2012 — 29 November: Thursday

Brian has been making helpful suggestions for a real-life "business case" for my woefully-neglected Android Tablet PC.1 Inevitably, his most appealing idea centres around a variation on the tool I currently use to 'profile' (or do I mean "wrangle", or "herd"?) my video titles. Having laboriously keyed in the UPCs of all my DVDs and Blu-rays, I paid a small fee and now let the good folk who wrote DVD Profiler do all the heavy lifting/listing. Here. Turns out there's an Android beta version of the same tool. Why, the very idea.

DVD Profiler on Android

There are two pieces of software required — the Android App and the DVD Profiler plugin needed for DVD-Profiler on Windows. Confusingly they are both listed with two alternative download sources — Dropbox and FileFactory. It doesn't matter which you use to download. Once installed on Windows, when you start DVD Profiler there is a new menu option 'Plugins' which has the single entry Droid DVDP Exporter. Attach your tablet, set it into USB transfer mode, click on the Plugin in DVD Profiler, point it at the correct drive letter that Windows has assigned to the Tablet, and export.

Brian adds:
I tend to export my entire collection every time even when only a couple of DVDs have been added. I'm sure I could just export the changes but a clean export is easier and for my 1800 DVDs only takes a minute or so.

Date: Just yesterday


Meanwhile, to dispel...

... any unworthy thought that I spend my time listing my media rather than enjoying them more conventionally, I can report (for example) having now watched two of the three Ryan Reynolds "vehicles" that arrived on Monday. Just "Just friends" to go (and I saw that several years ago while I captured a DVD-R of it off-air having noted that "Radio Times" had made it their film of the week).

Good job it's only a casual hobby. I wouldn't want to be thought obsessive about these things — specially after reading Simon Baron-Cohen's latest article Autism and the technical mind in this month's "Scientific American". He's been wondering how the gene clusters that may cause or predispose people to the development of autism and Asperger's2 manage to 'spread' in the population (or, at least, get retained), given the obvious drawbacks of some of their potential for social awkwardness. (Which is examined to wonderful comic effect in "The Big Bang Theory", by the way.)

What's that, Monsieur le Crockpot?

You're empty and in need of a good stuffing? I'll get right on it. Should be plenty of time before my lunch date. Judging by the heavily-frosted windscreens of my various wage slave neighbours' cars, it's been a bit chilly out there overnight, so I'm in no mad rush. Certainly the moon was very bright when I turned in. I've been vaguely thinking of another trip down to Novatech, but had better wait for the next widower's mite to be dropped into my bank account, I guess.

I must try to...

... remember that the meaning of "important" can vary. For example, it was obviously critically important for me to download and install yesterday's new build of the DVD Profiler software just a few minutes ago. Particularly before attempting to fiddle with / have fun with3 the Android variant. But whether it was equally important for me to bother reading this before getting ready for my lunch outing...

Important

... is a matter of opinion.

According to the...

... faintly non-native English after-lunch reply from the "Copernic" desktop search support folk in Canada, I might have been able to avoid re-buying their software — after the recent upgrade to Win8 Pro adventure — had I first tried running the program executable as "administrator" before I tried to re-enter my original Licence Key. Life's a bit short. Besides, the code isn't yet officially supported under Win8. I shall keep my head down and just hope the latest build continues to run flawlessly under its new Overlord. It seems to, so far.

A venison burger at "The Bridge" followed by a cuppa and a couple of posh Fudge's half-choc-coated stem ginger biccies have set me up nicely for the outpourings from my crockpot in another three hours or less. Thanks, Len.

If it's not one thing...

... it's (of course) another. I've just had to waste 30 minutes or so slowly but determinedly convincing one of the world's very largest financial institutions — while still refusing to set up the telephone access to them that they both try to mandate, and assume everyone has, (and, incidentally, in the process managing to charm one of my "memorable"4 security answers from the second of the humans I spoke to, too!) — that they've made a mistake, and should not do something they were glibly assuming I would approve of. My trump card here being that I don't really care whether or not I stay with this bank. I maintain this particular pair of accounts largely for sentimental reasons, and as a supposedly safe haven for a spot of savings covered by the deposit guarantee scheme, or whatever they call the thing that gets the guvmint (i.e., me, the taxpayer) to cover bank failures.

The other thing? I'd been sorting the bank out while leaving a batch of video file transcoding running on BlackBeast. When I tried to restore the various windows to see how that was coming along, Win8 (aided and abetted by the application, no doubt) had decided to eat all but one of the windows I'd deep-sixed (I thought, temporarily) by clicking in the bottom right hand corner of the left hand screen. This is, so far, the first time I've found myself raising my voice in mild irritation at the system. Some of my chums doubt it will be the last.

  

Footnotes

1  I do wipe its touch screen from time to time.
2  Baron-Cohen adds that Asperger's will be folded into the broader 'autism spectrum disorder' in the newest edition of the DSM-5. And I hope you don't have to ask what that is... :-)
3  These days, it seems only a priest, or a dead MP, or a dead celebrity broadcaster, can tell the difference.
4  It can't be that memorable, since I couldn't remember it. It would have been initially established, I suspect, back in July 2007 when Christa and I then knew only too well what was thundering unstoppably down the "medical" track towards us and were very deliberately converting all our various accounts into "joint" ones simply because we knew that would make things much easier for the survivor. Me, sadly.