we ended up playing a lot of Street Fighter II.

Hybrid Muni Buses

The last few days I’ve seen new Muni buses that have “Hybrid Bus” signage on them. I’ve seen them mostly at the Caltrain station, which makes sense as they’re running on the 10-Townsend line currently. At half a million a pop, I wonder how much they save in terms of gas. They also skirt very close to the ground, which is pretty cool since it seems they’d be easy to enter versus the standard Muni buses (which let out the typical hiss as they lower at stops).

Fixing Total Tracks and Removing Album Artist in iTunes

iTunes seems to have a bug if you edit the album artists on an album, it blows away the total number of tracks for a song. I had a bunch of songs that had album artists for half the tracks in the album but not the others, which cased all sorts of havoc when trying to play an album since iTunes can’t figure out the order to play them in any more.

I wrote up a little script to remove the Album Arist and also to fix up any places where the total number of tracks for a song is incorrect. It looks at the other tracks for the album to find what the correct total should be, so it’s only useful if at least one track in the album has the correct total.

I put the script up on Pastie, http://pastie.caboo.se/72537, and also below. It’s not the fastest thing, but it works (for me). Use at your own risk, I’m not responsible, yadda yadda yadda.

var   iTunesApp = WScript.CreateObject("iTunes.Application");
var   mainLibrary = iTunesApp.LibraryPlaylist;
var   tracks = mainLibrary.Tracks;
var   i;
var allAlbumsToArtist = new Array();
var allAlbumsToTrackCount = new Array();
 

for (i = 1; i <= tracks.Count; i++)
{

        var   currTrack = tracks.Item(i);
        allAlbumsToArtist[currTrack.Album] = currTrack.Artist;

        if(currTrack.TrackCount > 0)
        {
                allAlbumsToTrackCount[currTrack.Album] = currTrack.TrackCount;
        }

}

for (i = 1; i <= tracks.Count; i++)
{
        var currTrack = tracks.Item(i);
        WScript.Echo ("removing album aritst for  " + currTrack.Name);
        currTrack.AlbumArtist = "";
}

for (i = 1; i <= tracks.Count; i++)
{
        var   currTrack = tracks.Item(i);
        if(!(currTrack.TrackCount > 0))
        {
                var totalTracks = allAlbumsToTrackCount[currTrack.Album];
                if(totalTracks > 0)
                {
                        WScript.Echo ("changing  " + currTrack.Name + " to total tracks " + totalTracks);                
                        currTrack.TrackCount = totalTracks;
                }
        }
}