Listening to: 12 Girls Band - Clocks
Now Reading: Lifehacker.com

Awards: The Consumerist's Top Products of 2007!

The spork only ranks at #7. It's a sad day in history.

Keywords: rant

Listening to: Bing Crosby & Ella Fitzgerald - Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer
Now Reading: James Sturm - America: God, Gold and Golems

Haven't posted in quite a while, mostly due to little happening in my corner of the planet. Read a few graphic novels and doodled a bit, that's it.

Anyhow, it's that time of the year again. Let the parties begin.

Mood

Energy

A few weeks back I got a set of Ubuntu CDs in the mail, but didn't get around to installing as a triple boot setup (Mac, Win and Linux) is a bit messier than a dual boot one (in which case Boot Camp would be the clean and fast choice.) Originally I'd started on it, only to duck out of it when the instructions on the onmac.net wiki became too much for little brainless me (though it does sum up the obstacles quite nicely.)

After clearing out the previous Windows install I had and restoring the size of the Mac side, however, I found another triple boot tutorial, and decided to give it another try. So after several hours of a little restoring and much waiting, finally got it working:



The red CD is the regular 32-bit user version, and the yellow for 64-bit boxes. The setup uses rEFIt for the menu where one can choose the OS to load just like other bootloaders. You could see the Win and Mac drive icons on the desktop shot.

I'm quite impressed with Ubuntu -- easy to navigate around and lots of little games preloaded (yes, one can't ever get enough of them. ) For another, it was able to recognise my tablet (not a Wacom, but a Taiwanese one) plug-and-play style, whereas even in Mac OS X I've had to install drivers for it, which I found after poking around the net for a bit. Haven't had much luck in the past with Linux and drivers, though to be fair they were mostly small versions of Linux, but the drivers issues are gradually improving, so I'll be keeping an eye as things progress. Later I'm hoping to add more programs, and spend the kind of quality time that people do with their boxes.

So on that note, what's on your box?

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Comments on the install process:

- Basically most of the steps in the McK/MacApper tutorial worked, though for whatever reason diskutil lists the Linux partition as "Microsoft Basic Data".

- Skipped the swap partition as instructed, but to proceed forward with the install you'll need to type in a path under mount point. Just typing in "/" worked for me, even if someone's going to come around and say it's a bad idea.

- As there was no 64-bit deb distro of rEFIt, I couldn't overwrite the GRUB settings (which might have some awful consequences eventually), and since the installer didn't notify about GRUB at all, there wasn't much else to be done about it. The only thing is that when I select Win from the main boot menu, I'd have to select it again in GRUB. There should be a way to load Windows instead of Ubuntu by default in there, but it's fine as-is, since I haven't used Windows as often lately.


Keywords: Mac Linux Ubuntu triple boot

A new version that's been rewritten and crunched into an app, so it'll no longer have to be run under the Script Editor. It's not pretty at all and could use quite a bit of cleaning, but at least it's functional. Keychain is on by default, but if you'd rather not use it, it's possible to disable it and enter your login info each time the app starts up.

Summary: Something that checks your iTunes on OS X for your currently playing music and sends it to the forum playlist. Unicode support by default.

To install: Set up Keychain Access (see below). Unzip and toss the app into a choice location. Please make sure the directory path does not contain spaces -- the "Applications" folder is a good place to put it.



Notes:
- Fixed random tracks going unnoticed
- "&" in tracks are now displayed as "and", but the entry will show in full
- If you quit iTunes, the app should quit as well within 20 s. In some cases if iTunes launches again, close it again and all should be well. (Easy way out: Force Quit.)
- To disable Keychain, right-click on the app and choose "Show Package Contents". In Contents > Resources, open uPrefs.py with a text editor and set enKeych to "False".

Keychain Access setup [screencap]
You can find Keychain Access in Applications > Utilities.
Click on the "+" button to add a new login.
Keychain item name: http://forum.aw8.net
Account name: (your forum name)
Password: (your forum password)

Source
Current version
Old AppleScript

Keywords: Mac Python AppleScript AWF

One of the things I realised after moving to Mac OS X in New Year's was having to do without the Now Playing feature on the forum (as AMIP seems to be Win-only). That was partly also the reason why, according to my profile, I've been listening to the same 15 songs for months (the other reason being I was too lazy to change the fake list).

Add some goofing time and from there, you can guess the rest: pulled together some preschool AppleScript to get song info from iTunes at intervals and send it off to the clouds via curl. One drawback with this script, though, is that as an app it would choke after about 3 songs, so it has to be run with the Script Editor (the AppleScript editor that comes with every install) and sits in the dock. That, and having no guarantees it wouldn't wipe out your drive. Otherwise, if you do Macs, feel free to try it out for whatever it's worth; just thought to share a workaround for using a good forum feature.


Summary
Some script that will check your iTunes every minute for the song currently playing and send it to your forum playlist. To install, just put your login info on your default keychain first, unzip the file and click on the music icon. When Script Editor launches, click Run, hide it and forget it.

Checking interval can be changed. Unicode support by default. Sends song changes only, so if you've been listening to the Spring act of Vivaldi's Seasons all night and nothing else in between, it'll only show up once on your playlist.

Get the script here

Keychain Access setup [screencap]
Keychain item name: http://forum.aw8.net
Account name: (your forum name)
Password: (your forum password)

Known issues:
- Ignores songs randomly, but rarely.
- Ignores multiple artist entries that are separated by "&". Probably a curl issue.

Special thanks to Vincent for putting up with my pestering, and TrashMan from Macscripter.net for the Keychain Access script.


Keywords: Mac AppleScript AWF