nanovivid

There have recently been a couple of bugfix updates to the Lala Userscripts package. The biggest fix was to MiniMode so that it will actually load every time. See, I kind of forgot to include the code for loading jQuery, so MiniMode 1.0 would only load if you also had the Amazon userscript active. Oops! So that’s fixed (and both MiniMode and Amazon will alert you if for some reason jQuery didn’t load properly). MiniMode also will resize the player better if you’re shrinking from a very wide window.

As always, leave any comments, requests, or questions on the Lala Userscripts page.

♫ Le Knight Club - Hysteria

Lately some friends and I have been holding monthly gatherings to watch Mystery Science Theater 3000. I own a decent collection of episodes, but outside of a few memorable ones, I’m not very good when it comes to remembering which ones I’ve seen or how much I liked them. This makes it difficult to come up with movies to watch, so I realized that I needed a tool to help me track my collection and ratings.

I did some searching but couldn’t find any existing tools that would handle this sort of niche, so I wrote one myself. This was shortly after I got my iPhone, and it made sense to optimize it for mobile use. With the help of iUI, I was able to put together an iPhone-style website to do exactly what I wanted.

The site is called “It Stinks!” (named after the classic moment in Pod People). It works on the iPhone as well as in Safari and Firefox. If you find that you want to use it on the computer, click into the About section for some tips on optimization for the desktop.

If you haven’t created an account, “It Stinks!” will let you browse all MST3K episodes and link to reviews on other sites. Once you create an account and sign in (click the person icon in the top right), you can rate episodes and track which ones you own. (If you had a pre-Wordpress nanovivid.com account, use that). After you’ve started adding ratings and building your collection, you can filter the lists by using the magnifying glass icon.

There are currently some missing features, such as sorting episodes by average critic rating. It doesn’t show any ratings other than your own in the episode lists, and you are limited to adding star ratings (no reviews). You also have to drill down into the individual episode to see the review average.

Please let me know if you find “It Stinks!” useful. If there’s enough demand, I may look into filling in some of the feature gaps and possibly creating a desktop-optimized version of the site as well.

♫ The Field - Evening

I can never really leave well enough alone, so after my last adventure I went and wrote some more userscripts for Lala. Now in addition to Growl notifications, you can get a mini mode, Dock menu items and badging, and Amazon Universal Wish List integration. Check out the Lala Userscripts for more information.

♫ The Killers - Human (Thin White Duke Mix)

Recently, Jeremiah was kind enough to introduce me to Lala, which is a wonderful music browsing/listening/collecting/buying site. That’s a little convoluted, so maybe a “web-based iTunes with some community features” might be the best way to describe it. Easily my favorite feature is that you can listen to entire songs before you buy, not just 30 second snippets. That’s a huge win compared to most competing stores (Rhapsody MP3 lets you listen to full songs as well, but it lacks an easy method of queueing entire albums). Pricing is another advantage; most albums are $7.49 or less, beating iTunes, Amazon MP3, Rhaposdy MP3, and just about everyone else.

Almost as soon as I started using Lala, I realized that it really needed its own Dock icon and separate browser window. Enter the wonders of Fluid. I created a SSB (Site Specific Browser) for Lala with a cassette tape as the icon. (Sure, it might not make perfect sense, what with it being digital music and all, but it’s better than using Lala’s favicon. If you want another option, the speaker icons by Jonas Rask are very nice.)

However, one important piece of functionality was missing. I’m very accustomed to having Growl notifications for music that’s playing, and while Fluid supports dispatching Growl notifications, there weren’t any existing Userscripts to make it happen. Of course, I couldn’t leave well enough alone and spent a couple hours poking around Lala’s JavaScript to see if I could find anywhere to hook in and grab player notifications. Eventually I tracked down the Header.updatePlaybackNowPlaying function, which had exactly what I needed, and I was able to write a Userscript to generate Growl notifications on Lala track changes.

You can get the Growl Userscript as part of the Lala Userscript package I’ve put together.

If you want to be my friend on Lala, here’s my profile page.

♫ M83 - Couleurs (Sasha Invol2ver Remix)

I had a bit of an odd experience this morning. I was sitting on the couch enjoying Act III of Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog when the doorbell rang. I was a bit disoriented because, hello, who rings doorbells at 10:30 on a Saturday morning? At the door I found a woman who was probably in her forties and a girl who was probably 10 or so and I guess was her daughter.

As soon as I saw them, I had a gut feeling that I was about to get “witnessed” at, and was I ever right. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as entertaining as you might think. It was mostly awkward, since she just handed me a tract titled “What Hope for Dead Loved Ones?” and then, for some reason, felt compelled to read 2 Timothy 3:16 to me (which was rather confusing, considering that it has nothing to do with the subject of the tract). Her daughter just stood there the whole time, looking like she’d rather be somewhere else.

If it had gone on for longer than about a minute, I might have figured out some way to get rid of her, but she apparently just wanted to read a random bit of the Bible to me and give me a tract about dead people. It was really rather surreal.

♫ Frankmusik - In Step

It turns out that after freaking me out with the news that profiles were being removed, Netflix has changed their tune. It’s nice to know that they’re listening to their customers, and I’m glad that I’ll be able to keep all my ratings and my queue!

♫ MGMT - Electric Feel (Justice Remix)

I’m a little late on getting around to this, but whatever. The weekend before last, we took a trip to Pennsylvania for Bryan’s sister’s wedding. The wedding was lovely, the food was amazing, and the hotel was… odd. We stayed at the Golden Plough Inn in very country Peddler’s Village. Our room had a lovely farm animal theme, complete with a wood cutout of pigs suckling. Confusingly, even though we were in room 108, there were two flights of stairs required to reach the actual quarters. Even though the accommodations were a bit strange, it was a nice time. Since Bryan was in the wedding, I took a bunch of pictures with his fancy camera which he’s going to post at some point. However, the camera was apparently in the wrong autofocus mode, so a lot of them didn’t turn out so well. Here they are anyway. Oh, and there was a massive thunderstorm during the outdoor reception, so that was exciting.

After the wedding (and breakfast at the Cock ‘n Bull… no, seriously), we drove on to visit Dave and Olivia. They already posted a nice summary of our activities and some pictures, so be sure to check those out. It was great to see them again and to finally get to experience firsthand the amazing work they’ve done to their house (even if the fact that it’s a row house lead Bryan to remark that their neighborhood was “like The Wire”).

We also took the opportunity to visit IKEA, where I picked up some white DIODER lights for my desk, replacing the halogens I had previously. Even though the LEDs are a little flourescent-ish, they put out barely any heat and are wonderfully diminutive.

The trip was very enjoyable and I definitely want to get back to Philly at some point in the future. Due to poor planning and research, we missed out on all the museums, so that’s at least one reason arrange another visit. I could probably pass on a second Peddler’s Village experience though.

♫ Sigur Rós - Inní Mér Syngur Vitleysingur

• The Editing Room - Abridged Scripts
  Truly inspired abbreviated screenplays.

Tonight we got an email from Netflix saying that they’re eliminating account profiles so they can “continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.” How considerate of them. This means that I’m losing all my ratings that I’ve spent time building, and Bryan and I can no longer have our own separate queues. Up until today, I’ve always been very impressed with Netflix and pleased with their service, but I am not a happy camper right now.

Update: It’s hit Hacking Netflix now, and there’s a Netflix Community thread.

♫ Massivivid - God Away

While migrating my site to WordPress, I got annoyed that WordPress uses RSS feeds by default with no way to change to Atom. Not that there’s a big difference or anything, but if you’re anal-retentive like me and want WordPress to use Atom but still have pretty feed URLs (http://nanovivid.com/feed/ instead of http://nanovivid.com/feed/?feed=atom), you can do it with one .htaccess RewriteRule:

RewriteRule (.*)/feed/?$ $1?feed=atom [L]

This simply takes any URL ending in /feed and invisibly appends ?feed=atom to it. Instant Atom feeds for everything!Î

♫ Gotye - Heart's A Mess (Lull's Radio Edit)