David Carrington

Not exactly one of the “age old” problems, but an interesting morning challenge: GarageBand lets you stream audio music down from their site - but what if 10 people want to listen to that stream (using headphones) on the same network? VLC player and a PHP-generated playlist was the answer.

My PHP code does a few things:

1. Download all of the GarageBand “Genre” and “Chart” pages
2. Parse those pages for artist links
3. Download every artist’s XML podcast
4. Parse the podcasts for MP3 links
5. Dump the list of MP3s into an M3U playlist

Now what? Well we could all separately download the songs on the playlist and stream from GarageBand. However, that’s not geeky enough - so we’ve got it so Geoff is playing the music through VLC player - and has configured that to broadcast out across the network.

The only annoying problem is that I have to hit play each time a new track comes up as the connection is lost - I’m sure we’ll sort that out.

My Firefox has just told me to update my copy of 2.0.0.3 to 2.0.0.2… how helpful of it.

Thank you, GPSBabel, for letting me convert my list of local geocaches to Google Earth KML format:

gpsbabel -i geo -f geocaches.loc -o kml -F geocaches.kml

Jabber + Google Talk + MSN + ICQ = my preferred IM

1. Get a Jabber client
2. Get various accounts (Google, MSN, ICQ, AIM… etc)
3. Configure your Jabber client to connect to Google Talk
4. Find a jabber server with an MSN jabber transport - Open Jabber Servers
5. Talk to a few people
6. Check out your chat history from within the Google Mail interface

Being able to do this is definitely the turning point for me to switch over from using Gaim to Jabber. I personally use Miranda IM to connect to Jabber, but only until I find one that suits me better.

Now all my contacts (with aliases and groups) and chat history is all stored on Google’s servers, which means I can access the exact same contact list from anywhere with an internet connection.