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Posts Tagged FTW

Linux FTW: Using Virtualbox with an Existing Windows Partition

Jan 27

Posted by Aaron in Geekery | 21 Comments

The recursion might blow your mind.

Last week, a friend of mine needed me to do an audio file conversion, but the app that I use is installed on my windows partition. I really don’t ever boot into Windows unless I have a good reason for it — I’m much happier tooling around in Linux — there’s just something satisfying and comfortable about being able to pop open a shell at any time.

Anyways – it got me thinking: I’ve booted into a Windows XP image,  why can’t I use VirtualBox to boot from a whole partition? Surely that is possible…

Tonight I finally got to play with it. And as you can see from the image here, I got success. :)

It’s a little challenging, but it’s doable. I had to spend some time to iron out the kinks, but you can reap the benefits! Read the rest of this entry »

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Linux FTW: Quake-style terminal window

Jan 22

Posted by Aaron in Geekery | 6 Comments

Long ago (mid-90’s), there was a revolutionary 3-d first-person-shooter game called “Quake”, made by id Software, the same people that made DooM a few years before.

Quake had this really cool feature where you could press the ~ key at anytime during the game and a terminal window would drop down from the top of the screen. This terminal screen could be used for anything from chatting to changing maps and more. It was sweet.

Since then, there have been many attempts at replicating the functionality in both Mac and Linux environments, where it is still common to use a terminal window with some regularity.

One such software package, Guake, has become a personal favorite of mine. It’s very simple; no bells or whistles other than the ability to adjust the Opacity. My only beef with it was simply that the terminal would just pop up on the screen rather than drop down from the top. Totally superficial — but what’s the point of using an open-source OS if you can’t customize it to do exactly what you want?

Last night, I figured out how to do it. And it’s glorious (video demo after the jump). Read the rest of this entry »

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Linux FTW: Synching Rhythmbox “Now Playing” with the Web

Oct 5

Posted by Aaron in Geekery, Software Development | 4 Comments

A couple weeks ago, my wife introduced me to Blip.fm — that’s a whole blog post in itself, as I’ve got mixed feelings about it.

rhythmboxNevertheless, it made me curious about ways I could integrate blip.fm or something similar into my awesometop. I currently use Rhythmbox Music Player to play all of my music; It’s kind of like iTunes — in fact the only noticeable difference I’ve found is that when you import a CD you can’t select specific songs: it’s just all or nothing.

One thing that it does have that I don’t think iTunes has is the ability to load plugins (and write your own!!!).  A plugin that caught my eye was the “Rhythm for Web” plugin, which takes the currently playing song data and sends it off to a URL of your choosing. The destination URL can be a widget, a website, an API call, whatever. The author’s website provides sample code to use, but I wanted to do it a little differently than he did. I also made some slight modifications to the plugin itself, in order to make it more clean.

To install the plugin, unzip the tar.gz file to ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins/RhythmToWeb/. Then load Rhythmbox, click on “Edit”->”Plugins” and locate “RhythmToWeb” in the list. Click on “Configure”.

For “URL” type in the URL of where you will have your handler script. For “Secret” type in any password or string of characters you want to use  (1two3four5six would work, for example, or perhaps your birthdate and name — try to not use spaces of #’s.). Make sure you jot it down for a moment, because you’ll need to use it in the server script below. (Leave “interval” at 2… I’ve never had reason to change that.)

Felix, the original author, liked my “multiple song” tracking and has updated his code to use it.  Nice work!

My PHP server-side code is below.

Read the rest of this entry »

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The Ten-Year Growth

May 7

Posted by Aaron in Academia, Musings | 5 Comments

In a week and a half, I am graduating.

I started my undergrad, back in Pennsylvania, when I was 18 and I am now 28.  I am what admissions refers to as a “non-traditional student.”

I’ve been to five institutions, across three states, changed majors six times, and this will be my second and third college degrees: first was an A.S. in Accounting, the second and third are A.S. in Chemistry and B.A. in Natural Science & Math.

This is really exciting for me, as I’m sure you can imagine.  Not only because it’s my undergrad, or because it’s been ten years in the making, or even just because commencement will probably be really exciting — it’s just the whole idea of finishing something. Read the rest of this entry »

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