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Posts Tagged Instructable

Syndicating your shared Google Reader items

Aug 20

Posted by Aaron in Development | No Comments

I’m an avid user of Google Reader. I follow a couple dozen different websites, check it daily (and sometimes quasi-daily), and have a very elaborate system of tags.

One thing that I did a year or two ago was to take my public broadcast feed of my shared items and integrate it into my main website directly. The goal was to have the homepage of my website always have fresh content by linking it to my shared Reader items (I share anywhere from 3-8 items per day, on average).

Originally, my solution was a bit of a hack: I used Magpie RSS reader to consume the feeds, then did some serious PHP acrobatics to parse out the Google Reader feed — what I failed to understand, at the time, was the fundamental differences between RSS and Atom feeds (subtle, yet significant). All in all, I think it took somewhere from 100-150 lines of code to effectively snatch the feed and parse it out; and it wasn’t perfect, either — frequentle the title and source would get mashed together. But for that particular time, it was fine.

The other night, though, I decided to try and fix it up proper. I discovered that the Zend Framework has some native Atom Feed classes and thought this would be a good place to start. (Details, including my PHP source code, after the jump)

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Synaesthesia, also known as “Piano Hero” [Linux FTW]

May 11

Posted by Aaron in Featured, Linux FTW | 2 Comments

Last year, a friend of mine showed me this cool program he found called “Synaesthesia.” It is, as the title reads, “Piano Hero.” Notes fall from the top to the bottom of the screen and when they collide with the bottom, you must hit the appropriate  key on your piano / keyboard / MIDI controller. It is a VERY cool tool for training, practicing, and learning new songs. As someone that is not particularly skilled at sight-reading music (I do better learning aurally), any way to get new songs loaded into my brain is welcome.

We inherited a Yamaha Clavinova 350 last year as well, which has been really terrific for practicing; I was previously using a 2/3 size electric piano that was showing its age. I picked up an M-Audio Fast Track Pro interface off of eBay for about  $50, and so I can now use the Clavinova as a MIDI controller!

My big Win last week, though, which happens to be what this post is about, is getting it to not only work in Linux (not so hard) but getting the Clavinova to function as the MIDI controller for it (somewhat challenging). Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 8% [?]

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Using Virtualbox with an Existing Windows Partition [Linux FTW]

Jan 27

Posted by Aaron in Linux FTW | 79 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!

UPDATE: Sandeep has submitted screenshots with instructions on getting this to work with Windows 7, see below, at the very end.

UPDATE: If you are getting the error message: Offset must be a number: rce
I have found the fix for it. See the instructions below.

UPDATE: Bogdan (see comments) was able to get Windows Vista working under Virtualbox OSE, using the method below. See his comments for specifics on Windows Vista.

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Quake-style terminal window [Linux FTW]

Jan 22

Posted by Aaron in Linux FTW | 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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Twitter for Noobz

Aug 22

Posted by Aaron in Geekery | 6 Comments

Twitter logoUnless you abstain from network television, newspapers, AND the Internet, you have likely heard the phrase “follow me on twitter.” Maybe you’ve even set up a twitter account and made an update or two.

But if you’re still part of the crowd that looks at twitter and thinks “HOW is this supposed to be useful?” or if you feel lost about what to do next, then this is for you.

I’ve helped several members of my family get set up with twitter, some friends, and some co-workers. I am by no means a twitter “Expert,” but I’ve trained enough people on it that I practically have a routine down.

And it goes… Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 4% [?]

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