Here’s an old Bird’s Eye View tune that I just got around to mixing over the weekend.

Faith You Seek

It’s a song that some people say was the best song we ever wrote. I personally feel that it is too poppy and catchy, but that’s just me I guess. It’s another song that I recorded when we were demoing songs for our album. I am just releasing this now because the vocals were previously incomplete, but thanks to copy and paste…I have fixed them. Lyrically, I think it is some of Matt’s best work.

It’s not entirely obvious how to link to a specific folder in your .Mac / MobileMe public iDisk folder but it is fairly easy:

To link to your root public folder you use:

http://idisk.mac.com/yourusername-Public/
or
http://idisk.mac.com/yourusername-Public/?view=web

To link to a specific folder under the root folder use:

http://idisk.mac.com/yourusername-Public/Folder1/Folder2/
or
http://idisk.mac.com/yourusername-Public/Folder1/Folder2/?view=web

The same goes for files, except you don’t want to use the ?view=web part.

This could potentially be my favorite new app for my iPhone. It’s called Shazam (Free) and it totally blows my mind. Check out my video demo:

Shazam on iPhone 2.0 Demo from Sean McGrath on Vimeo.

Just wanted to try out the new wordpress app for my iPhone. I upgraded to the 2.0 firmware last night and have been busy using all the great apps at the app store. With 2.0 I would say I am 10 times happier with my iPhone!

I can’t see me blogging much this way, but it is a nice app to have just incase. I’ll likely be updating remotely via Twitter and Facebook.

There’s is a small trick to getting Rogers’ new 6GB/month for $30 data plan on your old non 3G iPhone. The trick is to not let them know you are using it for an iPhone.

If you go into a store with a non 3G iPhone they will ask you to leave, so it is best if you call. When you call tell them you want it for your Motorola Q9h. Basically any phone that is 3G and not an iPhone.

So that should get you the plan, and once that is done you need a few settings on your phone. Under Settings > General > Network > Edge add the following

APN: internet.com
Username: wapuser1
Password: wap

And then you should be all set!

Lately I’ve been experimenting with the Flickr API and in the process I’ve built a few tools that I use very often and figure others would get some use out of so here they are.

How to use these bookmarklets: Drag the bookmarklet link into your browser’s bookmark toolbar

Is Explored?

This bookmarklet checks the current Flickr photo you are viewing and sees if it is in the top 500 (explored) photos for the day it was uploaded. Basically does the same thing as Scout but is up-to-date (Scout runs its program every so often and isn’t up-to-date at all times).

Is Explored?

Flickr to BBCode

If you spend a lot of time on forums or message boards (phpBB, vBulletin, etc) and like to post pictures from Flickr there, then this bookmarklet is for you. Just go to the Flickr page for the photo you want to post, click the bookmarklet, copy the BBCode for the photo on the next page, then paste it into your message!

Flickr to BBCode

Flickr to HTML

This is the same as the BBCode script, but it gives you the HTML for the 3 sizes of the photo instead of the BBCode. Flickr will provide you with the HTML, but I find this bookmarklet makes it a bit easier to get to.

Flickr to HTML

Large on Black

A popular thing on Flickr is for photographers to include a link to a “View on Black” page. Well, if you are armed with this bookmarklet you can view any photo on Flickr “On Black” whether the photographer has included the link or not. If you happen to be one of those photographers….this will also help you get that “View on Black” link even faster!

View Large and On Black

Something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now is to create a page that lists a large collection of the songs I’ve been a part of over the last few years. Well, I went a head a did that over the weekend and added a bunch of Bird’s Eye View songs (pretty much all of them) as well as a few that I’ve done solo.

All songs are free for download and can be played right on the page.

Check it out

Ever wonder if you should be tipping someone? There are a few cases when I’m never sure when I should be tipping:

1. When picking up takeout food in store. In this case I do not tip.
2. At the hair dresser. In this case I do tip.
3. At the massage therapist. In this case I do tip.
4. At the local ice cream shop / convenience store. In this case I do not tip.

Am I out of line / crazy in any of these situations? What does everyone else do in these situations? Any other tipping situations you are unsure about? Share them in the comments.

It’s about that time to go ahead and change the look of things around here, so here is a new theme. This theme is based on the unsleepable_16 theme but I’ve made a lot of custom changes. Definitely the most personal stylings I’ve put into this blog to date. Usually I just pick a theme and go with it, but this time I thought it’d be a nice change to do something personal.

Along with the new look, I’ve also added a few new features which include:

• Better integration with my lifestream
• Better Flickr integration via the FlickrRSS plugin
• Twitter integration
• Mootools sidebar
• Updated to Wordpress 2.5.1
• Added a tag cloud
• OS X stlye search bar
• Custom favicon
• Installed Google XML Sitemap plugin
• Installed WP-Syntax plugin
• iPhone / iPod Touch theme for viewing the blog on one of those 2 devices. (Thanks to the WP-Touch plugin)

There is still a lot of lose ends, but they’ll come together with time.

http://www.flickriver.com/

Gotta love the automatic loading of images as you scroll down the page. I find this the best way to check out the most interesting photos on Flickr as well as find another user’s most interesting photos.

Here’s another little tip I just discovered by accident:

We all know that command+tab cycles between all open apps, but what if you only want to cycle between all open windows of the current app? For example, say you have several Safari windows open and most are hiding the ones beneath them and it is a pain to navigate to them with the mouse….

Well, a simple command+` will do the trick! Try it out, it seems to work on most apps and not just Safari.

I’m sure this is out there many times on the web, but thought I would share it any way.

A quick way to remove widgets from your dashboard is to hold down the “option” key while hovering over the widget. The close icon will appear when doing this.

After stumbling on phatfusion’s ImageMenu mootools control I immediately knew I wanted to use it on a new website I’ve been building.

So I grabbed the source and plugged in the example just to make sure I could get that working and everything went fine. It wasn’t until I started adding extra links to the menu that things started to get ugly. The example uses 5 menu items, but I wanted to use 8, but for some reason the control was expanding beyond the width it should have been and the last item in my menu was getting chopped off.

I tried playing with all the numbers in imageMenu.css but no luck. It wasn’t until I started going through the javascript that I found the problem. The math that ImageMenu was using to calculate the size of the closed menu items when one item is open, was faulty. It seemed to work fine with 5 menu items, but the more you add, the more noticeable the error is.

So here is the fix for imageMenu.js…

Replace:

this.widths.openOthers = Math.round((((this.widths.closed+this.options.border)*this.elements.length) - this.widths.openSelected) / this.elements.length)+((this.elements.length-1)*this.options.border);


With:

this.widths.openOthers = Math.round((this.widths.closed*this.elements.length - this.widths.openSelected) / (this.elements.length - 1));


I’ve been watching a lot of movies and video on my iMac as of late and one thing that bugged me was that out of the box the Apple Remote really only works with Front Row.

I watch the majority of my videos in VLC so this wasn’t ideal for me. I looked around at programs that would let me control VLC with the Apple Remote, but most cost around $15 and that’s more than I could justify spending.

Well, after some searching it turns out that the most recent version of VLC supports the Apple Remote! Play/Pause, Next/Previous and Full Screen toggle are the actions that are supported.

Those of you that subscribe to my lifestream may have seen a lot of posts tonight, but that is just because I’ve added a few new features to it.

The big features being the addition of my loved songs on Last.fm and my YouTube favorites. You’ll see a bunch of these items at the top of my stream, but that is only because it was the initial import.

Secondly I made a few changes to the look and feel, including a new “logo” if you can call it that. I also added some Mootools scripts to the page (try clicking on the del.icio.us link in the menu…) just for fun.

And lastly, I added some links to a few of my software projects (Quick Tag and Rockabye for now).

View on Flickr

Just testing out posting to my blog from Flickr. Here is a picture of my new clock that sits on my desk.

Credit: seanmcgrath

I just got done investigating an issue with IE where a was having part of my page disappear and then reappear when doing a select all.

I used Firefox+Firebug to inspect the HTML and noticed that this DIV tag was not showing up in Firebug’s source viewer in the right position. This told me that something was wrong and there was an issue with closing tags.

I look through the source and and couldn’t find anything that looked wrong. The only thing that caught my attention was a tag that looked like this:

<div class="clear" />

Just for kicks I replaced it with:

<div class="clear"></div>

Low and behold, everything worked. I am sure this is documented somewhere, but from now on I am going to be sure to write all my empty DIV tags like the second one above just to be safe.

I love MooTools! It’s an amazing Javascript library and I’ve been getting to know it lately (between my lifestream and a new website I have been working on). It makes some really cool effects, and makes it fairly easy to add them.

So tonight I added a lightbox to my blog for photos that I post. Check it out below.

We got some updated picture from the breeder today, so I thought I’d share. He’s going through the “fuzzies” right now so his markings aren’t very pronounced as they will be, but he has the cutest face ever. Apparently he has a matching personality too.