I figured out why my Beefalo loves my new laptops and wants to crawl inside of them. The screens on these systems are incredibly bright -- much brighter than any laptop I've had before (brighter than most CRTs I've seen). It's bright enough that she can finally see things on the CRT -- while wrapping things up here to go visit my mom, I saw her pawing at the scrolling text on the screensaver, seeming disappointed when it moved off the screen, and excited again when it came back on the other side. It's kinda cute now that I understand it.

I finished with the program to intelligently copy tags to my neuros. It was much harder than I initially thought -- downgrading Unicode filenames gracefully to ascii7 is not an easy task. Perl does its best to make it easy, but there are a lot of gotchas. The most puzzling gotcha was a cyrillic character that I had accidentally pasted into the filenames of some of my Russian music that was invisible. I'm not sure if Cyrillic has its own space character, if it was something I didn't have the needed font to display, or something else, but it took a lot of debugging to figure it out. The software appears to work though, meaning that I'll have pretty much all of my music collection on my neuros now (apart from some of the Chinese and Japanese music, which won't so easily transliterate down into ascii7). I hope the next Neuros will support Unicode.