Gav Reilly

SO, MY FIRST real blog post in well over a year. I won’t make the usual ill-fated apology about trying to do more in future – variety is the spice of life, etc etc – but instead want to put across an observation about the current lie of the Irish political land.

The presidential election has been and gone, and frankly there is little left to say other than to wish Michael D the very best for his impending tenure. He’s been given a pretty hefty mandate – the largest that any person has ever won in Irish electoral history; only on six occasions (all of them referenda) have the people voted in larger numbers for a common end – and my personal hope is that he does his best to use it. It has always struck me as a political curiosity that the President (mandate 1,007,104 votes, from voters in 43 constituencies) could be politically neutered by a Taoiseach (mandate 17,472 votes, from only one constituency); it would be a personal hope that the cabinet might keep the new President’s electoral standing in mind if he should give them a subtle nudge towards a particular social goal.

Anyway, specifically I wanted to make a note on the aftermath of the two constitutional referenda from last week, and the potential impact that the fallout might have on the government’s plans to make inroads on the one place that almost everyone wants it to succeed: political reform. Read the rest of this entry »

A GENERATION ago, the very idea that a British politician would go to Ireland to see how to run an economy would have been laughable. The Irish Republic was seen as Britain’s poor and troubled country cousin, a rural backwater on the edge of Europe. Today things are different. Ireland stands as a shining example of the art of the possible in long-term economic policymaking, and that is why I am in Dublin: to listen and to learn.

- George Osborne
The Times
February 23, 2006

(context)

• Watch TV3′s special edition of Tonight with Vincent Browne at 10:30pm, instead of The Week in Politics. They’ll be airing the video, including the censored questions.
• Email complaints@rte.ie.
• Contact the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (which has incorporated the function of the Broadcasting Complaints Commission):
  • info@bai.ie / complaints@bai.ie
  • Write to:
    • The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland
      2 – 5 Warrington Place
      Dublin 2
  • Telephone: (+353) (0)1 644 1200

Update: From RTÉ’s own website:

RTÉ is obliged under Section 39 (1) of the Broadcasting Act 2009 to ensure that

(a) all news broadcast . is reported and presented in an objective and impartial manner and without any expression of the broadcaster’s own views

(b) the broadcast treatment of current affairs, including matters which are either of public controversy or the subject of current public debate is fair to all interests concerned and that the broadcast matter is presented in an objective and impartial manner and without any expression of his or her own views, except that should it prove impracticable in relation to a single broadcast to apply this paragraph, two or more related broadcasts may be considered as a whole, if the broadcasts are transmitted within a reasonable period of each other

A quick note – which will only make sense if you’ve read Madam Editor’s piece from Thursday morning, channeling Yeats: Was It For This?.

It’s obviously an emotive issue – especially in Ireland – when the loss of sovereignty is threatened. As I was corresponding with an American colleague earlier, trying to give him some sense of context as to why Ireland takes its self-governance more than most, I found it difficult to construct even a single paragraph without having to reference Ireland’s chequered relationship with Britain.

However, the editorial – eloquent and on-the-button as it was – overlooked one salient point: the very concept that Ireland had supposedly retained its sovereignty up until now.

The point was this: why is having to borrow money from overseas sources considered a loss of sovereignty, when such borrowing is what the government – any government – does every time it has a budget deficit?

If Ireland has lost its sovereignty by having to invite the IMF in, it’s not (directly) the fault of the incumbent government, nor is it because of the scale of the loans we’ll get – even if they hit €100bn, it’s only doubling the national debt we already have.

It’s because bankers got greedy and stranded us up the proverbial creek – and that’s both the long and the short of it.

Guess who’s back, back again? Now that I’m a working man (more of which, I promise, will come in due course), writing for a living, it’s about bloody time I pulled up the bootstraps on this here blog and blew the dust off it a little bit.

So, musings and opinions to come in full flow in the days and weeks to come (not least helped because I’ll have a new laptop by then) but in the meantime, a practical one that seems a little bit uncovered by the world at large: how to make an iPhone ringtone from an mp3 file.

This how-to was prompted by Red Mum’s tweet earlier seeking guidance on it, frustrated that there’s an overwhelming amount of paid-for software out there that professes to do a job that any iPhone owner can already do for nothing – without having to download a ringtone from the iTunes store.

(I should add for the benefit of anyone with an AAC file – identified by the file extension .m4a – is already most of the way there, and you can skip down to Step 7.)

So – here goes nothing.

1. Open iTunes and find the file that you’re looking to convert. As a presumptive iPhone user, I can be fairly confident that you already have iTunes installed. If you’re one of the new that doesn’t, then I’m afraid the usual tactic of manipulating free software like Audacity doesn’t work (or, at least, not to my knowledge anyway) because it can’t export the file type you’ll need. You’re also going to need iTunes to put the ringtone on your phone in the first place, so you’re a little flummoxed here.

If the file you’re looking to convert isn’t in the iTunes library, simply play it in iTunes or drag it into the iTunes window and it’ll add.

2. Hit Control (or the Apple key) and comma to open the Preferences window. You’ll need to get in here to change the type of file that iTunes burns by default – more on this in a moment.

3. On the ‘General’ tab, after the ‘When You Insert a CD’ option, hit the ‘Import Settings’ button. This is the option where you tell iTunes what kind of audio files you want it to create when you rip a CD into your music library – you can, if you want, rip the tracks into a size-guzzling .wav file or into a more bog-standard .mp3 file.

This feature has more than one function, though, because you can also use it to convert files that are already in your library to other formats. So, if you wanted to make a .wav file out of an mp3 you already have (or, more probably, the other way around), you can use this iTunes feature to do it.

4. In the window that pops up, on the ‘Import Using:’ drop-down menu, choose ‘AAC Encoder’. This is the format that you’ll need to turn your file into before iTunes will recognise it as a ringtone.

As long as you choose AAC, you can leave the other settings as you like them. Click OK and exit from all the pop-ups until you’re back looking at the file you want to convert.

5. Right-click the file you want to use as a ringtone, and choose ‘Create AAC version’ (pictured right). The file will begin to convert into an AAC file. When it is done, you’ll hear a three-note jingle that you might recognise as the default SMS tone on the iPhone.

6. The converted version of your file will now appear in your library just below the original file. See it? It should look almost identical to the previous one. Now right-click the file and click ‘Show in Windows Explorer’  (or, ‘Show in Finder’ if you’re on a Mac). A window will pop up showing where the file is on your hard drive.

7. Rename the file extension from .m4a to .m4r. This is pretty much the only fundamental change you’ll be making to the file. In a Mac, the file extension should appear at the end of the filename by default. In Windows, if you just see the name of the song and not a file extension, then follow these instructions to display the extension.

(If you’re a little like me and can’t stand having an iTunes library with dead links in it, at this point you should go back into iTunes and delete the duplicate file from your music library because the file – songname.m4a – technically doesn’t exist any more.)

8. Double-click on the newly-renamed file and it will open in iTunes as a ringtone. Voila! Now that it’s in your iTunes library as a ringtone, you can drag it onto your iPhone or tell iTunes to sync it when you next plug your phone in.

As a housekeeping measure, you might want to go back into Preferences (again, Control and comma) and change the import default back into an MP3, which makes your files more universally usable. Of course, if you weren’t ripping MP3 files to begin with, then there’s no such problem.

Hope you find this useful.