Click to download PDF

Wondering which fish and seafood species are lowest and highest in mercury? Here’s a one-page printable chart suitable for hanging on your fridge or tucking in with your shopping list. I put this together based on information I gathered from the NRDC website.

mercury-fish-seafood-chart.pdf

“Why does Google Music show the wrong genres (compared to my iTunes genres?)”

This past weekend I went a little crazy trying to synchronize my iTunes library with the (otherwise totally awesome) Google Music service. As someone who had spent many hours carefully organizing the genres for my iTunes library, I was depressed to see all sorts of wrong and weird genres overriding my own metadata when viewing my library from within Google Music. After a great deal of digging and testing I figured out that the problem has to do with how iTunes encodes (or doesn’t encode) MP3 tags for standard/default genres like ‘Rock’ or ‘Folk’.

Here’s how to make your Google Music track genres match what you’ve set in iTunes:

1. Delete your entire Google Music library

This may be a painful step if you’ve already spent several days uploading your 100 GB iTunes music collection to the cloud, but it’s a necessary step since (at present time) Google Music will not check iTunes for any metadata changes after a MP3 file has been initially uploaded.

2. Re-tag your iTunes library with ‘custom’ genres

To make sure that Google Music accurately reflects the genres you’ve set in iTunes, you can’t use any of the standard/default iTunes genres. These are the autocomplete genres that come pre-installed with iTunes: Alternative, Blues/R&B, Books & Spoken, Children’s Music, Classical, Country, Dance, Easy Listening, Electronic, Folk, Hip Hop/Rap, Holiday, House, Industrial, Jazz, New Age, Pop, Religious, Rock, Soundtrack, Techno, Trance, Unclassifiable, World. Don’t use them.

Reassigning 1000′s of track genres isn’t as painful as it might seem. Just:

• Use View->Column Browser->Genres to select all the tracks belonging to a disallowed genre, e.g. ‘Classical’
• Select ‘Get Info’ from under the ‘File’ menu
• Type in a new genre you’ve made up yourself, e.g. ‘Classical-Modern’

My own methodology included making sure that all of my new genres included hypens, for example ‘Pop-Vintage’ and ‘Classical-Vocal’. Since none of the iTunes default genres have hypens, I knew I was done re-tagging my music when 100% of genres in the iTunes column browser were hyphenated.

3. Re-upload your iTunes library to Google Music

To make sure you do a clean upload, you might want to clear out the Google Music Manager application preferences and cache. I’m not sure how you do this on Windows, but on a Mac you:

• Quit the Music Manager (click on the headphones icon in the Mac OS toolbar)
• Delete [home]/Library/Preferences/com.google.musicmanager.plist
• Delete [home]/Library/Appplication Support/Google/MusicManager
• Re-launch Music Manager from your Applications folder

With a little luck and these instructions, you should be able to coerce Google Music into reflecting your iTunes genre assignments.

“My Future Self is a new way to keep an private journal online. It will encourage you to write about your life and the stories from your past. If you have kids, it’s a way to start keeping a journal for them – for when they grow up and wonder what was going on during their early years.

My Future Self is not a website. It is a private journal you will keep via email, sometimes responding to questions about your life, sometimes by sending an email just because you feel like writing down what happened to you today.

The only time you’ll return to this website will be to explore what you’ve written. When you do come back, what makes My Future Self special is that your stories will automatically be organized into timelines, places, dates, and relationships so that you can better visualize and understand the story of your life.”

MyFutureSelf.com

For example, the video you see embedded on this post was supplied from within the WordPress post editor like this:

How to set the size of automatic embeds for your entire WordPress site:

Login as the WordPress admin and go to Settings: Media. There you’ll see boxes for setting your maximum embed height and width. This will change the width of your embeds throughout your whole site. It’s retroactive so if you change theses settings, they’ll impact embeds even on posts and pages you authored before making the update.

Login as admin, look for Settings: Media

How to change the size for an individual embed:

If you need to make an embed bigger or smaller for a particular page or post, you can override the global media settings by adding a little code to your post, like this:

[embed width="390" height="300"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYZ[/embed]

Please make it easier to listen to NPR programs with this app.

I’m sure there are users of this App who like to fiddle around with the program streams and create their own custom playlists, but the premise I’m working on is that the majority of people who use the NPR Android App use it for a simple purpose: to listen to a show. NPR is radio, and the great thing about radio is that you can listen to it while working, walking, running, or driving.

Consequently, every time I use this app I’m frustrated because it takes me about 70 seconds of pointing, dragging, and button clicking (14 steps in all) to listen to a show. Don’t believe me? Watch this video, which also includes a recommendation for improvement:

Have you figured out a way to bypass any of these 14 steps? Let me know in the comments.

Please consider making a donation to this organization, whose fundraising is conducted by The Tibet Fund (a four star charity as rated by Charity Navigator) and whose mission is personally endorsed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet.

www.breathefreetibet.org

www.unitywoods.com

“I engaged Canton for a complete redesign of the website for Unity Woods Yoga. It’s hard to know what to praise first. His expert technical knowledge of WordPress and his creative design advice made the site far more attractive and user-friendly than before. His skill in automating a connection to the studio’s online registration system will save the staff many hours of work each month. I especially appreciate the value he consistently added above and beyond my expectations with extra tweaks and improvements that I didn’t even know to ask for.”

– Sue Lyn Schramm
Marketing / Outreach for Unity Woods

Highlights from this marathon design session included:

• Creating the two minute promotional video featured on the home page
  Because a good video is essential for promoting a band
• Automatically importing over six years of blog posts from blogger.com
  Because splitting your content across 2 sites hurts your Google ranking
• Promoting Facebook and newsletter signups (via iContact)
  Because having a website is not enough: you need to ‘push’ your news to your audience because they may not return to your website on their own

www.RoundMountainMusic.com

Listen here

Click to zoom track listing

This website is powered by our custom CMS which allows Asia Foundation staff to edit virtually every page of the website without any special tools. Certain areas of the website are seamlessly integrated with WordPress, YouTube, and SlideShowPro to take advantage of these industry-leading tools for news, video, and photo publishing.

Floodwaters by canton

Finished this during a moment in history when 2,000 Pakistanis have died and 20 million are injured or homeless as a result of massive flooding which in many ways is eclipsing the last three major natural disasters combined.

If this creative-commons released free tune gets your head bobbing and heart throbbing, I gently ask that you consider making a donation to one of these many four-star charities providing relief to those displaced by the waters.

“rainbow problems” (deadmau5 vs youtube)

Thank you Gmail!

Short answer: Yes!

I ran a test myself because if you search for email client support of imagemap-clicking, you’ll see everyone pointing to this article from 2007 which sadly reports that Gmail is the only significant email client that does not support HTML imagemaps.

Sometime between then and now (July 2010) Gmail added HTML image mapping support, so those of us who are in the business of designing email newsletters can rejoice and take advantage of this useful oldschool feature.

By the way, if you are an email newsletter designer and you had given up on using background images because of Outlook 2007′s terrible support in this regard, have a look at this interesting workaround.

“Il y’a un truque que m’a frappé: Tu a quatre-vingnt ans, il y’a des vins que tu ne boiras jamais.”

(This is the thing that struck me: You’re eighty years old, there are some wines that you’ll never drink.)

This afternoon I was digging through my collection of digitized cassette tapes as part of a journaling / diary project I’m looking into. One of the more precious things I stumbled on was this song I made during a music composition course while I was a sophomore at Northwestern University in 1993. The professor’s instructions were to “compose something of personal and emotional significance.” You can hear the song I composed below.

Chanson pour Monsieur Du Serf (MP3)

Nineteen-ninety-three was the year in which I was saddened to learn that a close family friend had died, Monsieur Du Serf. This was a gentleman I had known and loved since early in my childhood. During summer visits to my grandmother’s home in France, Monsieur Du Serf and his dog — a high strung Daschund named “U.F.O” (but prounced “ooh-foh”) – were regular visitors. He always treated me with great kindness and generosity.

A few years prior to this music composition assignment, I had started making sneaky recordings of conversations people had around me on a tape recorder. So as it turns out I was able to find a fairly recent recording of Monsieur Du Serf for the project.

The voices you hear in this composition are primarily those of my grandmother, Lucienne Bert (1912 – 2003) and Monsieur Du Serf (19?? – 1993). This pair liked nothing better than to sit around the dining room table and argue about wine and food. Discussions even about seemingly small things inevitably rose to fever pitches punctuated with table-slapping and disgusted exclamations of “baaaah!” and “ecoutez! (listen!)”. If the conversation got too quiet, Monsieur Du Serf would slip a bit of sausage or cheese to U.F.O I think just to elicit a grunt of disapproval from Lucienne.

Listening to this song again today (for the first time in the 17 year interval since it was recorded to a 4-track cassette recorder) I was moved by this conversation in which these two old friends, now both dead, were discussing what it meant to be eighty years old and buying wines that wouldn’t be ready to drink for ten or fifteen more years. In recent holidays, my mother and I have enjoyed drinking some of the very wines they discussed in this conversation.

Du Serf: This is the thing that struck me: You’re eighty years old, so there are some wines that you’ll never drink.

Lucienne: I bought some yesterday. I bought some yesterday because it gave me pleasure. I know I won’t drink them either.

Du Serf: When you’re old… when you’re old you buy wines for your <<héritiers>> (those who will inherit from you.)

This morning I flashed back to 2006 when video game maker Konami hired me to compose a dance remix of Toryanse for their Xbox release of Dance Dance Revolution. Did you listen to the melody in that video above? It is plain eerie – a definite timewarp into feudal japanese history – and making it danceable at all was a huge challenge.

All in all I think I went through 13 rounds of remixes back and forth before Konami finally settled on a techno genre tempo-warping version of the melody. Here’s an early draft version of the final mix (to which Konami still has exclusive rights):

Toryanse Techno Mix © Copyright 2006 Konami

http://cantonbecker.com/music/toryanse/toryanse_cantons-final-techno-mix.mp3

While digging through my files this morning, I rediscovered three completely different remixes I composed that Konami didn’t like. I’m releasing the following three tracks under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. This means you can do almost anything you like with these songs — download them, remix them, mash them up, extend them, even sell them — provided that you give me credit and link back to this website.

Toryanse Urban Mix

http://cantonbecker.com/music/toryanse/toryanse_cantons-urban-mix.mp3

Toryanse Dark Children Mix

http://cantonbecker.com/music/toryanse/toryanse_cantons-dark-children-mix.mp3

Toryanse Broken Children Mix

http://cantonbecker.com/music/toryanse/toryanse_cantons-broken-children-mix.mp3

www.FuturePrimitive.org

To extend the reach and audience for FuturePrimitive.org, the website is now connected to Facebook, Twitter and Feedburner (email) so that followers are automatically notified whenever a new episode is broadcast. Furthermore, fans can embed individual episodes as streaming audio widgets on their own websites by copying and pasting a single line of code (as is done with YouTube videos). For example, the episode you see below was embedded by inserting this single line of code:

<script src="http://futureprimitive.org/embed.php?show=142" type="text/javascript"></script>

1) No need to set the TITLE if it’s the same as the name of the page. Only set it if you want to make a bigger fancier more keyword-rich TITLE. (Not a bad idea.) at the top of the page than the name of the story itself.

2) In my opinion, you can leave the KEYWORDS field blank; consensus seems to be that these are pretty much ignored by search engines at this point because of abuse.

3) Instead, make sure your most valuable keywords appear in the TITLE and DESCRIPTION fields. This counts for quite a lot with the search engines. Don’t worry about making the description field read like a really nice sentence. On the other hand, don’t turn it into keyword salad. Strike a balance.

4) If you have particular keywords you’re aiming for (e.g. Arizona Immigration) then make sure that the PERMALINK (URL) contains those keywords, even if they’re not in your title. Keywords appearing in your URL make a huge difference, so don’t just accept the WordPress-generated URL without giving it a look-over.

And just to go all meta on you, look below for the TGFI settings used on this very post with which I am trying to attract web visitors searching for tips on using the TGFI.net SEO plugin. Notice I’m using both “plugin” and “plug-in” to account for both searches.

The TGFI SEO settings for this post

Mark had purchased the domain name for WorldTreeChocolates.com some time ago, and last week in a frenzy of chocolate-induced mania, we planned, designed, and launched his new website in under four hours. (We cheated some by starting off with one of my favorite off-the-shelf WordPress templates.)

The site doesn’t have a shopping area yet, so you’ll have to be patient before you can purchase your own soul transporting confections from Mark. However, the website we put together does include a blog, essays on chocolate history, and best of all: chocolate recipes. You can also subscribe to his blog via email so that each of Mark’s missives are delivered directly to your IN box.

"The Ancestral Puebloan peoples (commonly known as the Anasazi) had drinking chocolate brought up from Mesoamerica for use at Chaco Canyon. The medicine people, who were also astronomers and astrologers, used this chocolate elixir only in a ceremonial fashion..."

Click here to continue reading Mark’s post on how to replicate Mesoamerican or Ancestral Puebloan styles of drinking chocolate.

www.mmdfrance.fr

To distinguish MMD from its competition, the goals for this redesign included:

• Becoming content-driven: Focusing attention on MMD’s 10 years of expertise by deploying a blog made up of tutorial videos, tips, and free “maps” for download
• Making the human connection: Demonstrating that MMD is operated by real and approachable people with unequaled experience in their field.
• Simplifying content management: Using WordPress, MMD can easily update nearly 100% of their website content using a web browser. Adding new training videos or products takes minutes.

And now (as of WP version 2.9) it’s also possible to crop and rotate your images from within WordPress. No Photoshop required! Watch this video to learn how.