Dumping Grounds

I think I have already posted that I sold my Powerbook. I was using it as a front end for MythTV in my living room, and it had been a source of some level of frustration. Intermittent lock ups, pauses, and the ability to crash the back end (which was upstairs) all had me spending far too much time fiddling and troubleshooting my setup.

Well, now, it’s gone.

I have been giving some thought to possibly using some of the money that I got from the Powerbook to buy a Mini, which would fit the bill of DVR front end MUCH better than the Powerbook did.

Then it occurred to me that I had a really old G4 Mac upstairs that had been unhooked for maybe two years. I wonder if it could run MythTV. Heck, at first, I wondered if it even had DVI. Yes, it had DVI, and amazingly, it runs MythTV like a champ. I am truly amazed. It’s digitized video from analog cable… no one is going to mistake it for HDTV… but it looks as good as my TiVo.

I also (since the G4 has no wireless capability) moved my AirPort Express downstairs so I could plug the G4 directly into it. This was, I was sure, going to degrade my wireless network considerably, as I used the AirPort as a repeater in the middle of my house.

I could not have been more wrong. Moving the AirPort Express downstairs was the perfect move. Not a single crash so far while streaming Myth video. There are occassional pauses, but these are usually when the Mac is trying to do something in the background (This is one slow computer, 400MHz, and Myth is all it can do at one time) and right at the very beginning of a video, while it is still caching.

All in all, I’m thrilled. I have the same capabilites downstairs I had before (with the exception of the power to run games… which I have never done, not even once) and I have a bit more green in my pocket. Not to mention that I have one less computer upstairs gathering dust (which is almost like throwing something away).

Right?

And I posted this entry from my living room couch with the wireless keyboard I already owned, using my LCD TV as a display. You may not be impressed, but I think it’s very, very cool.

Not to mention, it has rained ALL day.

It has been a very good day.

In my last entry, I bemoaned the fact that a $189 PC I bought at Fry’s this weekend was faster than my 2 year old Powerbook (which cost considerably more than $189).

I may have been hasty.

While it is true that the PC runs my Craps program written in Ruby faster than my Mac… I wasn’t taking into consideration some other items, namely, how long it took to start Ruby in the first place. What looked like a 30% speed advantage for the PC, turns out to be closer to a 50% disadvantage.

When running the WEBrick webserver for testing Rails applications, suddenly the Powerbook is almost 10 TIMES faster. Serving the same application.

This difference is almost assuredly caused by memory (slow hardware, bad OS management, and/or lack of it). Plus the hard drive is slow, and the network interface is probably not the best.

I could fix all those things, but then it wouldn’t be a $189 PC, now would it? (As a matter of fact, I already put 512MB of RAM in it, making it a $228.99 PC) I don’t plan to add anything else to it. Continuing with my stated goal of bashing Windows at every available opportunity… I would like to point out that my 3 year old AMD machine (with LESS memory than the Windows PC) blows it out of the water while running Gentoo Linux. The difference may be a little in the hardware (the AMD was a nice machine 3 years ago, while the new one is CRAP, but current), but I think that most of it is in the operating system it’s running. I have not had a machine running Windows in almost two years… and as far as I can tell, I haven’t been missing anything.

All in all, not a bad showing for a 2 year old portable vs. a current purchase, no matter how cheap.

Courtesy of Moebius we have Mac OS X icons of everybody’s favorite Firefly class freighter. Click the image for your very own copy.

No, I don’t know how to make them work on Windows. If you convert them, I’ll post them.

BlogTunes v.7 is currently running on my machine. you will notice that the “Currently Playing” and “Recently Tracks” parts of my sidebar have sprung back to life.

Every single feature that I intend to release with is in, except customizable HTML templates. Right now, it outputs one format only… the one I want for DG.

I am 90% sure that I will actually send notifications to the Mac download sites sooner or later. Probably after it’s much better tested, and after the re-do of the DG look and feel.

I’ll be able to get the customizable templates done this weekend, and then I will quietly make it available on the site.

I have learned a TON about OS X programming, Cocoa, and Objective C… and just generally had a lot of fun playing with it. I’m sure I will continue to add features, and write more tools in the future.

No, I will not port it to Windows. Don’t have the equipment, the software, or the interest.

There are not many of you that read this site on Macs, but for those few, I figured I would post the application I have been working on. I’ll admit, it doesn’t do a whole lot yet, but the plan is that it will drive one of those “what I am listening to right now…” sections on blogs. (Yeah, I know, mine has not been updated in MONTHS.)

Well, the main reason was I didn’t like how any of them worked. The biggest problem was that they posted to the website immediately when iTunes played a new song. Which means all that odd crap that I skipped got posted to the site anyway. That just drove me nuts. So I decided to see if I could write my own Cocoa app. This is the first result.

So what does it do so far?

• It installs a menu in the upper right, near your system clock.
  
• It has a tabbed preferences box, and they save from session to session. Currently, only the “Polling” tab has any useful preferences.
  
• As you listen to iTunes, the menu will build a list of the recent tracks you have listened to. The number of songs you would like to track, how often you want BlogTunes to check, and how log you have to listen to a song before it gets added can all be adjusted.
• It provides on screen notifications of track changes via Growl.
• If you select any song from the menu, iTunes will go back and play that song.

What is it going to do (hopefully soon)?

• Save text files of what you are listening to (with user adjustable templates) for uploading to your website.
• Add images to the Growl notifications, and maybe even have it upload image artwork for display on your website.

With the warning that this is very rough software, you are welcome to download it and play with it. Bug reports would be appreciated, but I’m not really ready for feature requests yet. When I get done with the list of things I want it to do, then I’ll start adding other folks’ ideas.

Suggestions to make the preferences more clear (labeling, layout, etc.) are certainly welcome. If anyone wants to draw an icon (the one I’m using now is just taken out of some library I downloaded) that would also be appreciated.

Download BlogTunes.zip, 68K. (Requires OS X 10.2 or greater)

UPDATE I have a newer version that now displays the album artwork in the Growl notifications. The menu itself is much more organized and attractive, and there is now a third preferences panel where you can specify the name of the text files that get written (for uploading to your website). (Another update while on a plane to Tampa) It’s now writing those text files out to the drive as formatted HTML, as soon as I can get it uploading (and a prefs panel done so you can specify where to upload) I’ll make a new copy available.