// Internet Duct Tape

Mashing Your MP3 Music Collection with Last.FM

Posted in Geeking Out, Music, MP3s and Internet Radio, Technology, last.fm by engtech on March 05, 2008

Music, MP3, iTunes

I’ve often said that one of the qualities of the hardcore geeky is that we have needs that sane normal people don’t have. That’s why there are so many web startups focused on RSS when most people don’t have a clue what RSS is — the geeks don’t realize that their need to have a continuous stream of information and never miss an update from a site they are interested in isn’t the way a lot of people use the internet.

One geek itch I’ve been wanting to scratch is to be able to listen to my MP3 collection using the recommendations from Last.FM. I’ve you’ve never heard of Last.FM, it is a music service that lets you listen music as a radio station over the internet. I’ve been using it for a year and a half and I love it; it’s helped me discover so much good music.

I’ve found two ways to automatically build MP3 playlists using online recommendations. The first way uses iTunes replacement Media Monkey and some extensions to connect to Last.FM (thanks TJOHO!) and the second way uses software by a new startup called The Filter (backed by Peter Gabriel).

(more…)

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Delicious Links – 19 links – tips, google, music, code, blogging

Posted in Best of Feeds, Technology by engtech on March 01, 2008

Weekly Links

This is my weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together for my blog on Internet Duct Tape.

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This Week at Internet Duct Tape

Internet Duct Tape is my blog where I talk about software, technology, blogging and other geeky subjects.

This Week at IDT Labs

IDT Labs is where I announce new software tools I’m working on.

  • [TUMBLR] Regular Post Digest of the Last X Days
    • Build a list of the last X regular posts from your Tumblr account in the past Y days. Useful for doing weekly digest posts with Yahoo Pipe Cleaner
  • [TUMBLR] Delete your Tumblr with TumblrCleanr 0.0.1
    • There’s one Tumblr feature that’s missing: how do you delete your Tumblr? At some point you might want to destroy all traces of your tumblr (privacy concerns, or you want to use it for something else) and there isn’t an option to do that — other than click the delete button on every…

This Week at Ruby, eh?

Ruby, eh? is where I blog/tumble about the Ruby programming language.

  • Rake RDocTask with all of the options stubbed out
    • http://pastie.caboo.se/159372  Rake::RDocTask.new(:rdoc) do |rd| # rd.external # run the rdoc process as an external shell # rd.main = “name” # ‘name’ will be the initial page displayed # rd.rdoc_dir = “html” # set the output directory # rd.rdoc_file = [] # List of files…
  • Rake: Recursively parse a list of all the requires from a source file
    • There’s probably an easier way to do this. http://pastie.caboo.se/159362  # Recursively parse a list of all the requires from a source file def local_requires(source) results = [] File.open(source,’r').each_line do |line| if line =~ /require ['"]([^'"]+)['"]/…
  • I Can Has RSS?I’ve switched to FeedBurner for RSS support . And set up full feeds, thanks to Alex . (I had no idea that they were turned off!)
  • Bulk updating Gem sourcegem install allison Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org I swear to god that rubyforge is actually a humongous peer to peer network made up from stealing our bandwidth when we do a gem install.
  • Rake Tip: force tasks to run based on operating systemhttp://pastie.caboo.se/158812 task :windows_only do raise “Must be run from Windows, not #{RUBY_PLATFORM}” unless RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /mswin/ end task :linux_only do raise “Must be run from Linux, not #{RUBY_PLATFORM}” unless RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /linux/ end
  • Rake TipBAD: s.gsub(/.rb$/,’.exe’) GOOD:  File.basename(s).ext(‘exe’)
  • Rails: how to delete ActiveRecords to a recycling bin
    • The contenders: acts_as_paranoid – 2005-09-17  Creates a delete_at column and overrides finders to ignore columns with deleted_at set. Last release was 2005-12-20, about 1600 downloads. Around ~100 blog mentions. This guy is using it instead of acts_as_trashable   Reported not working on…
  • validates_presence_of and validates_length_of
    • Pick one : validates_presence_of :snausages validates_length_of :snausages, :maximum => 3 OR validates_length_of :snausages, :maximum => 3, :allow_nil => true I broke my app because of not including allow_nil grep validates_length_of app/models/*.rb | grep -v allow_nil // engtech  …

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Best of Feeds – 23 links – programming, music, photography, psychology, rails

Posted in Best of Feeds by engtech on January 13, 2008

RSS feeds are like cookies (that are good enough for me). Best of Feeds is a weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet this week. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together on Saturdays. I don’t blog on the weekend so read these links instead.Subscribe to //engtech to see this every week (or get it by email).

Legend

  • saves – number of people who bookmarked on http://del.icio.us
  • inbound links – number of blogs who linked to it (max 100)
  • diggs – number of people who dugg on http://digg.com

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

This Week at IDT Labs

  • [WORDPRESS] Category Resizer v1.0
    • WordPress Category Resizer 2008/01/02 – v1.0 – BUGFIX: newer versions of WordPress.com broke this script – BUGFIX: will run on any WordPress install, not just WordPress.com – BUGFIX: now works when you have less than three categories – added automatic update check – Tested with WordPress.com…
  • [WORDPRESS] Comment Ninja v0.5
    • Comment Ninja v0.5 2008/01/02 – 0.5 don’t display comment ninja in mass-edit mode, since it doesn’t work on that mode wordpress.com added avatars to the comment display and they were being sent in emails on multi-author blogs it grays out the comments you can’t edit IDT Labs is a…

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