Unfortunately, Pitchfork uses an annoyingly effective way to get around Adblock. Essentially they (warning: speculation) use Javascript to write more Javascript which, I assume, gets executed after Adblock has run through the source of the site. Ah but they didn’t think of how sweet Firefox is.

Firefox has a setting (in the “Content” section of the preferences) called “Load images automatically.” Obviously you want this to be enabled (how annoying would it be if it wasn’t?) but…wait a second. What if we didn’t want images to load for a certain site? The FF developers are one step ahead of us.

Next to the check box is an “Exceptions…” button that let’s you define block/allow settings on a per site basis (just like when setting cookie exceptions). When I added ahs.pitchforkmedia.com to the block list, voila!

Oh wait…that only blocks images. As in that flashy Flash ads are still there.

Honestly, that’s fine with me. My biggest problem was that all the ads were overwhelming. With the images gone the Flash ads are much easier to ignore.

This isn’t a perfect solution but it made me a lot happier and hopefully you will be too.

I have one major gripe though: subscription settings are universal. There is only one setting for how podcasts are managed. An example might help.

Say there are two podcasts (I’ve got way more but I’ll make it easy on you guys) that I like. The first is a weekly show that I never want to miss but if I do, I want the last episode to be saved until I watch it. The second podcast is released daily and I don’t really care if I miss one. You’d think it’d be easy to set up iTunes to save all episodes of the first one and only keep the newest of the second. You’d be wrong.

In fact, I have to save all episodes and go through and delete manually. I won’t pretend that I’m so pressed for time that I can’t take a minute and delete old shows everyday but it’s the principle. This is fairly basic functionality that is left out.

All this being said, I also won’t pretend that Steve Jobs reads my blog religiously and, thus, won’t tell his developers to work on this pronto. Maybe sometime soon though? Thanks Steve.

But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn’t be imagined without it.

I still have to tweak the way it outputs the tracks but in all the install took about two minutes. Really nice little plugin.

I have to say that I was thoroughly impressed. I watch a fair amount of TV but lately all of the shows I used to watch have made seemingly irreversible turns for the worse. Prison Break for instance is just ridiculous. How many times can they just barely escape from the cops or one of the several other groups out to get them (all of which just want to kill the Scofields off)?

And Lost. Oh man, Lost really makes me mad. For the first two seasons the writers kept introducing crazy plot twists and mysteries that left you with the feeling it was all going to tie together in the next episode. The third season tried to do that, but at this point I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to tie up all the loose ends (and you know none of the die-hard fans are going to be satisfied until everything has been explained).

House is another show I’m starting to hate. Sure, Hugh Laurie is always witty and good for a couple laughs but it just gets old. How many times can they get down to the last 10 minutes of the episode having no idea what is wrong with a patient then BOOM! They have the cure and the little kid we were supposed to be oh-so worried about is fine. It’s a good show but it needs some spicing up.

I could go on but I think I’ve danced around my main complaint long enough so I’m just gonna say it: something needs to be resolved!!

I know, crazy, right? Take a second to think about it. When was the last time you watched a show and actually felt satisfied? As fun as those cliffhanger endings are, they become less cliffhanger-y the more you see them until all of the suspense is gone. “Oh wow! Lost just had the craziest ending! Now I have to watch next week.” Um…nope.

Heroes is different (and better) than the above shows because in the end something significant is actually resolved (I’m going to try really hard not to give anything away but consider this your ***WARNING*** that there might be spoilers). In the beginning of the season we find out about some big explosion that happens in New York sometime in the future (November 8th of that year - not an important detail). Throughout the season we learn that the explosion is caused by someone with powers, but it’s pretty much up in the air until the last episode as to who it is (real suspense!).

At the end of the season everything comes to a close. I know, I was looking for some ridiculous plot twist too, but it never came. The writers did an awesome job, though, in setting up next season. If you didn’t catch it, go back and listen to what Molly says while she’s lying in the bed with the map (that other guy, not Sylar). Obviously I don’t know for sure that this is the direction the show will go in, but it’s my best guess.

This type of ending should be the model for all other shows. There is no reason to keep people hanging in suspense all summer because people just don’t care enough when the show isn’t on. Networks know that, for the most part, everyone who watched last season will come back in the fall by virtue of how much of a pain it is to start watching a new show (think about it - new time slot, old seasons, etc.). Even if every network exec reads this (ha!) there wouldn’t be any reason for them to change their ways. The current biggest threat to TV is the Internet and losing a few viewers to bad endings is nothing compared to what they’re about to lose to services like Joost and YouTube.

I see widespread use of this new protocol in the future.

Update: I guess I should explain where this seemingly random post came from.

I’ve been thinking about making a media manager-esque application so i was looking into the Audioscrobbler protocol used to submit played songs to last.fm which they boringly named Audioscrobbler Protocol.

I promise I’m going to post more. And yes, I realize that I’m really only promising to myself but by writing it down it’s more likely to actually happen. Oh, and for some reason I decided to record this with the video camera my family has never used (we got it like 4 years ago…).

Later.

After creating the new button (JButton button = new JButton(new ImageIcon("path/to/icon");) all it takes is two simple method calls to make it just an icon. The first, button.setBorder(null);, is fairly self-explanatory but the second, button.setContentAreaFilled(false);, while almost as self-explanatory, is not obvious at all. In fact, I read through the API twice before I caught it.

I still have one problem though. This solution works well if you want just the icon present however it breaks if you try to add text. This is rather important in my app so I’m going to have to work out a solution.

I’ve actually learned a few neat tricks recently which I’m going to post here. If you’re at all interested, stay tuned.