Here Comes the Sun

Summertime is fast approaching, and this year I was really interested in purchasing a solar power supply for use with various portable electronic gadgets. Between Magnum's annual Canada Day picnic, and Tito's annual Luau, there does seem to be a need for portable, clean electrical power. Big V usually has a battery powered assembly for musical entertainment, so I felt perhaps I could augment his setup with a little AC/DC from the sky!

The only problem being that I know squat about electricity other than "don't stick metal things in the electrical outlet". So the research was rather slow going.

Many of the items seemed to be distributed by Asian companies, which did not bode well for their reliability. Slogging through many poorly translated manuals only helped reinforce this perception (honestly, couldn't they hire someone to check the grammar?).

Finally I found the device I was looking for, the Brunton SolarPort 4.4. It is made in the US, but there is a Canadian distributor in BC. Boy was I happy. I read the product specs and found that it had some handy features:

1. Clam Shell design - The unit unfolds like a book to expose its solar panels


2. Built in Cigarette-lighter Socket - If you have a car charger, just plug it directly into the device.


3. Built in USB Outlet - use your device's USB cord to charge your iPod, PalmPilot, mp3 Player, or anything else that charges via USB.


4. Standard Power Adapter Plugs - the device includes standard power adapter plugs to charge or power other devices like CD players as if they were using AC power.
   


5. AA and AAA Battery charger included - The package also includes a second unit that attaches to the panel portion that charges AA and AAA NiCad and NiMH batteries.


6. 12V and 6V switchable - what this means, I don't know. It sounded good, but I'm a Chem, not an Elec, so what do I know.


7. Multi-Unit Co-operation - link multiple units together to add additional power. Not sure how useful that is, since I'm only planning on buying one. I guess if one of my buddies likes it so much that they buy one for themselves, then we can take advantage of this feature.
   

The main product page is at Brunton.com and the Canadian distributor is Modern Outpost. I really am looking forward to buying this baby, but I'll probably wait until closer to summer time when I can give it a good run-through with full sunshine.

When this happens, I will definitely post a follow-up review to fully describe this product.

Until next time, keep on having fun!

"bah weep graaagnah wheep ni ni bong"

Two Tools for Managing Your Music

Hey Stream Crossers,

Like many music aficionados, collection is quite large. Also, since it is an amalgamation between several collections in my house, there is a significant degree of duplication. Add to that a great deal of missing tags, and poorly structured naming convensions, you have a recipe for a mess.

By this point, manual organization is out of the question. Software, and plenty of it, must be employed to manage this beast.

ID3-TagIT is a great free package for managing tags and file names. It has internet naming look up, but it is still quite rough. It manages bot v1 and v2 tags and lets you scrounge every last bit of information form the music files before having to look it up on the internet.

Media Monkey is a fantastic piece of software that really lets you get up to your elbows in managing you music. It also has an internet look up function. It uses Amazon.com as its source, which is great since you can also get the album art. unfortunately Amazon only has the actual disk's publication date, so you wind up with results stating that the Beatles' White Album was released in 2001. What the *&%^%$% ?

Another cool feature is that Media Monkey will suggest files that appear to be duplicates. It won't actually delete anything automatically, you have to hit the delete button for that to happen. The fact that MM "sees through" the file structure is a very powerful feature.

All in all, both these tools are good to have on your computer, but if you could have only one, Media Monkey is the choice since the last release of ID3-TagIT was in July 2005, rather old in software circles (its not like the software is so perfect that it can halt future releases).

With conventional recordings, where the entire album is released by one band or artist, I will create a directory for the band/artist and a sub folder for the album itself. If the CD is a compilation with various artists, I'll just create a folder for the album itself, unless I want to group the albums together such as with Christmas albums.

As for file naming conventions, my rule is pretty strict: - - . Again, if the CD is multi-artist, I'll go with - - . The track number is mandatory and always double digits (otherwise tracks 10, 11, and 12 show up before 1, 2, and 3). This way tracks order in the way they should appear on the CD, since someoverlap occurs on some tracks.

With these simple rules, you too can have a neatly organized music library.

Until next time, keep having fun!

"bah weep graaagnah wheep ni ni bong"