So, Here’s my first blog post since I’ve gotten back from camp. Here’s a little logic puzzle.
You are a farmer that needs to transfer one cow, one bail of hay, and one alligator across a river in a boat that can only carry yourself and one item. How can you move all of the items across the river without leaving any item alone that will eat another (alligator eats cow; cow eats hay). There is one solution to the problem. Give it a shot.
Answer in three days
Hello everyone. This blog entry is all about pipes. Yahoo! has recently released a service at pipes.yahoo.com which allows you to stream information like RSS feeds to one source. If you look in the right sidebar of this blog, you’ll see a “Family of Bloggers” block. This is created by making a pipe that gathers the five most recent posts from all of the Liske family’s blogs and puts them in one place, sorting them by date and time. It sounds daunting, but by using the Yahoo! service’s Drag-and-Drop interface, it’s VERY easy to do.
Here’s what the “Family of Bloggers” pipe “source” looks like:
Basically what’s being done here is, I gathered the RSS feeds from all of the blogs (Wordpress has the RSS feature built in), run the OUTPUT of the feeds to a “Union”, which joins them all together, then that runs to a sorter, which sorts them by date, then I cut it down to 5 entries only, then it’s output as a final feed. This is a relatively easy pipe to follow as it’s very linear. Using this, you can feed YouTube, Flickr, and Google and incorporate that in your site. Once you’re done, you can insert the final feed into your blog, MySpace, and whatnot.
As a final note, all you need to use pipes.yahoo.com is a Yahoo! ID, which is free.
I’ve decided that I may move this blog. I’m unsure right now. The new location will be http://tech-works.info/, and I will keep them in sync until I make a final decision. Until then, you can still check back here for all the techy goodness.
Actually, maybe Teen Tech’s kind of cat can solve the thing in under a minute …
Since a simple Creative Writing assignment (more on that tomorrow), I’ve been increasingly more interested in CG, or Computer Graphics. I use a program called Blender which is found at Blender3d.org. I just got done making some “Proof of Concept” images to test the Reflectivity and Transparency functions. I’ll show you the Before shot where it’s just the wireframe, and the after shot where it’s rendered.
Before:
After:
What does every teen do? Go to school. And what does every teen use to wake up? Either a radio alarm that plays anything you want as long as its static, or a loud, obnoxious BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ until you throw it out the window. How can you save money on broken alarm clocks which can add up after a while? Use your computer to play your favorite song at the time you need to wake up. Who would have thought of that? You’ve got a computer in your room that is turned on 24/7, so it’s available, and you’ve also got an alarm that is on 24/7 that is annoying. Throw the alarm out the window once and for all and use your computer.
I’ve split this guide into two portions. The first is for all of you Windows users out there, and the second part is for all of you Linux users out there.
Windows
Windows is quite simple to get set up as a fully working alarm clock. All you need is your favorite music playing software. I prefer to use WinAmp because it’s small, and has a few other options that you can use (streaming to other computers to wake up the whole house for instance 
), but you can use others, such as iTunes. Next, you need a playlist file, which we will use a .M3U file, which is basically just a list of songs, but it also plays with iTunes (I have not tested it with Windows Media Player). This file is just a simple text file that lists the songs you want played (everything must be in the same “folder” for this to work without jumping through too many hoops). Finally, you need your volume up. Not loud enough that it wakes up the people three doors down (no pun intended) from you, but lound enough to get you awake and into your usual routine.
Step 1:
Collect your music. It doesn’t matter where you get it from, as long as whatever music player your using can play it (as a rule of thumb, just stick with MP3s).
Step 2:
Build your .M3U playlist file. Using “Notepad” (under “Accessories” in the start menu), it creates a pure text file without any formatting that Microsoft Word or Wordpad will put in it.
Here’s the look of the .M3U file:
#EXTM3U
song1.mp3
song2.mp3
song3.mp3
and so on.mp3
Just save this as “alarm.m3u” to wherever your music is saved.
Step 3:
Create a “batch” file that will start your playlist. A batch file is simple in this respect. Run a single command that opens and starts playing your playlist automatically. Save this as “alarm.bat” in the same place as your playlist file.
Here’s what your batch file should look like:
start alarm.m3u
And that’s it for the file portion of the alarm clock.
Step 4:
Create a “Scheduled Task” to start the batch file at the desired time. Under the “Control Panel”, there is an “applet” called “Scheduled Tasks.” Create a new task, and where it asks for the program to run “Browse” to the “alarm.bat” file that we created earlier. Set the time, and you have yourself a custom alarm clock.
Note:
If you set your music player to shuffle, it won’t start with the same song every morning.
Linux
The Linux part of this guide will focus on using Ubuntu Linux (7.10 Gutsy Gibbon) using Rhythmbox as the media player.
Step 1:
In rhythm box, drag and drop your selected music in, and that takes care of the playlist portion of the alarm.
Step 2:
Set up two (2) “cron” jobs. Cron is a program that runs in the background that checks once a minute to see if any events need to be executed. The first one opens Rhythmbox and the second one actually plays the music. If you try to do them at the same time, it won’t work because it will try to play before the player is finished opening. So, during the scheduling portion, set the open event before the play one and you won’t run into any issues.
Here’s what the two Cron events look like:
1:
export DISPLAY=:0 && rhythmbox-client
2:
export DISPLAY=:0 && rhythmbox-client –play
To set these up, start up “Kcron” found under “Applications” -> “System Tools”. Create and schedule the events in that order, and you now have a working alarm clock that runs Linux.
I hope this helps you in your quest for a more alarming alarm clock. If you have questions, just post them here.
OK,
So, most people that know me, know that I am a linux advocate. I finally did yesterday what I’ve wanted to do for a long time. Wipe Windows from my computer and Install Linux. I’ve been away the past week in South Carolina visiting family, and when I was away, two discs came in the mail from Ubuntu (a popular distribution of linux). Ubuntu is free and will always be free, all you have to do is go to their website, request discs, and they’ll ship them to you free of charge no matter how many you want. I first tried the Live CD where it runs everything off of the CD which doesn’t harm what you have installed, so I could see if it detected all of my hardware. It did. It found my wireless network, sound, and graphics drivers which are the main components people have problems with when it comes to a full linux integration. I then proceeded to back up all of my files, and installed Ubuntu. The whole install took MAYBE 20 minutes. I was highly impressed. A Windows XP install takes about an hour if you do a quick format and Vista takes about 2-3 years. This installed my new Operating System, formatted my Harddrive, and set up my user account in 20 minutes. When I started up, I was greeted by the Ubuntu login screen and was able to log in, which I might add is very fast.
There was a singular glitch in the system, and that was with the sound. Whenever a sound was playing, whether it’s music or video, a static was emitted that drowned out the sound. The solution was quick and easy once I figured out what it was. The computer was trying to output digital sound through an analog sound card. It’s like water and oil, it just doesn’t mix. The fix was to uncheck a single box in the sound’s control panel. Problem solved. I can now watch Rubik’s cube videos without annoying static. I was able to install my Steam (www.steampowered.com) games using WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) which is a Windows program emulator, so I’m still able to game with my new system.
Most people are familiar or have heard about the system called Beryl (a.k.a. Compiz), where the desktops can be turned into a cube (if you haven’t heard of it, you have now ). I installed this subsystem without a glitch, and was up and running without even restarting the computer.
Here’s some screenshots for you all to be jealous at because Windows simply isn’t cool enough:
(Beryl Cube System)
(Rain Desktop Effect)
‘Teen Tech’ scarfs down a piece of cherry pie at today’s Easter Dinner.
Photo by Dad, aka ’Luna Pier Cook’.
Well,
I got a new job. A tech-related job which is exactly what I was after. It’s for http://www.supportspace.com doing on the fly online tech-support for random people. My favorite part of the job is that there is such a variety of tech issues that people get online with. One moment I could be fixing someone’s email and the next, a printer problem. It’s great. I like variety.
1) I get completely and utterly annoyed. I may start to yell and scream. Virus = Bad, and I got one.
2) I go all bounty hunter on the little pest. I start going through system logs, look at running processes, go through the startup objects on the computer looking for anything out of the ordinary and DELETE it. This phase may require going into Safe Mode (F8 at startup).
3) If all else fails, I go to my tools that I keep locked in a vault for safekeeping, because nowadays, the only way to keep any software, data, and random bits of information safe is to keep it as far away from a computer as possible. At this point, I’m ready to throw the PC out the window and run over it with a car, and I do have experience in running things over.
Well, I’ve got a virus right now. I not nice one that pops up a balloon notification in the lower right of the screen saying “Your computer is infected!” (you can’t forget the exclamation point. It makes it all better!) and it wants me to download some more software, which is probably a virus itself to “get rid” of it, when actually it lies dormant in the far depths of my hard drive.
Well, Off I go to fix this blasted thing.
