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The spam comments on this blog are rarely interesting — there’ll be a sentence along the lines of “Hey great sight, it is just wat I was looking for!!!” followed by links to male enhancement pills. (Of course, you don’t have to see those comments, thanks to Akismet.)

But when I dive into my Gmail spam folder, I get the good stuff. Although the subject lines can be funny, my spam comedy is from the authors — people like Vortex M. Lodestar, Pushcarts E. Death, and Plurals R. Perspicuity. It’s more fun than my real email.

Okay, I didn’t permanently abandon the site — it’s just been busy ’round these parts. I have, however, been Netflixing, and I hope to have some movie reviews up soon. Until then, here’s something for the Quicksilver fans out there: Chris Brown at Christopholis has a QS script to tag your iTunes songs, and come up with a custom playlist based on the tags. Cool stuff.

I’ve been at school since Tuesday and have only had one day of classes so far, but this is already shaping up to be a pretty terrifying semester.

When I was a senior in high school, a college friend told me that I should expect to spend about as much time on homework as I did in class. That struck me as pretty reasonable; while a lot more than I had at the time, it seemed a decent tradeoff for only having a couple of courses a day.

So far, that rule of thumb been more or less accurate. There were a couple of pretty intense courses with heavier workloads — the music theory course I took last semester comes to mind — but I was lucky to have them balanced out by fluffier courses, like Intro to World Music.

Well, a few things changed this semester.

I’m not familiar with the material anymore. When I got to Tufts, I was still taking courses where I knew half of the material going in. I didn’t learn much Spanish until my second semester, and learned barely any music theory until my third. I could read Shakespearean English fairly well before I took Shakespeare. Now, though, I’m in unfamiliar territory.

I’m in higher-level courses. Spanish 2 might have been easy because I knew a lot of Spanish going in, but it was also a beginner course anyway. Spanish 21, an intermediate course, is a bit more rigorous. This same change has happened across the board.

Most importantly, I’m taking more courses than I ever have before. Every student obviously makes the shift from easier to harder courses, but I’m overloading my schedule with three more courses than last semester. I have to take one of the classes for no credit just so the school will let me fit it in.

So now, I’m looking at spending twice as much time on homework as in class, what with two reading-intensive courses giving me a novel and a half to read every week, with more, harder classes to spend it on. The price one pays for a double major!

WheresTheFreeSpace is a Mac utility that helps clear up your hard drive. Give the program a folder or disk, and it tells you which files are taking up the most space. (I suppose WheresTheUsedSpace would be a better title, but that’s neither here nor there.) There are a few other features, like filtering by file type or user and printing out the results, but the core functionality is giving you file sizes.

Well, not much for me to say: it does what it says. After you give your location, you wait for awhile and then get a screen like this. Well, there’s your data. Now clear away!

Of course, there’s plenty of room for improvement. I would have liked more options on how to display the results. As it is, the program will only show you a directory tree with the files/folders inside sorted by size (check out the screenshot above). I would prefer a flat list of files, like what you would get from search results, so that I don’t have to go poring through each subfolder to see if the large files are important or not. The program also took a long time to collect its data — about seven minutes to go through my hard drive, and (for some reason) even longer when I only asked for MP3 files. In the age of Spotlight and Quicksilver, I’m used to faster results.

The verdict: an adequate utility, but overpriced at $29.95. Luckily, you can get $10 off if you use promo code DANBRUNO at checkout. At $20, it could be worth the money if your drive is hopelessly cluttered. Worth a look.

I just activated a four-month Netflix subscription that I got for Christmas. If you know me at all, you’ve probably realized that I’m pretty hopeless when it comes to movies; name a classic, or a film that “everyone” has seen, and I haven’t. (Example: I just saw The Wizard of Oz last year, and I still haven’t seen The Sound of Music.)

So if you have recommendations, lay ‘em on me. I’m going to burn through as many movies as I can next semester. If you’ve given me suggestions in the past, assume I’ve forgotten and tell me again. If you’ve just stumbled upon this blog and don’t know me, suggest something anyway. I’ve got a queue to fill!

TransparentDock is a fun little application. It does what it says, of course: you can just run it and make the OS X dock transparent. If you don’t want that, though, you can use it for other miscellaneous customizations such as changing the level of translucency, pinning it to the corner of the screen, or changing the colors. There are even a few unexpected settings you can change, such as screwing around with the context menus. Perfect for control freak Mac users.

The Charlston Post and Courier has an article today on the current state of the classical music industry, from cultural and commercial trends to the effects of technology on budding composers.

After the Macworld Expo, I complained that Apple still hasn’t dropped its prices to a competitive level. Blogger Mike McHargue seems to have proven me wrong.

McHargue customized an Apple MacBook Pro and a Dell Inspiron E1705 to have the closest specs possible. The end result? $2,399 for the MacBook, $2,341 for the Dell.

It’s a negligible difference, I’d say. If you don’t buy that, consider that the MacBook comes with a built-in webcam. And a better operating system!

Anyway, this is good news. It’s cool that Apple is finally price-competitive with Dell, even if it is for a high-powered notebook and not an everyday consumer machine. The Intel chips look like a bona fide Martha Stewart Good Thing.

Microsoft is discontinuing Mac development of Windows Media Player, but they’ve made up for it with Flip4Mac, a utility that allows the immensely superior QuickTime Player to handle WMA and WMV files. It’s a free download, too.

Oh hell yes. This is where genetic engineering needs to go. (via)

The Eagle_Fire Garfield Randomizer takes three random Garfield panels and arranges them into a strip. The results are sometimes funny, sometimes nonsensical, and sometimes mystifying, but they all have one thing in common: without exception, they’re more entertaining than actual Garfield strips. (via)

Apple CEO Steve Jobs gave his biannual keynote speech this morning at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco. Everyone and their mother has an awesome exclusive detailed hands-on pod-photo-textcast review, so I’ll go for brevity:

There are new Mac computers with Intel chips, and they’re really fast. One is the iMac (same as before) and the other is the “MacBook Pro” (think PowerBook on steroids, but smaller). There are ’06 versions of iLife and iWork with lots of new bells and whistles. Also, you can get an FM tuner for your iPod now.

My impression: the new computers were the only things to jump out at me, and the biggest obstacle to wider Mac adoption (price) is still there. Fun for Mac geeks, not a big deal for everyone else. As usual.

A PhD student at UNC Chapel Hill has performed a thorough analysis of Facebook usage among freshmen at his school. Some of the statistics are staggering: by the end of their first semester, over 94% of them had a Facebook account. That kind of penetration is unheard of. Check the link for more.

I’ve been thinking about used video games lately, so my interest was piqued at a recent Joystiq post on the subject. Apparently, the new games aren’t the moneymakers — people like me, who try to avoid breaking a $20 bill at the store, are keeping these guys in the black.

A vice-president of marketing for Electronics Boutique was quoted as saying, “Used games are keeping the entire ship afloat. EB and GameStop make basically no money from new product.”

Why did they get into this position? Two reasons:

Nothing deprecates in value like a video game. A game that cost $50 three years ago could be in the bargain bin for $5 today. If you’re patient No wonder they make all their money from used games — if you could get a perfectly functioning used car at 1/10 the price, no one would buy those new, either.

Of course, most gamers are not patient, and have no intention of waiting for discounts. (Just look at the launch of any game console). On the other hand, they don’t think that the games coming out are worth $50. Joystiq commenter Jeff sums it up nicely:

[...] the only other industry I can think of that complains about this is the music industry. Which should be no surprise to anyone, if you compare the music and video game industries and see the things they have in common.

If so many people are selling your games back to stores after buying them, then it strikes me that the problem is one of content. Improve your content, and people will both be willing to pay more and they will be less willing to part with it later.

It’s an interesting issue, especially considering that video game companies already sell their consoles at a loss. What’s a CEO to do?

It might be difficult and expensive to run Windows software on a Mac at the moment, but using DOS software is easy and free. Just use DOSBox, an open-source, cross-platform DOS emulator. Why emulate DOS, you ask? I’ll tell you: computer games.

I just got through fooling around with three solid gold classics: Lord of the Rings (Interplay, 1993), Syndicate (Peter Molyneux and Bullfrog, 1993), and Jazz Jackrabbit (Cliff Bleszinski and Epic, 1995). All three installed and ran without any problems, although the latter two were pretty slow. (EDIT: Ctrl-F12 will overclock the software, so if your computer is fast enough, you should be able to get decent speeds. Hit it a few times and keep an eye on your CPU usage.) Luckily, OS X porter Shawn Holwegner still supports the project, and the “rather trivial” build will eventually be optimized for Tiger.

If you’re a Mac user pining for the days of DOS games — or a Windows user who can’t get the games to run properly — do yourself a favor and check out DOSBox. And if you need some games to play, Home of the Underdogs has a ton of classics.

If you’ve never used DOS before, you probably find the help files and quickstart guides a bit intimidating. Look after the jump for some help.
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