Nine Inch Nails once again proved that they (he?) are the coolest people (person?)* on the planet. The latest album, Ghosts I-IV (a 36-track series) is sold online for $5. So, last night I picked it up in FLAC lossless. For $5. No DRM, no quality degradation, just 600 megs of pure above-CD sound.

And then, to play it and get it onto my iPod.

Crap.

For those who don't know, FLAC is a sound/music file format that is perfect, and well-compressed. Handy to have for your master-copies - you can make degraded versions from there. MP3 has better compatibility and is much smaller per-file, but if you convert from a high-quality MP3 into another format, it will degrade. FLAC will not. I figured "I'm a nerd, I should get the FLAC and transcode a copy into MP3 for my ipod and other players".

Seemed easy enough.

Until I found out that none of the mainstream apps have 1st-party support for FLAC, despite it being the standard for lossless. Then I went looking for opensource tools (my typical second-choice after free MS products). Double-crap. The OSS tools are little command-line Perl scripts that were designed for Linux and seem to complain about various missing dependancies on Windows XP - I even went to the trouble of installing ActiveState Perl onto my machine to run them.

So, I ended up fetching Foobar2000 - a decent freeware app. Still, I wince at using freeware, because you always worry about getting what you paid for, and since it's closed-source, you don't know what's inside.

Foobar2000 is actually surprisingly nice - it feels like a stripped-down iTunes using the Windows native interface, with far more power-user-friendly features. It's happily grinding away at converting my unreadable (but archive-quality) FLAC files into MP3s.

* NIN is a band... but it's a band of hired guns run by the owner, composer, lead performer, etc. that is Trent Reznor. So I often think it's kinda silly to refer to it as a band when he does more than most singer-songwriters.

Just went shopping. The mall calendar/boardgame store is starting their discounts on boardgames now, so it's a good time to pick up that game you've been holding off on. They've got Settlers of Catan for $40, and the 5-6 player expansion pack for $21. I was tempted, but the also had this:




Which won out. Risk as it should be - with nukes, lunar colonization, and a 5 turn limit. Plus, all my friends already have Catan sets, and since I usually end up playing with them I didn't feel it necessary.

Also, at Zellers, I saw this for $30:




Battlegrounds: Crossbows and Catapults - Orcs Vs. Knights. I already have a set, but any younger gamers out there take note: Crossbows and Catapults is not to be missed. This was a kids game, but is very playable as an adult. It's half war-game, half bar-style darts/pool ballistic skill game. Very fun. I have a combination of the original set and the Base Toys re-release, but the new one looks much more stylish - replacing Vikings and Barbarians with Orcs and Knights is extra-cool, and the darker, grittier paint-jobs (and the new cannon piece) are very nice.

Only worry is that the Base Toys re-release was very light on the rules (we played from memory of the '80s version, and I'll bet this one is similar since it's a children's toy. Plus, they only come with 8 pucks per team, but of course they come with lots of the little stand-up men that were only spies in the original, so if you use the old rules you could probably use them as "captives" and keep the pucks in play.

Okay, yesterday, our washing machine died. Little-known fact - you can't live very long with a baby and no washer. So, we're shopping for a washing machine, and it's scary. We decided we wanted to be good little prosumers and join the front-loading revolution, and so I've been hitting up epinions et al for dirt on everyone I can find.

Holy cow, it's like a minefield out there. I'm not talking "oh, this has 10 positive reviews and 1 negative one", but that most models are down to three stars just because the reviews are all 1s and 5s. Every model under $900 has mold problems, and a few over $900 have electronics bugs or static electric failures. The only one that reviewed consistently well is the Samsung Silvercare line, which advertises the esoteric feature of dissolving silver ions into your water to disenfect your clothes - cool, but creepy... and that one's gonna be $1100, so it'd damned-well better be good.

Well, back to the hunt.