As a 26 year old black man in America that has never been arrested, I have got to be in the clear of some dumb shit that could happen. I’m too old to pick up a new drug habit, and too old for petty crime. Happy birthday to me. I found a plugin to ichat that makes it much more usable especially in regards to log viewing. Its called chax.
Author Archives: Brandon
ID3 Tags, and album artwork with iTunes.
I am using iTunes more often now. I like the album art view, it gives me the feeling of flicking through my old mans record collection. The only thing that annoys me is how the automatic album art retrieval works. It uses the id3 tags, particularly the album to make a match based on the albums in iTunes extensive library. I have found this to be about 60% effective. I was able to get about 90% of album art automatically input into itunes using the following procedure and software. I will describe them first. iEatBrainz (Acoustic Music Tagger) Uses MusicBrainz (musicbrainz.org) to fix your mp3 and aac tags in iTunes after they’ve been ripped using acoustic matchings. Album art thingy runs in the background, downloading artwork and lyrics for your iTunes collection and saving them into iTunes automatically.
- Download and install ieatbrainz.
- Download and install album art thingy.
- Run ieatbrainz against the songs lacking in id3 tags.
- Start album art thingy, then start itunes.
- 1st select all of your songs and have itunes try automatically.
- For those stragglers, play them and album art thingy should do it.
- Between the two sources if nothing is still found, chances are the id3 tag is wrong. You can edit them via iTunes.
Got fired. Moved on. Made a widget.
I got fired. It was painless; like a girlfriend that has gotten fat breaking up with you just before you started gnawing your arm off to get away. Thats life. I made a sample widget using dashcode that basically just pulls the rss feed from slashdot. Its big as hell, and here it is. Enjoy. Oh, and I apparently have a family history of high cholesterol so I am scheduling daily visits to the gym. I may as well get in fantastic shape with all this newfound free time. ** No more cell phone, thank god. ** I feel like I just got a new laptop.
Opening reading, writing and closing files in C.
I have learned a little more C. Now I know how to open/modify/close files using fopen, fclose, fprintf, and fgets. Als always sample code and universal binaries are available here. Todays programs are called openandreadfile.c, and openandwritefile.c. I am looking into using libosip, and libexosip2 to write a sip client that only a geek would love. Beyond SIP I have enough things that I want to do with the language to keep me going for quite some time, embedded development in particular. This is fun.
How to make a simple universal binary; and other things learned about gcc
Although this is not my first time around the block regarding gcc, I have never gone much further than editing makefiles, and use flags under gentoo. Here is what I learned today; I am writing it down in the hopes that I will not have to learn these things again.
1. gcc, the Free Software Foundation’s C compiler, does not comply with the ISO/ANSI standard unless you include the -pedantic command line switch. (-ansi just turns off various GNU extensions.)
2. To get the full effect of the built-in error-checking, you need to use -O along with -Wwhatever. I recommend using -Wall -O until you feel you know C, then you should use whatever additional -W switches you feel are appropriate. The -O switch has to do with optimizing code but it also enables checking for uninitialized variables.
3. To make a universal binary that will run on my laptop + my home ppc based macs I have to use “-arch i386 -arch ppc”
Final: I am compiling now using “gcc -pedantic -Wall -O -arch i386 -arch ppc filename.c -o filename” -Peace-
Two things; openstreetmap.org, and learning C.
I discovered opensetreetmap.org a few days ago while reading a post in the openmoko mailing list. and to quote the project page “OpenStreetMap is a project aimed squarely at creating and providing free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them. The project was started because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive or unexpected ways.” I am sure I could come up with something using self gathered data and maybe the google maps api. That leads me to my second point. Its about time that I learned C, so this weekend I am doing nothing but that. I am going to read and go through every online example I can find, and post my progress here so I can tell the world what I have learned.
A real open source cell phone
Finally a real open source cell phone. No more of that well our phone runs linux, but you can’t touch anything crap. The FIC manufactured Neo1973 runs linux and uses the apt style ipkg package manager.
Hardware specs include…
- 120.7 x 62 x 18.5 (mm)
- 2.8″ VGA (480×640) TFT Screen
- Samsung s3c2410 SoC
- Global Locate AGPS chip
- Ti GPRS (2.5G not EDGE)
- Unpowered USB 1.1
- Touchscreen
- micro-sd slot
- 2.5mm audio jack
- 2 buttons
- 1200 mAh battery (charged over USB)
- 128 MB SDRAM
- 64 MB NAND Flash
- bluetooth – yeah…
and software includes
- Dialer
- Contacts
- Application Manager
- Calendar
Thats just the basics for now but I for one am all over this. There is information at openembedded.org on porting your apps. I for one am thinking softphone/ SIP client. Something lightweight that has already been proven to work on another embedded platform like minisip perhaps. If anyone wants to help I will provide a free SIP account for testing. How does agps work? Will I be able to develop a google maps/ agps mashup as a navigational system solution? Will batman be juiced by the joker and his squad of jolly henchmen?
I need to remember to fix all of my id3 tags
I can use ieatbrainz or find a linux eq.
After much review…
I still want an iphone. I want one with sprint/netxtel/clearwire/anydamnbody wimax, and I damn sure had better be able to use it as a bluetooth modem with my mbpro. Oh and one more thing I need a terminal application so I can ssh into things and fix/break them. In fact I would imagine anyone in the enterprise needs that. Well, that and a vnc/citrix/windows terminal services/ remote desktop client. What do you say apple. Hook a brotha up.
I am using rsync.net for backups now.
I was using the included backup application that came with OS X, and their online .mac backup solution, but now that my .mac subscription is dead and done, I have decided to go with rsync.net for those few files that I absolutely cannot lose. For just under $6 US a month I get 3 GB of offsite storage that I can access via any of the ssh flavors (ssh/scp/sftp), rsync, or my personal favorite rsync over ssh. It was really easy. After I signed up I just put my public key up, then ran something like…
rsync -azvrpg –progress -e ssh backup [email protected]:/username/dir
This basically says sync the directory named backup on this machine with a directory of the same name inside of /username/dir on the machine myserver.rsync.net, and oh yeah use the lovely encryption that ssh affords us. I’ll probably make a cron to do this for me once a day/week tomorrow.