Dr. Memnus Lagbane Soultooth the Mad

I'm looking for an electronics parts supplier. I need some LEDs, transistors, random wires and breadboard, and maybe an IC or two. The only place I currently know to get these is Radio Shack, whose prices are exorbitant when I'm looking at twenty or more lights in four colors.

I can Google for "electronics hobbyist supply" but a lot of the sites that come up are user-hostile, don't have a lot of great specs, or seem to be selling in bulk anyway. I'd love to use American Science & Surplus as a main supplier, but being a surplus site their selection is sketchy at best; they seem particularly short on blue LEDs (never mind being able to find a particular op-amp chip).

Any more hardcore DIYers than I have any recommendations?

(EDIT for actual formatting)

click

So Gmail (in Firefox, on my laptop) is having this problem where it's loaing. And that's all. As far as I can tell it's some sort if infinite redirection loop, that it pops up the "Loading..." page, tranfers some data, blinks the links on the top of the screen, then goes right back to loading and waiting again. My work computer had been doing this for a while, and I'd pretty much ignored it, because popping up something else Google in another tab usually broke the cycle. This is not working this time. Clearing out cookies has not helped, nor does stopping the cycle, logging out of Google, and logging back in again. Anyone have any idea what might be happening? I'm not thrilled to have Exploder be my only access to email.

(EDIT: I can also break the cycle by opening iGoogle in another tab and opening a conversation from there, but it's still not something I want to do all the time.)

click

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?

click