My long weekend

What did I get up to on my long weekend? Well I made myself an auto-shuffling audio DVD. This took a long time to figure out, but the result was worth it -- I just throw the disc in any player and I have (so far) 84 tracks that randomise themselves continuously. With all the nice stuff that DVD offers like a menu to turn off shuffle if I want to focus on an album, and album art and the name of each track on screen. (Almost) all with free software. Go Linux!!!

That and I have hacked apart my new IPCop firewall box adding cool stuff to it (hopefully without reducing its effectiveness too much).

I'm very impressed especially with IPCop. Look out for me to post some instructions (and packages if you're lucky!)

Have I also said how much I love Xbox Media Centre (link to news updates)? Okay, okay that'll do for now...

MacZOT geniuses team up with TheCodingMonkeys...

Who said the Internet wasn't fun anymore? I'm having a great time with MacZOT.com, getting at least one piece of cool software per week that I want. Speaking of which, this weekend I got some good use out of Matinee, Multimedia Tiler from the MyzsteryZOT as well as Media Rage -- which is an awesome little Mac program.

Today is different though -- it's BLOGZOT 2.0 on MacZOT.com where those with blogs give a free plug to make software cheaper. This one's about SubEthaEdit from CodingMonkeys which is an awesome concept in collaborative document editing. Some of the possibilities of this program are interesting, but I'm a one-person household and Macs are vetoed at work so hmmm...

MacZOT and TheCodingMonkeys will award $105,000 in Mac software to the first people to ask for it if enough blog articles get posted... let's see if the Mac blogging community can do it again!

If the price is right and SubEthaEdit suits your needs I hope I've helped you out -- otherwise keep your eye on MacZOT.com again tomorrow because who knows what it'll be!

I want my macZOT!

Mac users: visit macZOT.com -- a VERY interesting new approach to getting people to pay for shareware!

They prey on curiousity and 'myzstery' and heavy discounting to keep Mac developers and users happy... sounds interesting... I'm trying out this week's Your First/Extended/Exploded Myztery ZOT.

They accept PayPal which is great... but I wish they'd just finish adding to the ZOT so I can find out what I've got.

Excellent concept guys -- if it all comes through it's going to Recommended -- visiting the site already is... the suspense is killing me!

Recommended: XBOX Media Center

Okay, so I just got an XBOX (no, not a 360). And I've modded it. I'm a big media center freak so the first thing I reached for was XBOX Media Center.

And I'm pretty impressed. Okay, so it's a bit crashy, and it's a little hard to find, but it IS free, and while it works it works great. Get yourself one of the latest CVS builds and you'll be going off.

The nice thing about XBMC, as it is often called, is that it is expandable. You can use XML to customise it, and Python to program it (lucky that I have a book on Python already). This is great, as it means such things as TV guides can be added to it. Not to mention direct support (via MySQL and SAMBA) for my MythTV recordings.

Brilliant!

PS. To mod the XBOX don't go past Softmod Installer Deluxe, which you can find here, but make sure you get the latest version 4.5, especially if you have a PAL XBOX (this caused me no end of confusion). And if you use Splinter Cell to softmod, make sure you get the matching (PAL/NTSC) game save!

Kudos to Datel/Codejunkies for making the Action Replay product that makes this possible, and Liksang.com for the XBOX to USB goodies.

If anyone has a script for ecto...

I'd be grateful if anyone has a script that implements expandable post summaries in ecto -- the one's Blogger suggests

here or better.

Revitalising my blog...

Okay, I'm finally going to put a concentrated effort into getting this back off the ground.

There's a lot of software and things that I see or play with in a week, so I want to be able to comment quickly on them here.

To make my life easier I'm also going to be trying out some different weblog clients, the first of which is ecto. Let's see how this goes, and maybe I'll recommend it.
[posted with ecto]