- Recent
- Popular
- Tags (0)
- Subscribers (1)
- Why social networks are lying bastards.November 17
-
You’ve seen it I’m sure. Myspace purports “a place for friends”, Bebo says it “is a social media network where friends share their lives and explore great entertainment” and Facebook says it “helps you connect and share with the people in your life.”
They all are lying. Granted it may be a lie of omission, but that’s a lie just the same. What they are forgetting to tell you is that they are little islands of popularity that are only as useful as the percentage of your friends that they have already tempted onto their bosom. Which means that most of us are constantly taunted to join up to one or more of them to connect to our friends, and we can’t shake the nagging feeling that we’re missing out on re-connecting with what’s-her-name, the cutie you snogged back in grade 12 and have been wondering about lately when the lights are low. And pretty soon my friends we have 2 or 3 or 12 different sites maintaining lists of our ‘friends’ with varying (infuriating in some cases) levels of overlap and omission.
Everyone claims the web 2.0 is all about communities and openness and sharing and blah blah blah lies. What we really have is a bunch of people who see what they think is a problem. And they have this grandiose idea of how to organize us and the stream of information we generate daily into useful and manageable pieces. Granted some of these apps work great, but the problem is that they all either seek to lock your entire online
- Edinburgh, London, and back in time to vote.November 4
-
What a whirlwind week, last Tuesday I flew from Rochester to Edinburgh to finally meet a friend from one of the IRC channels I frequent. So I landed early Wednesday morning and we spent some time wandering around Edinburgh. I can report in that in fact Haggis is actually pretty good, and in spite of what I’ve heard about the Guinness the USA gets being different from the real stuff, it’s really not.
Thursday morning we picked up the rental car, which was a pretty spiffy new Audi A4 Advant TDI (btw, the future is here folks, I got 42MPG in a wagon… gooo diesel) and promptly drove out of Edinburgh and headed south towards London. I admit that driving around the city was a bit of a white knuckle ride but once we got out on the A702 it was nothing but clear skies and beautiful countryside. We tossed on some awesome and classic tunes and bombed through the countryside zipping from classic English roadworks to classic English roadworks pausing only to eat shitty fast food at rest stops. We rolled into London at about 21:30 and checked into our hotel and flopped to sleep.
Friday we returned the rental, which taught me that London biker dudes (motor bike and pedal bike alike) have no fear at all and that the cars give exactly enough space to them and not a millimeter more. It was a bit harrowing but we made it through without any major problems. I am really glad we didn’t just fly or hop a train. After wandering around Camden a bit we scoped out the v
- twitterpy and lastfriendsOctober 21
-
I keep forgetting to write something about these guys. I wrote a pair of Python scripts to watch my Last.FM and Twitter friends and pop up a little bubble when something new happens.
There are Ubuntu packages available in my PPA over on Launchpad for both of these guys that should work just fine on 8.04, and hopefully will be updated to 8.10.
For those of you not using Ubuntu, my CVS repository has the scripts themselves that you are welcome to try out.
- Mutt and Google CalendarOctober 20
-
I’ve been meaning to throw this out there for a bit. I wrote a little python shim to connect mutt to Google Calendar. My particular use-case is as follows. I use fetchmail to connect to a Microsoft Exchange Server at work which delivers mail into an IMAP account that I check with mutt. Appointments and conference calls show up as .ics files attached to messages. I use Google Calendar connected to my BlackBerry to keep track of all the stuff I do so I need a quick and easy way to get those events out of mutt into my Google Calendar.
Enter ics-gcal.py.
I associate this script to the ics / vcs files and simply exec the attachment from within mutt. This adds it to my Google Calendar.
You can find the script in my CVS web repository.
I’d be super interested if anyone else finds this useful.
- Sirius Radio on my PS3? Yes Please!October 3
-
So it looks like the svn version of mediatomb (which will become 0.12.0) now supports streaming PCM audio to the PlayStation(R) 3! This is super good news. So I went and updated my Python shim between Sipie and Mediatomb to output PCM.
You can get mediatomb-sirius.py from my CVS repository by visiting this url:
http://bagend.ub3rgeek.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/misc-scripts/mediatomb-sirius.py
Once I have the config sorted out, I will post more.
Edit:
I got FLAC streaming working, and shot a quick video of it in action.
Showing off Mediatomb transcoding FLAC to the PlayStation 3 from Matthew Ernisse on Vimeo.Edit 2:
I got the sirius stuff working finally, had to overcome a few really annoying behaviours of all the bits involved, but it seems like it is working pretty well. You can head on over to the http://www.ub3rgeek.net/wp/sirius-on-the-playstation-3/ page for more details and another video.