That’s a bit of a problem.  I like to read, and over the last several years my reading has increasingly taken place online.

My Google Reader subscriptions, for example, include many (probably over a hundred; I’m not sure) blogs which all constantly produce high-quality content.  Most of them are photography blogs, but I also read many blogs about computers, graphic design, the Web, chemistry, medicine, and politics/news.  I try to keep myself a well-rounded person, and indeed I find all these blogs interesting.

At least, that was my Google Reader situation until very recently, when I realized there was so much information coming in on a weekly basis I couldn’t possibly read it all.  I also realized that (partly because of this) I hadn’t even bothered reading many of my favorite blogs in months.

Therein lies the problem.  Clearly, I needed to unsubscribe from many of those feeds, and I also had to give up on reading all the posts which had queued up while I ignored Reader.  Doing this was hard, since as I noted before, each of these blogs interested me and had a pretty high signal-to-noise ratio.  But I had to realize that there was no way I could possibly read all of them.  It was kind of difficult to accept this at first, but really there’s nothing else one could do.

Since the majority of the blogs I subscribed to were photography-related, I started cutting there and then moved on to the rest of my feeds.  I’m still working on cutting out all but the very best blogs – with high signal-to-noise ratios and consistently informative, high-quality content – but still I’ve made very good progress.

I’m also doing something similar (though on a lesser scale) with my Twitter account (@cdzombak).  That one isn’t as crowded because I don’t subscribe to many “noisy” people/sites on Twitter.  It helps that I also have a private Twitter account I use solely for communicating with close personal friends, so achieving a really good signal-to-noise ratio with my public account doesn’t seem as important.

And in a similar vein, I’ve been unsubscribing from nearly every mass mailing that finds its way to my email inbox.  I’ve been thinking recently that email ought to be more like the telephone or snail mail (minus telemarketers and junk mail) – reserved for communication between actual people. Weeding out everything else lets me focus better on communicating quickly and effectively with people who actually need my attention.

(Exception: I still subscribe to daily news emails from the New York Times and NPR.)

I hope that accepting the idea that I can’t read everything, and drastically narrowing the number of content-producers I follow online, will allow (and motivate) me to spend more time consuming offline media – that is, reading books and magazines. I subscribe to two magazines (National Geographic and American Photo) and I almost find time to read them in detail; one of my goals for the next few months is to put more time into reading National Geographic in particular.  Another of my near-future goals is to read more books; I have a few in mind (Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class and Max Gergel’s autobiographies are some of the items on my reading list).

Further, probably better-written, reading: Books and Blogs

As far as I can tell, RadioShack sells exactly one infrared phototransistor.  (They’ve really moved away from selling electronic parts in recent years, which in my opinion is too bad.)  I recently bought one for a project; I didn’t have the time to order it from one of my usual suppliers (plus, shipping would cost many times the cost of the part).  The RadioShack part number is 276-145 or 276-0145, depending on which part of the website you’re looking at.

Of course, this phototransistor comes with no documentation, and there’s no manufacturer specified so you have essentially no hope of finding a complete datasheet.  I did some digging on the Web, though, and I was able to find a little more information about this part.

On the RadioShack site, I found some specifications for the phototransistor as well as a short summary of features.

I am also going to reproduce the data here, in case that site is reorganized or the data becomes unavailable for some other reason.

In researching the options, I found that PNC offers two forms of overdraft “solutions” that you can opt into.  (The information on these is found here on the PNC site.)  One of the options seems much more consumer-friendly than the other, and it seems like PNC is making it as difficult as possible to find information about it and opt into it.

Note: you should double-check everything with the PNC site and talk with one of their customer service people before taking any action based on this info. I’m presenting information here based on my own experience with PNC and the questions I’ve asked their customer service people.

Option 1: Overdraft Coverage

The first option PNC offers, and the one they seem to really want you to use, is called “Overdraft Coverage”.  This is the coverage that we’re used to from before the consumer protections: if you overdraft, the bank charges you an exorbitant fee (around $35) and gives you a short-term loan that covers the amount of the overdraft.

There’s a lot of information on their site (linked above) about this option, and it’s easy to opt into it from the online banking interface.

Option 2: Overdraft Protection

The second, more consumer-friendly solution is called “Overdraft Protection”.  With this option, when you overdraft your checking account, PNC will deduct the overdraft from your savings account.  The fee for this is $10 per overdraft – less than 1/3 the fee for “overdraft coverage”.  (This is presumably because the bank isn’t technically loaning you money. They just charge you $10 for the benefit of using your own money – how nice! </sarcasm>)

There’s not much information on the PNC site about this option.  PNC mentions that it exists and provides a basic summary, but there is no in-depth information online.  You’re told to contact customer service for information or to opt-in.  You can’t opt into this protection from the online banking interface, either.

Conclusion

It’s pretty clear to me that PNC would like you to enroll in “overdraft coverage” – they have much more information about this option on their site, and you can get information and opt in using the online banking interface.  It’s obvious why this might be – the bank makes more than 3 times the profit if you overdraft using this coverage rather than “overdraft protection”.

If you’re looking for some form of overdraft solution, I’d recommend that you ask customer service for information about “overdraft protection” and strongly consider that option – it’s much, much more consumer-friendly.

You can find the calendar & directions for using it on the calendar page.

A half-century ago, Afghan women pursued careers in medicine; men and women mingled casually at movie theaters and university campuses in Kabul; factories in the suburbs churned out textiles and other goods. There was a tradition of law and order, and a government capable of undertaking large national infrastructure projects, like building hydropower stations and roads, albeit with outside help. Ordinary people had a sense of hope, a belief that education could open opportunities for all, a conviction that a bright future lay ahead. All that has been destroyed by three decades of war, but it was real.

- from Once Upon a Time in Afghanistan by Mohammad Qayoumi

An interesting and thought-provoking article and photos.

There’s no definitive way to tell whether a client is an OpenID client, but I’ve put together a set of .htaccess rules which do a pretty good job.  These rules let you redirect human visitors (HTTP 301) but not affect OpenID clients looking for an endpoint.

These rules can be found on my code site, and any updates will be posted there as well.

However, whenever I ran git (or a few other programs which depended on OpenSSL), I got several messages like the following:

The worked properly, but the these messages were quite annoying, and it was clear that something wasn’t quite right.  I won’t go into the details of symbol versioning here.

Some research revealed that some people have had similar issues, but many solutions simply involved copying “working” versions of these libraries over the nonworking ones, which isn’t possible in this situation (and is a hackish solution at best).  The closest to a solution I found was this December 2006 post on the Debian mailing list in which one of Debian’s OpenSSL maintainers mentions that you should add a line to Configure and that you need the file openssl.ld.

I’ve now figured out how to build OpenSSL 0.9.8l on Debian (specifically, in my home directory at Dreamhost) with symbol versioning.

The patch file mentioned below is very simple and changes a few lines in the Makefile and the Configure script; click here to download the file and look at it yourself to see exactly what changes.  This patch file is not specific to Dreamhost’s environment; it should work wherever you want to build OpenSSL.

This procedure will install OpenSSL in your ~/local/lib. You should create the directory tree ~/local/src if it doesn’t exist already.

This solution seems to be working for me, and I’ve documented it here in the hopes that it’ll save someone the time it took me to figure it out.  The patch file should be pretty easily adapted to future versions of OpenSSL as well.

Additional Links

• OpenSSL bug #1222 (adding versioned symbols)
• Debian OpenSSL package (Looking at the patch from here is how I eventually got this working.)

Organization

My music library is organized by folders in the format Music/Artist/Album. Pretty simple.  Filenames are in the format <track> – <title>.mp3.

For multiple-disc albums, I still only have one folder for the whole album, and then the files are named <disc>.<track> – <title>.mp3.  This makes more sense (to me, anyway) than having separate folders for each disc – it’s all the same album, anyway.

I still don’t have any good way to take care of Various Artists albums, though.

There’s also a Music/Soundtracks folder, which contains a folder for each soundtrack I own.  This seems like a more logical way to organize these than by artist.

Tools

For collection of music, I use either Exact Audio Copy or Amazon MP3. Exact Audio Copy rips CDs with the highest accuracy possible.  I usually rip to 256 or 320kbps MP3s.  Amazon MP3 is great because it provides 256kbps MP3s with no DRM (both advantages over iTunes).  Even better, it’s not too expensive and you’re still supporting the artists.

Once I’ve obtained MP3s via any avenue (except Amazon MP3), I run the album through MusicBrainz Picard to ensure that all the ID3 tags are accurate.  Sometimes, though, I need to resort to fixing parts of tags manually.  (I don’t do this with Amazon MP3s because files from that service are already accurately tagged.)

I use ID3-TagIT to fix tags (especially adding the disc numbers to multi-disc albums) and rename files.  This program can rename files based on the ID3 tags, making renaming a bunch of music files super-easy. It can also organize files into a folder structure (like the one I described above) automatically based on the ID3 tags – great for taming an out-of-control music library.  This is a really great, powerful program, and I’m sad to see that it’s no longer being maintained…I’ll have to find a replacement eventually, I guess.  For now, though, it looks like it’s still available.

Before adding the files to my music player, one more step: I run them through mp3val to make sure there are no issues with the files which could cause skipping, etc. This isn’t usually necessary with files from Exact Audio Copy or Amazon MP3, but it can’t hurt, and it’s invaluable for files from any other source. (mp3val is a command-line program, but there’s a graphical interface available for Windows at the Web site.)

Finally, you can add the files to your media player of choice. For iTunes, I use the free version of iTunes Folder Watch.

A Note

I know this looks like it would take a long time, but once you get the hang of it, it really only adds a minute or two to the process of importing each album – a small price to pay for a well-organized and maintained music library.

The class now has many new features and more robust code with an improved interface.  It should be logical and easy to use.

By now, I’ve reached v2 alpha 2.5, and I think it’s sufficiently ready for users to begin implementing and testing in their applications.  See the project page for docs, downloads, etc.

• Christmas Bomber: Where Airport Security Worked
• Post-Underwear-Bomber Airport Security
• Matt Blaze on the New “Unpredictable” TSA Screening Measures

I also highly recommend that you follow his blog.  He’s a respected security guru, he knows what he’s talking about, and it’s usually very interesting to read his stuff.