This is a list of things that we big boned people have to think of every day. These laws are sacrosant!
What should I wear today? Let’s see, t-shirt, shapeless large jumper/top, loose shapeless trousers. What, it’s summer? I know it’s summer, won’t I be hot? Sure it will be, now where’s that top.
Sitting in a pub/club? Are you sitting with your back to a wall, of course you are. Is that a stool you are sitting on, probably not as it doesn’t have a back and people can see you.
Going out to the shop, gonna stick your coat on? But it’s pretty warm, and it’s the middle of the day! Well I’m still gonna wear that coat!
Stand up straight dammit! I don’t want to, my shoulders are having a competition to see how far forward an down they can get, if it happens to make me smaller and less interesting that’s not my problem.
My, that’s an interesting shade of dark you’re wearing. I like the dark and dark combo. it’s sooo you darling!
Are you dancing? Are you asking? No.
Yes I do have a baby face don’t I, thanks for mentioning it.
What, no you can’t hug me. If you touch my love handles again your fingers are going in a door.
If you have adopted foobar2000 (which i’ll refer to as fb from now on) you may be both flumoxed and excited by the possibilities of this wonderful music player. I recently came back to using fb after the release of v0.9, and have been tinkering with various components including foo_ui_columns & foo_browser.
Unfortunately the documentation for foo_ui_columns isn’t exactly extensive, and some of the options on the config page are quite cryptic, so it took me a few hours to work out how to move foo_browser to the top of the screen so that fb has a similar browsing style to itunes. However I pulled my finger out, worked out what I was doing and now I can post a little tutorial to help anyone else having similar problems.
This is what my fb looks like, notice that I have an extra column on the left, this has other info, you don’t necessarily need it (and I can turn it off by hiding the sidebar in columns_ui). You can see the three column file browser at the top, which can be browsed in this case by genre, artist and album.
Firstly, you’ll need to have the components foo_ui_columns and foo_browser. Both the dlls go in the components folder which is under the fb. You will need to close and restart fb to activate them.
Open up the fb configuration window. You want to go to Display -> Columns UI | Layout (tab) as can be seen in the two screen shots below.
Now in the screenshot above you’ll see that there is something called the "Splitter", this is what we are going to use to create our column structure and place the browser at the top of the fb window. This is the bit that took me the two hours, actually realizing that if you right-clicked on the splitter
you would get a contextual menu. Heh.
Anyhow, if you right click on the splitter a menu will come up (as illustrated below). Select "Insert Vertical splitter" and click it. A new splitter wil appear. Right click on that splitter and select "Insert horizontal splitter".
Now we have the basic structure we need to add the browser columns. Right click on the last splitter and go to the sub-menu "Insert Panel", from there go to "Panels" and you should see a list of browser panels. Select the ones you want (e.g. I have Genre, Artist, Album) and insert them into the structure. Of course with this method you can install any panel in any place you want in foobar, you just need to experiment.
You’ll notice in second screenshot I have inserted the "Columns Playlist" one tier above the browser. What this means for my particular fb installation is that the playlist appears on the left hand side in it’s own area, but doesn’t interfere with the browser.
Unfortunately with my sidebar on I get a nasty side scroll bar in the browser columns, I think that may be a bug currently. Let’s hope it vanishes!
Hope this was of use to anyone who comes through here.
*edit* recent changes to foo_browser necessitates an update to the guide. To select what option you want in each column of foo_browser there are two methods. Firstly in the ‘Configuration -> Display -> Columns UI -> layout’ page go to the splitters you’ve set up, select one of the instances of the ‘Browser[*]‘ and to the right you will see a button saying ‘Configure..’. Click this and you will be able to select what you want from a drop down list of options.
Alternately and much easier, set up your browser columns as you would like, and once finished Shift+Right-Click on each of them in turn and the same list will be presented to you. Very easy.
Also it should be noted that the latest version of foo_browser fixes the sidebar problem. If you do ever get the sidebar then click on ‘Library -> Reset Browsers’ and it will refresh them. Not very intuitive but it works.
The picture below is of the extremely talented Gilles Trehin, a 28 year old autistic guy from France. Since the age of 8 he has been designing an imaginary city called ‘Urville’. His talent is absolutely remarkable, I guess it has something to do with his condition, but it only proves to me what I already felt, that someone with autism is far from being dis-abled, rather they are differently-abled.
He’s gone beyond simply designing it, and written a geographical, cultural, historical and economic description of it. If you are interested in seeing more you can pop over to his website.
Further to that he will be publishing a book soon. I intend to order one when it comes out.
A fascinating experiment in polyphasic sleep can be read here. To quote wikipedia:
Polyphasic sleep is a sleep pattern specification intended to reduce sleep time to 2–5 hours daily. This is achieved by spreading out sleep into short naps of around 20–45 minutes throughout the day. This is supposed to allow for more waking hours with relatively high alertness.
The method uses natural human sleep mechanisms to maximize alertness when sleep time needs to be minimized. However, it requires a rigid schedule which makes it unfeasible for most people. It can work well for those engaged in activities which do not permit lengthy periods of sleep.
The author of the article says that his experiments were so successful he decided to sleep that way indefinately. Along with the article is a log of his experimentation which is very interesting.
I can’t quite imagine being awake for just 3.5/4.5 hours at a time. Some things I do every day take longer. Reading a book, working on my computer. The thought of having to work around sleep periods sounds quite intimidating. On the other hand you do gain time as you sleep for 2-5 hours a day, a lot less than normal.
If you do decide to try it out, don’t forget that there is alot of myth and fud surrounding polyphasic sleep. There has been little research into and the effects of doing it wrong are apparently quite bad.
As for me, I’m going to keep practicing my lucid dreaming which I will blog more about soon. Meanwhile check out this very informative lucid-dreaming website.
ooh my heart, so beautiful!
