Factories of insanity playing on your vanityas they distort your sense of self
Telling you what you need and how to succeed as they steal all of your wealth
Probing your mind, trying to find how to scheme on you best
From programmed schools with Devilish rules putting you to the test

It’s doing it again.

In fact it played two Last Poets tracks this morning. What kind of a day is going to be, oh Zune?

RADAR, SONAR, LASER BEAMS
JETS, TANKS, SUBMARINES,
MEGATHONS, H-BOMBS, NAPALM, GAS….
All this shit will kill you fast
All products of the Mean Machine

Don’t get me wrong. Revolutionary music is always win. In fact, it may be the only music truly worth anything, because beyond just entertainment it is an attempt to make a strong message. This is no doubt why in high school I was listening to Franti and Paris while others were listening to Color Me Badd and Boyz II Men. (Well, I listened to those too, a little.)

But it has this way of jarring your morning.

Every time I sync my Zune — every time — it pushes another copy of The Last Poets - “Mean Machine” onto the device. It’s like my Zune is trying to warn me about the Man, which considering its origin, is pretty ironic.

I have 33 copies of the song on there right now as a result. This means that “Mean Machine” comes up inordinately often in shuffle mode. Sure, Zune software has pushed other dupes, but this one is really egregious.

This ordeal is only punctuated by the fact that the very first sounds in the the track are the words “Driving me NUTS!” And, fittingly, the title of the album this track appeared on was This Is Madness.

Maybe my Zune is trying to be a mean machine. Again, irony abounds.

Stealing your time, smooth and slick
with the latest trick to get rich quick
from nonsense at your mind’s expense
as your mind digs the scene
from the Mean Machine
designed to drive your brain insane

Every time I download Dia, I think, maybe, it’s gotten better than the last time I used it. It’s open source, so that means lots of user feedback and stuff, right?

Nope. Not a bit. Dia is the poster child of open source software pitfalls. It’s pretty clear from using the application that the only people deciding how Dia should be are the people who develop it, who have already decided once and for all what Dia’s functional space needs and doesn’t need and refuse to introduce anything else.

Visio is just one of those things that OSS simply can’t (or won’t) come anywhere near close to emulating. Compare with Gimp or Audacity, which are comparatively awesome. Even Visio 4.0, from the early 90s, wipes the floor with Dia. (In fact Visio 4.0, which was the last release pre-MS ownership, is the pinnacle of the Visio line. Everything added to Visio since then has been pretty pointless.)

Unfortunately MS Visio is like $3984765.

It could be better only by playing Rick Astley.

Dear robber baron executives,

All that offshoring to India really turned out to be a great idea, huh?

Via Lifehacker: WinDirStat is a whiz-bang tool that scans your disk and organizes your filesystem in order of file size. The greatest feature here is that it also provides an incredibly intuitive at-a-glance display of just how your used disk space is allocated among your files.

Above is a shot of WinDirStat showing the disk usage on my system. The large blue area at top left is World of Warcraft (a lot of patch files hanging around there!), the red area in the middle is MP3s, the light blue areas are image folders. The green monsters at bottom left are my hibernate and paging files. Purple files are DLLs and yellow files are executables. Every directory is a rectangle of space, which is further divided into smaller rectangles of space for subfolders and down to individual shaded boxes for files.

Using WinDirStat, you can quickly assess where the big space users are, and delete them at once. It’s a much faster and prettier method than my previous technique, which involved copious manual use of du -h |sort -n in a Cygwin window.

While the new Zune software leaves a thing or two to be desired over the previous one (album info updating, ahem), it does make it a lot easier to explore and subscribe to podcasts. Not only does it provide a searchable showcase of popular pods, it makes it a cut-and-paste operation to add a new one, and from then on, the Zune software will automatically download and sync new episodes.

I suppose this is something iTunes has been doing all along, but I’m happy to have it. Interestingly enough, the Zune actually uses the term “podcast”, a Kleenex moment for a word directly derived from the leading competitor.

Thanks to Woot I’ve upgraded from my $40 SD-based MP3 player to a refurbished brown Zune. It’s a great deal and a handy device, especially for the price ($100). I’ve easily put my entire MP3 collection on it, plus a dozen or two of my favorite CDs.

A really nice feature of the Zune software was its auto-rip mode. Setting the software to rip automatically when a CD is entered, and eject when done, made it fairly whiz-bang to copy CDs onto. Insert, close drive, wait a few minutes for drive to eject, put a new CD in and repeat. Sync when done and they’re all on the Zune.

One disappointing fact about the Zune is that despite its ability to play video, it’s really hard to find video to put on it or otherwise get videos onto it. The Zune Marketplace, M$’s answer to the iTunes Store, has no video available on it at all. Just music. The Zune website suggests you do a search for “viral video” to find the gobs of free videos out there. I don’t know when they put this together — the Zune was originally released in late 2006 — but nearly every “viral video” I know of these days is on a flash-video streaming site like Google Video or YouTube. And M$ doesn’t have a comparable video sharing site yet.

There are solutions to this, but none are easy. I’ve tried to find answers to two questions: getting Tivo movies onto Zune, and getting YouTube movies onto Zune. With only free options. There doesn’t seem to be a robust, working free solution to the first problem; the best bet is probably shelling out $25 for Tivo Desktop Plus, which converts its movies to iPod-compatible format, which is also compatible with Zune. As for the latter problem, so far the best answer has been the Videora iPod Converter, from which you can search YouTube and automatically download and convert videos. The software expects to be synching to an iPod, but close out the error popups and dig up the output folder and import it into the Zune library.

While Zune has its limitations, hopefully M$ will get wise and make the Zune more interoperable with the next upgrade. Some rumors say that the next Zune firmware update will allow the Zune’s onboard WiFi to connect directly to the Internet, which seems like a no brainer.