Category: Geek
Free Nokia Lumia 800 Giveaway
I just read that Nokia and Microsoft will be giving away 85,000 of its new Lumia 800 smartphones - 25,000 to developers, and 60,000 to “bloggers and cultural influencers”.
I’d love to get my hands on one of these. I love Nokia’s hardware - I rocked an n95 for a solid two years, and the thing was darn near bulletproof - but wound up switching to Android a while ago because I didn’t want to subject myself to Symbian any longer. I’ve got a T-mobile Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant now, and I’m very happy with it, but I’ve heard really good things about the new Windows phones too. Maybe Nokia hardware = Microsoft software = a win? We’ll see.
Posted on Oct 31, 2011 - 03:12 PM
How to Set Up A Microphone With Virtual DJ 7 (and the Hercules DJ Control MP3 e2)
I’m just putting this here so I won’t forget it and have to troll the virtualdj.com message boards in the future. Hopefully you’ll find it useful as well.
Basically, in Virtual DJ 7, you need to map your mic to a deck or decks in order to use your microphone with Virtual DJ.
Go to Config, Skins, and then choose a four deck skin. I have a big monitor, so I use the 1440x1024 one. Then go to Mappers. I used
deck 3 linein ‘mic’ & deck 4 linein ‘mic’
(replace the curly apostrophes with the straight ones, if you copy/paste) to map the “Scratch” button on my Hercules DJ Control MP3 e2 to enable the mic on both decks, so it doesn’t matter which side the crossfader is at. If you don’t have a controller, you can use another key: “M”, for example.
That ought to be it - let me know if you have any questions. Note: if your mic isn’t working in Windows in general, then it won’t work in Virtual DJ. Make sure to set it up in Windows first, and to test it with the sound recorder program or Audacity, before you start trying to get it to work in Virtual DJ.
Posted on Oct 24, 2011 - 12:23 AM
Pipe Delimited U.S. State List
Copy/paste this if you need a pipe-delimited U.S. state list for some reason:
AL|AK|AZ|AR|CA|CO|CT|DE|FL|GA|HI|ID|IL|IN|IA|KS|KY|LA|ME|MD|MA|MI|MN|MS|MO|MT|NE|NV|NH|NJ|NM|NY|NC
|ND|OH|OK|OR|PA|RI|SC|SD|TN|TX|UT|VT|VA|WA|WV|WI|WY
(Inspired by Trevor Davis’ ExpressionEngine form builder tutorial.)
Posted on Apr 25, 2011 - 02:44 PM
How to find a person’s Facebook profile from an image
I figured out the other day how to find a person’s Facebook profile page from an image linked to that profile.
For example: say someone posts a photo from their Facebook page on an internet forum. The photo URL will look something like this:
http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash2/hs213.ash2/47632_591801253534_15302248_33857587_6862829_n.jpg
The member ID for the Facebook user is in that URL - it’s the group of numbers in bold, after the second underscore from the left. In my case, it’s 15302248.
So, in order to find the URL for that person’s Facebook profile, just go to http://facebook.com/profile.php?id=15302248.
There you go! It’s super easy… perhaps TOO easy. Everyone should keep in mind that they’re basically advertising their Facebook profile whenever they post a direct link to an image they uploaded to their Facebook account.
Posted on Jan 10, 2011 - 05:35 PM
Pitchfork mpd Media Player comes alive again - Patchfork!
The best server-based mp3 jukebox I’ve used yet has come alive - Patchfork!
I’ve found that it’s a drop-in replacement for Pitchfork, the awesome mpd-based jukebox software that stopped being updated in 2008. Joshua Wise was kind enough to patch the Pitchfork 0.5.5 source and make some much-needed changes, including fixed lyric lookup support and Amazon coverart grabbing, and adding a view-only mode.
You can grab the files directly from Joshua here, un-tgz them, and drop in place of your existing /pitchfork/ directory. Make sure the /config/ directory is writeable by Apache, and so long as your previous Pitchfork install was functional, that was all you should need to do.
Before grabbing the Patchfork snapshot, you may want to make sure there’s not a newer version in the git repository. Click on the “snapshot” link in the top right of the shortlog on Patchfork’s site to download the newest version.
Edit 2/13/2011: You can still grab a copy of the old Pitchfork here.
Posted on Nov 04, 2010 - 05:15 AM
Dubstep Artist Popularity Based on DMCA YouTube Takedown Notices
I created and continue to run dubstepp.com, a music (YouTube video) aggregator for dubstep and reddit’s /r/dubstep community. It and /r/dubstep have been fairly successful - dubstepp.com is currently keeping track of more than 2,000 songs submitted to reddit by /r/dubstep members.
Anyway, I need to go through the submitted tracks and remove dead links every once in a while. The vast majority of those dead links are caused by YouTube taking a link down due to a DMCA request done by a record label or artist. I’ve kept track of those dead links, and made a list and tag cloud-style graphic of the words which pop up most often in removed links.
(Click to view larger. I used wordle.net to make this).
Based on the idea that more DMCA takedowns = greater popularity and greater record label support, we can see that the most popular/best-supported dubstep artists are Rusko, Borgore, Burial, Datsik, Flux Pavilion, and Benga.
You can check the data out for yourself: download deadstep.ods (OpenDocument Spreadsheet) or deadstep.csv (comma separated values file) for the source data. In the tag cloud I created above, I exluded the words “dubstep” and “remix” from the cloud, as they weren’t artist names and they were the two most-mentioned words in the data.
Posted on Sep 15, 2010 - 12:53 AM
rsync from Linux to a Windows partition, ext3 to NTFS
Just figured out a solid way to use rsync to efficiently sync data from a Linux host (ext2, ext3 or ext4) to a Windows-based NTFS filesystem.
rsync -rltDvu --modify-window=1 --progress --delete /mnt/sata /media/windows/
/mnt/sata here is the Linux directory to be backed up, and /media/windows is the NTFS-formatted Windows destination.
The crucial part is “—modify-window=1”. Because Windows and Linux use slightly different formats for file creation/modification timestamps, a regular rsync operation won’t recognize identical files between ext3 and NTFS filesystems. The “—modify-window=1” option tells rsync to allow for a 1 second difference in timestamps between files; once rsync knows to be slightly less literal in its definitions of “same”, it works quite well.
Hope someone finds this useful. I’m using it to make a backup copy of my MythBuntu media (ripped movies and music) to an external hard drive (formatted with NTFS instead of ext3 or 4 so I can easily share it with friends).
Posted on Sep 05, 2010 - 08:34 PM
