I have had a 21″ CRT monitors for a long time now. I think I have gone through three of them. Each of these 21″ monitors suffered the same fate; the screens all got a greenish tint to them that got progressively worse. I love CRT, I think they provide a much better picture than LCD monitors and I think they will continue to do so for some time. That said, I bought a LCD.

I got sick of all my 21″ monitors turning green so I decided to try out LCD. I had bought all 21″ CRTs used, but that is only because new CRT monitors are quite expensive, so maybe that helped contribute to their early demise. I still run a CRT in conjunction with my new 20″ Dell 2007FP, I have a 19″ that does duty as my secondary monitor.

I have been quite happy with the 2007FP. Text looks great, it’s super sharp, has nice colors after I dialed it in with my Colorvision SpyderPro. It was a breeze to install, it came with all the necessary cabling including both a DVI and VGA cable. It has to USB ports on the side. The monitor came with a stand that is height adjustable, as well as able to rotate and pivot. The screen is actually slightly larger than the old CRT. I can run it at 1600X1200 which was actually a requirement for me when I was shopping for a new monitor.

I considered getting a widescreen monitor but when I looked at the Dell E228WFP, which is their 22″ model, it actually had fewer total pixels than the 20″ traditional aspect ratio monitor. The 22″ was cheaper too but it wasn’t part of the Dell Ultrasharp line like the 2007FP. The fact that I have dual monitors sort of makes it so I don’t need a widescreen monitor as well, plus I don’t watch movies on my computer or play any games on this rig. I have the Home Theater for that. I have made a deal with myself. I am going to get the 30″ widescreen LCD monitor when I hit my first financial goal, the first month that I could afford to buy two of the 30″ monitors I will buy myself one.

If you are in the market for a nice 20″ LCD I can suggest the Dell 2007FP, I have been quite happy with mine so far. I purchased it from the Dell Outlet which saved me about 75 bucks.

It has bothered me for ages that in Windows you can not reorder the items on your taskbar. I often have the same programs open day in and day out on my computer and I like to have them in a specific order. For instance I like Netremote to be on the far left near my quick launch items, it’s always there and if it’s not there it screws up my workflow just because I am so used to it being there.

Yesterday I decided that I had had enough and I went looking to see if there was a solution to my problem. As luck would have it there was. Not only was there a solution but the solution was free as well. The program is called Taskbar Shuffle and so far I am in love.

Not only can I now reorder the items on my taskbar I can also middle click the buttons to close them, something I have gotten very used to doing with Firefox tabs. Taskbar shuffle is a tiny little program and consumes very little resources.

If you are looking for a way to arrange and reorder the items on your taskbar look no further than Taskbar Shuffle

So a few weeks ago I got it in my head that I should share with the world my MP3 collection. I figured it would be interesting, be good for me so that I could keep track of it myself, hopefully generate some income for me, and it would allow me to constantly be adding content to my website since I am always getting new music. The search engines love web pages that update often. I also hoped that viewers would find it interesting and I am including the album cover for all of my albums and I am sure there are people out there like me and it can be a serious pain in the butt trying to find pictures of some of those rare album covers.

This project really made me wish I knew some programming language like perl. If I knew perl or something this whole process could have been much less painless and much more automated but I don’t know it so I had to make do with something else.

Luckily for me I found a program called MP3 HTML Generator which did the bulk of the work for me. I still had to do a LOT of work though. I have pretty much been working on this project day and night for the last three weeks. I mean that literally too, for many of the days in the last three weeks I have been working on this from the time I got up till I went to bed. One thing I definitely am is persistant.

The way MP3 HTML Generator works is you tell it where you have your MP3 files stored it reads through your collection and using your ID3 tags it spits out the HTML source code for you. There are several different templates you can use and you can use your own templates as well (but they are kind of limited). I ended up using a portal type interface for mine which to me makes the most sense. The other style all seem to just spit out a really long list of your entire collection and the portal style first gives you a list of all your artists, you select and artist and it shows you all the albums you have for that artist and then you select an album and it shows you all the songs on that album.

Here are some examples of the different styles that MP3 HTML Generator can do for you.

Example 1
Example 2
Example 3

And here is the portal example, the style that I used.

Example 4

I have nearly 200gigs of MP3’s, over 30,000 of them so as you can probably imagine this was a daunting project.

When all was said and done MP3 HTML Generator created just shy of 3,000 new HTML pages. Now because of the limitations in the program I had to go in and edit each and every one of these pages.

MP3 HTML Generator allowed me to do this project and I wouldn’t have attempted this project without it. That said the program could definitely use some improvements. You are allowed to use your own templates but you are limited to having the program just stick the code into one place in your template, you just put the following line in your code

< !-- BODY_TEMPLATE_PAGE -- >

And the HTML that is generated is just stuck in your page there. The program would be incredibly more useful if you could make the artist names appear where you wanted it just by putting something like <#artist#> on the page, that way you could put the artist up in the title of the page, in the H1 tags, etc. You should be able to do this will all attributes such as title, genre, length, year, album cover, etc. If this program did this I would have been in heaven.

Another thing that would make this program much, much better would be customizable URLs. As it is right now the program just makes the URLs in sequential order so all of your generated pages are something like music_01.html, music_02.html. music_03.html etc. It would be absolutely fantastic if it used your file structure for the url. That way you would have URLs that looked like music/audioslave/revelations.html or something to that effect, this would make this program worth a fortune to me.

The program is also a bit buggy. You assign the album covers to the MP3s within the program, I had it randomly inserting covers in the improper place. The program was also too smart for it’s own good. On soundtracks and Various Artists CDs it wouldn’t allow me to assign the cover to the entire album in one shot because the artist name didn’t match up. This was EXTREMELY annoying as I had to do each track individually.

If you are looking to take on a project like this I can recommend that you use MP3 HTML Generator because it seems to be the best thing out there but realize that you will most likely run into some limitations. If you know perl or another language and you happen to write a better program PLEASE let me know, especially if you happen to incorporate any of the things I mentioned above that this program is lacking.

Here is the final result of the last three weeks of hard work:

Moe’s Massive MP3 Collection

The other day I downloaded a video file which was an .NSV file. I had never heard of an NSV but I tried playing it on my media player of choice (media center) anyway, it didn’t work, of course…. bastards. After doing some searching on the net I found that NSV is a Winamp file format. I really didn’t feel like installing winamp because I like to complicate my life and would rather spend several hours converting it to a format that my present media player can handle, I am weird like that. Anyway, I hit google and started searching for ways to convert NSV to AVI, I found some results but they all seemed far to complicated. Some of these methods required three to four pieces of software and I didn’t care that much about this video. But, I am a stubborn son of a bitch and I kept looking for an easier solution. I finally hit pay dirt.

I found a little program called MikkoNSV which claimed to do it all in one shot. I downloaded and installed it and gave it a try. It went through the conversion process with no problems but when I went to play the resulting AVI file I was only getting sound, no video. After some poking around I found that MikkoNSV was using some funky video codec, after some more poking I found that FFDSHOW codec pack can play just about anything so I decided to give it a try (I have FFDSHOW installed on my HTPC). After installing FFDSHOW I tried to play the file and bingo, success! Hopefully if anyone else has the same problem that I did you find this post useful.

The video that I went through all the trouble for ended up sucking elephant testicles.