Hardware envy!!

Linked from QC: a tablet/screen that I'm severely drooling over. I was just looking at tablet PCs today and lamenting the fact that not a single one of them has a decent graphics card, ergo none of them would be good for flying Maya. But this, this would be so much hotness, with the 8800 GTX driving the graphics, an interface in which I could actually do honest-to-god detail work, and a full-sized monitor next door for close-ups. Blarglerearghotttness. Ok, so optimally that'd be my third monitor, but so far I've only got two video outs.

So if you buy me a tablet, I'll make a model of you. Any takers? Anyone?

What if I throw in a pizza?

Um, I suppose if I starting doing modeling for profit as well as fun I'd actually want to have legal copies of Maya and Photoshop. Or get off my ass and actually learn Blender, and stop caring about how much GIMP sucks.

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Ask LJ Before Asking Schmack: Music Repair

So I have two separate music problems, both stemming from inferior CD ripping software.

First is as exhibited in this file: A scratch on the CD causes the file to not play properly on an iPod Nano. It plays correctly in iTunes, but the iPod gets a few seconds in, goes silent for a bit, then skips to the next song. All files with this problem are in .mp3 format.

Second is as exhibited in this file: The file metadata read by every player I've tried lists the track length as about twice as long as it actually is. All files with this problem are in .m4a format.

So I'm looking for a music repair utility - something that can open the file, smooth it out so it reads and plays correctly, then save it back with the same filename. This should be something automatable, so I can script it through either Cygwin or Python to run overnight on every song on the computer.

Anyone know of something?

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