posts from 2006.02

I spent much of this weekend configuring amaroK, a music player/organizer recommended to me by Rob.

Here’s a screenshot (crummily scaled ‘cuz I’m lazy – click for less scaling):

The thing that triggered all this is that I was sick and tired of the way gkrellmms kept crashing while I played Internet radio stations, and would take out both xmms and gkrellm in the process. I decided I wasn’t going to take it anymore, and since just the other day Rob was crowing about amaroK, I figured I’d try that.

amaroK gives you a good way to search for your music, but only if the ID3 tags are correct. It offers a way to look up track info on MusicBrainz, but I found that only worked about 25% of the time for me, so it wasn’t that big a help. Manually updating so many tracks is what took me so long in setting this up (I keep finding other tracks that have wrong info, so I suppose I’m still not done). Actually, amaroK offers a comparatively nice way to update track info, especially for song genre, which in turn makes my pod! more useful. As you can see in the screenshot above, amaroK can also download album covers, which is nice eye candy (though not particularly useful). Unfortunately, it seems to get this wrong about 10% of the time, and I end up listening to Bat Boy and seeing Beauty and the Beast (I’m not even joking, there). Still, for the times that it works, it’s pretty.

As amaroK scripts (what you and I might call plugins) seem to only work never, I found no love with the provided alarm script. As I use my mp3 player to wke me up in the morning, this was rather important; so I compensated with perl:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

$ENV{DISPLAY} = ":0.0";

# dcop command
my $dcop = "/usr/bin/dcop";
# amaroK binary
my $amarok = "/usr/bin/amarok";
# aumix binary
my $aumix = "/usr/bin/aumix";
# volume to play at
my $vol = '39';

my $debug = 0;

# first; ensure that amarok is running, if it isn't running, run it
my $testPlaying = `$dcop amarok player isPlaying`;
if (($? > 0) || ($testPlaying =~ /call failed/) || ($testPlaying =~ /^Error/)) { # not running
	($debug > 0) and print "amaroK not running; starting\n";
	`$amarok &`;
}
elsif ($testPlaying =~ /true/) { # running, but already playing
	($debug > 0) and print "amaroK already playing; exiting\n";
	exit 0;
}

($debug > 0) and print "amaroK not playing\n";

# ensure that the volume is at a reasonable level
`$aumix -v$vol`;

# select random music to play
`$dcop amarok playlist clearPlaylist`;
`$dcop amarok playlist repopulate`;
#`$dcop amarok playlist shufflePlaylist`;

# if we're going too fast, amaroK will try to play before the playlist is
# populated
sleep 2;

# start playing!
`$dcop amarok player play`;

exit 0;

and cron:

# alarm clock
# for work, every weekday
0 7 * * mon-fri /home/tekniklr/mystuff/programs/amarok_alarm.pl >/dev/null 2>&1
# for the other odd days when I have to get up
#0 10 * * sat /home/tekniklr/mystuff/programs/amarok_alarm.pl >/dev/null 2>&1


So far, I like amaroK okay, but it has some problems (besides the ones I mentioned earlier). For one, when I first used it, it crashed every 10 minutes. I fixed that by using the gstreamer output engine instead of xine, and by ensuring that the databse was SQLite instead of MySQL. For two, it’s kinda slow to decide to actually stop playing. For three, though it has a nice freedesktop compliant tray icon, it doesn’t actually hide when you minimize it in Fluxbox, unless you right click on the icon and minimize it from there (that one’s probably not the amaroK people’s problem, admittedly). And for four, whenever you are messing around in any other tab, it will jump you back to the ‘Current’ tab whenever a new song starts, which is really distracting (and possibly dangerous).

As it’s still young software, I’m hoping it grows out of this stuff in the future. Until then, it’s still kinda fun (and using cron as an alarm makes me 1337), and at least I’ve finally given a good portion of my music correct ID3 tags.

I swiped this from Erin. I think it’s rather accurate in terms of my personality, but I wonder how inaccurate it really is for anyone else :)

happicow and Peter can probably better attest to the veracity of this.

And just for the record (see comic, below), I do shop at X-mart (but we call it Target, here). I’m consistently surprised by just how much cool stuff they have (though I admit the thrift store is oftentimes cooler!) Though I have to admit, out of all the people I know, if anyone were to have a velvet-lined toolbox, it would be me.

the Romantic Test finished!

you chose BY – your Enneagram type is FOUR. “I am unique” Romantics have sensitive feelings and are warm and perceptive. How to Get Along with Me Give me plenty of compliments. They mean a lot to me. Be a supportive friend or partner. Help me to learn to love and value myself. Respect me for my special gifts of intuition and vision. Though I don’t always want to be cheered up when I’m feeling melancholy, I sometimes like to have someone lighten me up a little. Don’t tell me I’m too sensitive or that I’m overreacting! What I Like About Being a Four my ability to find meaning in life and to experience feeling at a deep level my ability to establish warm connections with people admiring what is noble, truthful, and beautiful in life my creativity, intuition, and sense of humor being unique and being seen as unique by others having aesthetic sensibilities being able to easily pick up the feelings of people around me What’s Hard About Being a Four experiencing dark moods of emptiness and despair feelings of self-hatred and shame; believing I don’t deserve to be loved feeling guilty when I disappoint people feeling hurt or attacked when someone misundertands me expecting too much from myself and life fearing being abandoned obsessing over resentments longing for what I don’t have Fours as Children Often have active imaginations: play creatively alone or organize playmates in original games are very sensitive feel that they don’t fit in believe they are missing something that other people have attach themselves to idealized teachers, heroes, artists, etc. become antiauthoritarian or rebellious when criticized or not understood feel lonely or abandoned (perhaps as a result of a death or their parents’ divorce) Fours as Parents help their children become who they really are support their children’s creativity and originality are good at helping their children get in touch with their feelings are sometimes overly critical or overly protective are usually very good with children if not too self-absorbed Renee Baron & Elizabeth Wagele The Enneagram Made Easy Discover the 9 Types of People HarperSanFrancisco, 1994, 161 pages You are not completely happy with the result?! You chose BY Would you rather have chosen: AY (EIGHT) CY (SIX) BX (NINE) BZ (FIVE)

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 28% on ABC You scored higher than 45% on XYZ

Link: The Quick and Painless ENNEAGRAM Test written by felk on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Last night, I had a dream.

In this dream, I went to a museum with some friends, some of whom actually exist. In this museum, they had at least two hippopotamuses. Each one was the size of a T-rex. One of them was lying down, with it’s butt pointed at the walkway. It farted on me, even though I tried to dive out of the way (I saw it coming). I couldn’t successfully dodge, and was suddenly caught in a 40mph stiff breeze, which didn’t smell in the slightest, but was still gross. Also, cold (?).

My dream guide contains neither hippopotomuses or flatulence, but on museums it has this to say:

To dream of a museum, denotes that you will pass through many and varied scenes in striving for what appears your rightful position [sic]. You will acquire useful knowledge, which will stand you in better light than if you had pursued the usual course of learning. If the museum is distasteful you will have many causes for vexation.

I think the butt-tornado qualifies as distasteful, so I can only assume that all of this refers to (if anything) me learning Witango at my