Tidying up
Posted by stephen on Thursday, 24th January, 2008 @ 12:19
Today I made this site my OpenID, via a delegation to myOpenID.com (OpenID delegation is a marvellous thing). So now I can login to a variety of sites as freakymousemats.com. Except that I noticed (as I half expected), that my OpenID was in fact www.freakymousemats.com/blog, as there was no root to the site, just a redirect to the blog.
My blog's always been my homepage. And the immediate redirect to /blog/ is a hangover from the days when the site was built in Plone and I couldn't make the blog software serve the root. But it seems a little unnecessary now, so a little Django URL rewiring and the blog is now at the root of the site (with /blog/ gracefully redirecting).
And finally, from reading around about t'modern interweb, the www prefix is considered a little redundant in this day and age. So a couple of template changes later, a reversing of a mod_rewrite rule and this site now sits at http://freakymousemats.com/. And thus my OpenID is elegant and beautiful. And hopefully my site isn't broken.
How I listen to the radio (or a lesson in unnecessary complexity)
Posted by stephen on Tuesday, 22nd January, 2008 @ 10:00
Lately I've noticed I have a bad habit whilst working at home of sitting on the sofa with my laptop in front of the TV with some rubbish on that occasionally distracts me from doing anything useful. I'm not sure why I do it, perhaps because I spend most of my day on my own, it's nice to have 'someone else in the room'.
I decided recently that it's time to get out of this habit, and I thought the easiest way might be to switch to a diet of Radio 2, as I do when I'm driving around during the day. It still gives me that sense of not being on my own, but without all the distracting visuals. So the question was, how do I listen to it? Actual FM radio seems a little too 20th century for my liking. And it doesn't help that it'd need a long aerial cable dangling out the back of my amp.
The obvious solution (to me) was to use my MythTV setup to listen to it through the AppleTV. Unfortunately, and inexplicably radio from DVB (Freeview) seems to be a bit broken in the current version of MythTV. I wasn't too disappointed, as Myth always had a habit of being a bit flakey about it, and running a process that routinely consumes more than 200Mb of RAM just to listen to the radio seemed like overkill.
So I started today (somewhat earlier than usual) listening to the live radio player from the BBC website. My problem with this though is it requires RealPlayer, which I'm not a big fan of, also making it tricky to listen to through the AppleTV. It also seems ridiculous to have a 64Kbit stream leaching my Internet bandwidth when my house is being bombarded by 4 higher quality copies of the signal (FM, DAB, DVB-T/Freeview, DVB-S/Sky).
My solution then? Remove one of my three DVB tuners from MythTV and hand it over to VLC and it's rather useful VideoLAN Manager. And with a tiny bit of configuration...
new Radio2 vod enabled setup Radio2 input "dvb/ts:adapter=0:frequency=842000000:bandwidth=8:guard=3" setup Radio2 option :program=18560
Now using VLC or QuickTime I can simply visit rtsp://halcyon:5554/Radio2 and listen to it on any computer on my network, streamed on demand. I could have multicasted it. But with wifi and dumb switches, it's a little wasteful. Having copied VLC.app to the AppleTV I can now SSH in to it to kick VLC off and listen to it through my amp. One day it'd be good to work out how to get the AppleTV to tune to it with it's built in QuickTime through the proper interface. Hmmm...
I love technology.
Django app in under 60 lines
Posted by stephen on Tuesday, 22nd January, 2008 @ 08:37
Proving that Django can do most of the work for you these days, the World's ugliest Django app (via) delivers a wiki app including page templates, private pages, comments and a nice little admin in a single file of fewer than 60 lines.
MacBook Air Mainboard
Posted by stephen on Saturday, 19th January, 2008 @ 19:49
I've not been able to find any pictures of the MacBook Air's mainboard online except for the keynote video itself, so I thought I'd take a screenshot and put it up on here. It's so tiny! How is that a whole (pretty fast) computer?!
Now I wish my Windows phone was 3G
Posted by stephen on Friday, 04th January, 2008 @ 01:19
