floating in space…

VIOLENT FEMMES Tour Schedule

Jippeee! I didn’t believe it when I first heard about it, but now I’m happy ;)
9 August at oppikoppi and 11 August in Cape Town. Would have liked to go to oppikoppi…

Arrghh! A unicode/utf/latin-1 confusism again…
Been playing around with my new Sony Ericsson W850 - and so far it’s pretty impressive.

But there’s a problem with some mp3 ID3 tags which I tracked down to be UTF-8 used in some ID3v2.4 tags. I first thought it choked on the ID3v2.4 tag like so many other crappy players, but it handles ID3v2.4 fine if you convert the encoding to Latin-1 or UTF-16.

ID3v2.3 does not allow UTF-8, which is why it will always work fine. ID3v2.4 adds UTF-8 support, so this is a bug in the phone software. I’m using version R1JG001.

I used eyeD3 to convert the tags, which can also add album art btw.

Edit:
It looks like there’s a problem with track numbers as well. UTF-16 works fine, but track numbers are mixed up, so the tracks play out of order. And don’t try UTF-16BE. Your phone will reboot repeatedly until you remove those files. Looks like using either ID3v2.3 or ID3v2.4 doesn’t matter. So all that is left is Latin-1 encoded tags.

So if you have problems, make sure you don’t use UTF or unicode encoded tags on your mp3s

I made this rough python script to convert to lower bitrate mp3s and fix the tags to work with the W850i. It will also add any picture named folder.jpg or album.jpg in the same directory as album art to the tag. http://www.floatinginspace.za.org/w850_cp/cp2w850.html

Found the following in some newsgroup. Some more detail on speed reading here:
Speed reading - wikibooks
Test your reading speed with this handy Online Reading Speed Test.

1. Sit down at a well lit table and sit up straight.
2. Take a hard cover book with big easy to read print. preferably not a novel — some kind of no-brainer non fiction works best.
3. Take your finger or a pen and underline the words as you read them. Get used to pacing with your finger for a few minutes.
4. Now speed up. Simply move your finger FASTER THAN YOU CAN SOUND OUT THE WORDS. You probably will not be able to understand what you read. In fact, if you think you can comprehend what you are reading, speed up till you simply see a blur of words that you recognize. If you are having problems and keeps sounding out the words compulsively — hum a tune. This disables your brain’s capacity for verbalizing words.
5. Aim your eyes above the line of text you are reading, as if you were trying to read “between the lines”. This makes it easy to focus your attention on GROUPS of words rather than your eye stopping on individual words, which slows you down. At first you are not aiming to understand; you are trying to train your brain to accept that it can see and know what phrases of words mean simply by looking at them.
6. Practice this exercise for no more than 15 minutes at a sittting, no more than one sitting per day, usually after your morning wake-up ritual when you are at your prime. If you practice for more than 15 minutes, you will exhaust the overworked neurons that are trying to adapt to a new skill, and will have to wait for 2 to 3 days and restart. If you try to push too hard or too fast, your brain hardware will resist you.
7. After 8 or so sessions, your brain will start to abandon trying to comprehend what you read as “sounds” and instead will visually grab words and process them in parallel, instead of one at a time. Typical reading speeds at this point in time are around 800 to 1500 words per minute.
8. The ultimate key to speed reading is realizing that your brain is learning to process words with the process of seeing them in groups, then processing their meaning. We are taught to read by seeing words, sounding them out, and then using our spoken speech hardware to comprehend what we read. The brain doesn’t need this slow speech step.
9. After a number of sessions in which you are comfortable with this technique, get rid of the finger and use a small brown index card with three black semicircular dots along one edge on it. The black dots tell you where to position your eyes as you read across the page. Take this card, and drag it down the page, scanning each line 123 123 123 123 with your eyes fixating either on the dots or above the text lines. With your finger out of the way, you can pick up some serious speed. As with before, don’t expect perfect comprehension right away.
10. Lose the card. Get in the habit of just scanning with your eyes. (If I’m tired, sometimes I still pull out the card. It’s a great crutch.)

There are more techniques for speed than just these. I used to crank along at 30K WPM. This 10 step plan is good for about 3K WPM or sometimes a little more. The fantastic rates come from learning to scan in text essentially out of order, grabbing entire paragraphs as your eyes pop around them almost at random.

Practice Practice Practice.

As you read, try to ask questions to yourself about what is going on, or who the material is suitable for, or something to allow you to “correlate” it. If you are not reading with need or potential purpose in mind, your brain won’t remember it. In fact, your brain will not even process it. It will just see words flying by. The purpose of studying for an exam just doesn’t cut it. You have to try to imagine using the material in the real world, or sifting it for “junk” or planning something to do with it, and considering what effect what you are reading will have on your plan or your needs. In short, your brain will slowly get in the habit of “asking questions” at lightning speeds. It won’t even bother to sound these questions out or formulate them — just instantly come up with them and compare them relative to the material being read.

You will remember what you read relative to the questions you thought up as you read the material.

Some people try to speed read novels. Forget it. It really doesn’t work so well. They become lifeless, because you have to read for “this did happen and this did etc.” Speed-read novels often lose that sense of life. If you have an exam in a Lit class, then speed reading is for you. Just expect the novel to be a little less “alive” than it might otherwise be when you otherwise read slowly and can feel the emotions that were conveyed in the words.

This is how it works
You’re young until you’re not
You love until you don’t
You try until you can’t
You laugh until you cry
You cry until you laugh
And everyone must breathe
Until their dying breath