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<< Web Radio Boom Box Part I

In my previous post, I mentioned getting a new motherboard. I’ve just uploaded new photos with more details on the current status of the project.

The new motherboard is Mini-ITX with a 1GHz processor. For a power solution, I got a picoPSU-120 and a 6.6A brick converter to go with it. It’s a clean and elegant solution that keeps the wires in the case at a bare minimum and makes for much more free space. I’ll now have room to put two full size speakers in it.

Not mentioned in the previous post: Damn Small Linux is set up to connect to a network and start playing music on boot. Using Monkey web server and PHP, I created an interface that allows someone to pick any shoutcast station and control the media player, XMMS. The audio plays to some PC speakers I’ve connected until I get a small speaker amp and some decent speakers to install.

Despite the advances of the Internet, apparently some news still travels slowly. I closed down my Gmail Invite Spooler page months ago, but I’m still getting hundreds of unique visitors to that page along with about a dozen email requests for Gmail each day. Almost all of the emails and traffic are from foreign countries, so I devised a simple javascript that will allow folks to more easily translate the page into their own language.

You can use this very same javascript. It should work on any site just by including the following:

Here’s what it will look like:

In order to help a convention get off the ground, I built a tool that scraped all of the prices for round trip flights from every American and Canadian airport to eleven major North American cities.

According to my Costimator, Washington DC is the cheapest major destination, and NYC’s LaGuardia airport is the cheapest origin airport in North America.

You can enter airport codes and view the average cost to major destinations along with the percent difference from the average cost.

For the past few months, I’ve been working on a web radio boom box. I’ve hollowed out a perfectly good radio and made room for a tiny motherboard and power supply that are set up to run Damn Small Linux off of a USB flash drive. There is a wireless card inside, and the box is configured to sniff out wireless networks and automatically start streaming web radio on any friendly Wi-fi network.

I’ve come across several obstacles along the way, ranging from the actual hollowing out of the stereo to linux wireless headaches to my most recent discovery: the new, smaller motherboard I found for this project has very anemic audio output.

I fully expect to install a small audio amplifier to drive the speakers that go with the stereo, but sound quality is still very tinny even with the EQ fully tweaked out in XMMS (a Linux Winamp clone). I’ll have to do some more experimenting to see if this motherboard can be made viable. In the meantime, I’ll continue to work on my other projects. More about those later.

Continue to Web Radio Boom Box Part II >>

Some friends and I went to see Date Movie last night. While some of the jokes were genuinely funny, most of them were dragged out for way too long. For example: the cat’s toilet monologue, the opening dance number, and the introductory scene for “Andy” could have all been cut down by 75%.

Several of the gags, such as the bum fighting, charred mother’s remains, and zit popping scenes were completely over the line. The writer/directors for these movies need to realize that drilling the humor into the ground isn’t the best way to make audiences laugh. Bring on the subtle humor. Bring on the nuance. Bring on the Knights Who Say Ni!

Sharon: “I feel like I almost got my seven dollars worth.”
Paul: “You paid nine dollars for that ticket.”
Patrick: “I certainly didn’t get nine dollars worth of entertainment.”
Ian: “Is it just me, or are comedies just not as funny these days?”
Emily: “It’s not just you.”
Rating: 2.0/5

Last night Emily and I went to the first night of “What’s for Dinner,” a six-week continuing education class designed to expand the average home cook’s repertoire. At the beginning of the night, the twelve students there went over what we were going to cook:

• Mixed greens salad with balsamic vinaigrette
• Milanese-style minestrone
• Soft polenta with fontina and fresh thyme
• Pan seared, honey glazed pork loin
• Raspberry oatmeal bars

The class and materials fees came to a little over $100. Not a bad deal for about a week’s worth of full dinner recipe ideas and social exchange.

I subscribe to several fast moving feeds. Most of the news in these feeds is of little interest to me, but I’ve remained subscribed just so I can catch the occasional gem.

This problem begged a simple solution, so I’ve created FeedSifter.com. It is a very easy to use service that allows you to monitor any RSS/RDF/Atom feed for multiple different groups of words. FeedSifter automatically determines what sort of feed you are filtering and gives you only the entries that you care about. You can generate as many filtered feeds as you’d like, and you can change your filter at any time by returning to the site.

For example, say you want to filter the FatWallet.com Hot Deals feed for free items, NewEgg.com deals, and drives of all sorts (USB, harddrives, etc). You could use a filter like the following:


Free
NewEgg
GB,drive

Once entered, you are provided with a filtered feed URL and you’re all set.

Emily and I just got back from The World’s Fastest Indian (trailer) starring Anthony Hopkins. We both agree the film earns our “best uplifting new release in recent memory� award.

Despite this film’s decent television ad campaign in the last week, it is only playing at two indie theaters here in the Emerald City. Considering that this movie has been out for some time in New Zealand, I can only the US theaters are taking it slow and letting the lower budget theaters test the waters. Of course, I don’t know what they’re waiting for. It’s not as if there’s anything else worth watching right now. Just two days ago, Big Momma’s House 2 was the most widely screened movie in the area.

Finally, we also agree this movie deserves the “biggest misuse of suspenseful music� award for the scene where Burt approached the mystery house after his trailer broke down.
Rating: 4.5/5

Other recent movies of note:

Memoirs of a Geisha
Emily: “I wish it would have delved more into the traditions of Geisha.�
Ian: “I wish they would have played up Sayuri’s sharp wit.�
Rating: 4.0/5

Underworld: Evolution
John: “I’ve seen worse.�
Ian: “I’ve never seen anything worse.�
Rating: 0.5/5

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Emily: “Don’t take your kid.�
Ian: “The bow was the most useless prop ever.�
Rating: 3.5/5

Jon Bell, a fancypants web designer I work with, has designed a quality web game called GroupThink. In short, it is a collaborative game about creating amusing/creative/insightful sentences one word at a time.

“Be yourself, trust yourself, and don’t wear perfume.”
–Groupthink

After watching a building burn across the water from my office today, I had the idea of applying the Seattle emergency response data to a map.

You can click on each of the datapoints for some interesting info on what’s going on at this very moment in the Emerald City. In later revisions, I’ll add auto-updating AJAX calls and fancy icons for different event types.

If you live in a major city with data like this, let me know the URL. I might be able to whip up something similar for you.