nntk Blogged

A reasonably up to date list of my World of Warcraft characters can be found here or, I suppose you could get more details using Blizzard’s Armory - for example my main is Nosnibor on Sunstrider.

Due to the immense amount of spam that has been hitting this blog recently I’ve had to take the option of disabling trackbacks and pingbacks for all articles. Sorry…

I’m trying out some new blog templates so for the time being have had to remove the ‘Listening to…’ link from the sidebar. The same information can now be obtained by following the My Music link in the ‘Links’ section.

I’m trying out an addition to my sidebar that lists the artists most frequently played on my iPod/iTunes. The name of each artist should link back to Musicmobs to give a list of the songs played.

Got to confess that I haven’t touched this blog for months. Returned to discover numerous mass sales comments advertising online casinos, real estate companies and worse. So, now switching to requiring a registration before a comment can be left - just use the link in the Meta section in the sidebar to register. I’ll see how that goes - if there’s still an issue with spam comments I’ll abandon the comment facility!

Update 5th May 2006: On some of the blog templates I’m trying out there is no Meta links section - but there will be a register link elsewhere, often as a tab or link on the blog header banner. Look around - it’s there!

I’ve finally settled on a new site design I’m (fairly) happy with and applied it via a Dreamweaver template. If you’re interested in how it’s done, see the notes on my news and contact page. There are still a couple of things that still need to be sorted out though. At present, all page titles have been set to the same default so I’m going to have to go through and manually edit all of them. And I would like to revamp the photo gallery pages a little.

I am in the process of moving nntk.net from Adobe GoLive to Macromedia Dreamweaver. This means there will be some layout changes and intervals where the site may not have a completely ‘finished’ appearance.

Just a few applications that I find extremely useful in windows - partly just to give me some easy links to their web sites!

Directory Opus >>

Quite simply the best Windows file manger I have found - and I’ve tried many! I use Directory Opus all the time as the default replacement for Windows Explorer. Superb stability and performance, many layout options, brilliant search tools, image previewing and a myriad of useful file commands. What more can I say!

AppRocket >>

I’m just starting to get used to this keyboard file launcher/search tool and want to use it more. I use LaunchBar all the time on the Mac for application launching and searching - it is quick, efficent and invaluable. AppRocket seems to give near-identical functionality for Windows - just got to get used to not using the Start menu or ObjectDock (see below) to try and exploit its usefulness!

ObjectDock >>

Continuing the campaign of replicating Mac OSX functionality in Windows is Stardock’s Start menu/task bar replacement ObjectDock. I have been trying to keep a clear(ish) desktop and use ObjectDock exclusively for about a year now - and it works very well. But if AppRocket is everything that LaunchBar is, ObjectDock may be less useful - after all, in my OSX dock I only have eight or nine items but in my current, tabbed Windows ObjectDock I have about thirty.

NoteTab Pro >>

Excellent text editor - and I probably hardly even touch its full functionality. I do use its formatting abilities and search and replace (within an open document or within files) tools a lot. My default replacement for notepad, I use it for text, html, ini and batch editing - it can do far more in a programming environment. There is a free version, NoteTab Light, which would probably be enough for most people.

Firefox >> and/or Avant Browser >>

Tabbed browsing is an essential for me, and these two free browsers easily outperform Internet Explorer - at least until IE7 is out. I probably slightly prefer Firefox. Avant is very good, but it does use the IE page rendering engine - it is essentialy a skinned and customised Internet Explorer, but a very good one.

IrfanView >>

Very useful, freeware image viewer and basic image editor. Small, fast and very useful - for most image manipulation (resizing, format conversions etc.) you really don’t need the likes of Photoshop or Paintshop! Also has some nice batch image processing options, image browsing functions and basic html page output.

Article added to the section of the site dealing with John Hackett. This article was contributed by Thomas Knott, who was with the HQ “G” 7 Armd Div in 1955/56, with Major-General Hackett.

Just started looking at a second method of tracking my use of iTunes and the iPod - using the application iTunes Catalog to convert iTunes playlists to html and publishing them on the web.

You can see the results at Ian’s Library.

Quite a nice output, with lots of clickable links and loads of detail. There are a few of shortcomings though.

Firstly, and most importantly for me, there is no option to include a composer field into the generated pages. This makes any entries for classical albums a bit nonsensical if they have been tagged properly with the ‘Artist’ being the performer(s) and the album title simply being the title of the work. There is no mention of the composer anywhere!

Secondly, artwork for the albums is fetched from Amazon, and sometimes the results get a little mixed up. I got some peculiar results, with Sum 41 and Mariah Carey albums being fetched, I think, for The The and The Jam albums. And again, covers for classical albums are completely messed up - many come up as pop albums, or even if classical are not very closely matched to the actual CD. This is a fault with the Amazon search engine rather than the iTunes Catalog software though.

And finally, it is still harder work to generate, check then publish webpages than to just upload an xml file to Musicmobs.