Bank Holiday housekeeping

Posted under Blogging, Housekeeping by tim at 17:06 No Comments »

Just thought I’d mention a couple of minor changes going on at the blog:

  • I’ve been experimenting with different ways to display my Twitter updates in the blog’s sidebar. So far, I’ve gone through two different dedicated WordPress plugins for this purpose, but have now settled on the Lifestream plugin, which until now I have only used on the Lifestream page itself.
    In short, I have replaced the old “Twitter” sidebar section with a new “Lifestream” one, which will show the five most recent updates I have made to my online accounts. Twitter will still be the most frequent, but now you will see updates from Delicious, YouTube, Flickr and others there as well. The Lifestream page will be unchanged as before, and will show the most recent one hundred updates (usually about one week’s-worth).
  • The Lifestream plugin has recently been updated, and now includes the option to publish a daily or weekly “lifestream digest” post to the blog. I am going to try this out over the next few days; the new digest will replace the one I tested last week (generated by the Twitter Tools plugin), as long as it is an improvement over what came before. (The Lifestream digest doesn’t appear to have an option for which day of the week to publish the weekly digest, so I’ll have to see how that works out.)
  • Yet another use of the Lifestream plugin (you can tell I’m keen on this one :) ) which I would like to implement, is to add it to the “single post” page, so that when you view a blog post, you will also see a selection of lifestream updates from around the time the post was published. The means to do this is currently being worked on by the plugin’s author, and once a workable method is developed, I’ll be keen to add it here.
  • Yes, I know I haven’t set up the long-promised “Music” section yet—it’s on my “to do and really should do” list!

Anyway, as the August Bank Holiday approaches (and with it, the end of another somewhat soggy summer), I hope you have a good one, whatever the weather!

Posted by Wordmobi

Browsing our home server with my Nokia N95

Posted under Uncategorized by tim at 07:29 No Comments »

Apologies for the seemingly endless stream of posts about the Nokia N95, but this one should be the last for the moment…

Ever since I got my N95 just about two years ago, I’ve wanted to be able to access the photos, videos, music, etc. on our home server (a ‘hacked’ Linksys NSLU2 running Unslung Linux), but for various reasons none of the possible solutions I’d looked at were ideal. The good news is, finally I’ve now found what appears to be the best way.

At the weekend, I finally upgraded my N95’s firmware from a positively ancient version (12.x, I think) to the latest (v31.0.017), which amongst many improvements, added UPnP “renderer” (client) support. In other words, the N95 can now play media from a server, instead of only being a server, as was the case previously.

I’m now in the process of trying out a couple of UPnP servers on our home server, to stream our multimedia collection to the N95. The one I’m testing right now is MediaTomb, and aside from it seemingly putting a quite high load on the system (“top” was reporting a load of over 3—the NSLU2 is not that powerful a machine), the functionality seems to work. I’ll be testing this further, but it does look as if my quest for portable multimedia anywhere in the house, may have finally found its goal…

Blowing into the microphone…

Posted under Uncategorized by tim at 16:53 No Comments »

…testing, testing, number one, number one, isn’t this a lot o’ fun…

If this is working, I’ll see you here again soon!

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