Musings on computers, music, travel and other such things.
fortune | twidge update actually works as expected. Add cron to the mix, and you can automate random utterances to appear on twitter when you are away from your computer or otherwise engaged.
More an amusement than anything useful, but it killed 5 minutes of my lunchtime.
(I wrote more about twidge here)
Various freely available MP3s by Portugal. The Man – I’d not heard of this band until about 3 hours ago, but am actually quite taken with them now. It’s American indie with a strong side order of psychedelia, and I think I could handle a whole album of this easily.
The Butcher’s Ballroom by Diablo Swing Orchestra – Another great name, and an album that I can only describe as a cross between Opera and thrash metal. Except it is a lot better than I’ve made it sound, and is the sort of thing that should be made into a musical.
Before We Stand… We Crawl by Hungry Lucy – Interesting trip hop, with a female singer who can sing, and some killer melodies to go with it.
All are freely available to download.
During my recent trip to London, I decided that I’d try and stay online as much as possible, whilst at the same time not paying for (or in fact stealing) an internet connection. It was actually a lot easier than I thought, and made me realise that if I lived in London I’d not really need a 3G dongle or an internet capable phone in order to conduct my online life on the move.
What I found out was largely as follows:
The hotel I was staying in advertised itself as having free wifi on the ground floor. It did, but the signal was no greater than 40%, and as I was on the 7th floor I had to come down to the bar to use it. This was fine, and I used this for my morning and evening email sessions.
There are lots of University buildings in London, some of whom subscribe to the JANET Roaming Service. As I’m a member of a participating University I can use their networks for free. This got me a connection on floor 7 of the hotel twice, and would have been an option in a couple of other places as well.
The rest of the time I generally used The Cloud, mostly in or around Pret A Manger stores. It’s possible to get free wifi in a fair few places (largely pubs and cafes), and my most productive session of the whole trip was the last hour outside Euston station where I got through all my home and work email with a near 100% signal.
So yes, I managed to stay up to date, and maintained Inbox Zero throughout the trip.
I’ve been after a command line based microblogging tool for ages. I think Twidge might be just what I need.
The syntax to make a post is as follows:
twidge update "whatever you want to post goes here"
And before you do your first update, just type twidge setup, which will then ask for your usename and password.
If you want to update identi.ca rather than twitter, then add the following line at the end of .twidgerc:
urlbase: http://identi.ca/api
And that’s all there is to it.
I’ve been trying out Suse Studio over the last couple of days. It’s a build service for livecds and software appliances, and it really is so easy to use that I think most non-technical users could get to grips with it. It’s invite only at present, but I got an invite just by asking (and I’m not exactly known for my love of the distro).
I’ve built a 300mb livecd with a very minimalistic Gnome install plus Dropbox, and it seems to do everything I want it to do. And it only took about 20 minutes in total to do.
I think this is something I will play with some more when I’m on holiday.
This guide has all the required info, and worked like a charm on my netbook running 8.04 and my laptop running 9.04 (although it was simpler than the guide suggests in both cases). I’ll hopefully write a more comprehensive guide at some point soon, because I think 3.1 is something that people should consider upgrading to.
I’m really not noticing the fact that I’m running 8.04 on my Dell Mini, largely because I’ve upgraded most of what I use regularly to later versions.
James Blackshaw is a London based guitarist who creates 12 string guitar and piano based instrumental soundscapes. I’d been meaning to check out his work for a while, but only got round to downloading this album yesterday (another case of needing to burn a few emusic credits quickly). Each of the five tracks is different, but they gel together quite nicely to make something that manages to be both melodic and experimental at the same time. He’s been mentioned in the same breath as a lot of guitar greats, but I’d actually throw Jim O’Rourke or one of the other Chicago scene improvisers into the mix, as this music makes me feel the same way Bad Timing did when I first heard it. This music does not need vocals, or lyrics, or drums. It just needs to be listened to with an open mind. I think I’ll certainly be checking out his extensive back catalogue over the next few weeks.
The nominations for this year’s Mercury Music Prize have been announced. Usually I have a fairly clear idea of who I think should win, but this year I’m torn between Florence & the Machine, Bat for Lashes and The Horrors. I’ve played all three to death this year, and I think all three artists really deserve a bit more acclaim and money. It also makes me want to check out the nominations I’ve not heard of, as generally I end up quite liking everything that gets nominated.
Something else I’ve stumbled upon today is an extension that allows me to post straight to my blog from OpenOffice.org. This post is largely an attempt to get it to work, so I’ll not say anything more than that for now.
This week I’ve been looking at a few OpenOffice.org extensions that might make my life easier. One that certainly will is the Sun Wiki Publisher. Basically it takes a document, logs in to a particular instance of Mediawiki, and converts that document into a wiki page (including table of contents, headings etc.). I’ve tried it with a couple of complicated documents and it did a fair job of converting them, and it is certainly something I will be looking at further at work this week, as I think it might solve a couple of long standing problems.