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HOTAS (Joystick + Throttle) Comparison

As part of the long list of preparations for the release of Elite : Dangerous I decided it was time to get a new HOTAS system.  Hands On Throttle And Stick means exactly what it says;  a joystick and throttle with so many buttons you don’t need to take your hands off to fiddle with the keyboard.  They can be expensive bits of kit, but after a lot of searching and reading I settled on getting the CH Fighterstick and CH Throttle.

This post will break down why I went for the CH and I’ll do a follow-on post about what I think about the HOTAS system itself.

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PowerShell : Comparing Contents of Two Folders

Someone at work asked me if I knew a quick way in PowerShell to compare the contents of two folders. I asked a few questions and it turned out he was trying to rationalize all the music folders he had scattered round on his families computers. He wanted a way to look at all the files in a folder and check if an identical file (by identical he meant the same size) was present in a second folder.

I quickly thrashed out a line which he later said did the trick;

gci c:\source | %{$Found=$false;foreach($Item2 in $(
gci d:\target)){if($_.Name -eq $Item2.Name -and
$_.Length -eq $Item2.Length){$Found=$true}};
if (-not $Found){"$($_.Name) not matched."}}

Explanation about how it works below the line.
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Tagging MP3 Files in PowerShell

One of my main familial duties is as CD-Ripping monkey.  Once we get a CD I need to convert it into a format friendly for the various streamers, phones, players, alarm-clocks and secret digital diaries (yes, really).  This usually just involves ripping an album to Flac and MP3 and uploading it to the file-server.

Some audio-books and multi-CD albums are more difficult though;  the more CDs there are the more chance that iTunes or the FreeDB databases have mismatches of metadata between the discs (maybe CD #1s album title is “Status Quo Greatest Hits CD1′ and CD#9s album title is ‘Status Quo – Greatest Hits (CD 9)’).  Clearly mismatched metadata is a crime against humanity and I can’t leave it uncorrected.

You can only imagine how diabolical the Harry Potter Unabridged audiobooks are;  each has 25+ CDs with with 50-70 files per disc.  When we get a new-one they often sit on my desk for days, taunting me while I choke back a sob and try not to remember the manual corrections required the last time I converted one.

This time my PowerShell-fu is strong and it comes to the rescue with some automatic tagging.  The details are below.

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Patching the World : The Spirit Level Book Review

I’m an optimistic technologist; I know that the application of reasonThe Spirit Level and knowledge is the best way to improve the world. This ethos is normally applied to tasks such as sorting out the universal remote control or un-jamming the cat flap but I believe that everything will improve with the march of progress.
But what if you could improve the world as a whole, rather than improving individual components (a cure for cancer, electric cars, un-jammable cat-flaps)?
That’s what The Spirit Level is about, and it’s well worth a read.
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