Last Exit is a Gtk based player for Last.fm. If, like me, you use GNOME Desktop then you might prefer the way this player looks compared to the Qt based official Last.fm player. It is harder to install than the official player and as it’s still quite new there are still a few bugs that need to be ironed out. I have written some basic instructions for installing Last Exit on Ubuntu Linux. (more…)
I have written a Python script to download a webcam image at a configurable interval. I am currently testing it with the BBC’s three Aberystwyth webcams. Although it should work with almost any webcam. I will use these images to make time-lapse style video.
The script uses the If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match headers in the GET request to ensure the same image is not downloaded twice. The script is capable of regularly downloading images from several webcams. I will be using either ffmpeg or mencoder (from the mplayer project) to create the videos.
Thanks to Matthew Russell (aka horizon5) for help with threading. Thanks also to Gary Steele for his page on creating videos from a series of images.
For those who want to run it themselves, I’ll put it online in a few days to download once I know it works properly and the code is tidied up a little.
I recently switched to using the Irssi IRC client from XChat. Because the scripts and commands I had become used to in XChat are not available for Irssi I wrote a couple of scripts for Irssi.
Mass Op (/mop) command for Irssi - A script which gives everyone ops on the channel except for people who have “voice” (+v).
XMMS Currently playing script - Says to the channel what you are currently listening to something like
[music | Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbit (Surrealistic Pilow)]
when you enter /xmms
Google-it - A script that says to the current window a url to “Google It, You Moron” based upon specified keywords. For example
/google irssi scripts
produces
http://www.googleityoumoron.com/?go=irssi+scripts
Read this if you don’t know how to use irssi scripts.
I have written a short Python script to allow you to find the overlap between the favourite artists of two user’s on Last.fm.
For example, my Last.fm favourites compared to my friend Seb’s favourites currently produces this list.
swp1@flemensfirth:~/src/python/lastfm-intersect$ python pair.py Aimaz cybersebb
In Flames
Pantera
Black Sabbath
Led Zeppelin
Dead Kennedys
Opeth
Beastie Boys
Anathema
Pink Floyd
Queens of the Stone Age
Iced Earth
Rage Against the Machine
Metallica
My Dying Bride
You can download the script here.
I am working on another script to do a similar thing for a group of people, but it needs to be programmed differently, otherwise given a large enough list of users no artists would appear in the list.
(edit: this version has been retracted see Last.fm forum post)
This is what version 1.1.1 of the Last.fm Player looks like, you can binaries from http://www.last.fm/help/player/ the source code tarball is only version 1.0.4 so if you want the source you should check it out.
svn co svn://svn.audioscrobbler.net/player/trunk
Some people on the Last.fm forums have reported problems using ALSA with the newest player. If you try using it OSS may work for you, I am currently using OSS because I experienced the same problem with ALSA.
I intend to make a new .deb package geared towards Ubuntu users with Qt not staticly linked like in the previous package I made, with files in more appropriate places (not /opt) and all together I’ll try to do a better job 
*** Update *** I never got round to making a package, those after packages for ubuntu should go here. If you use debian then it is in apt, just install lastfm from apt.
I have created an Ubuntu package of Last.fm Player 1.0.5 (2.7 Mb). It also adds a Gnome menu icon in the ‘Sound & Video’ submenu (Thanks to Mr_T for help with that). If you don’t know Last.fm you should check it out, same goes for Ubuntu.
If you have any suggestions on things that need to go in the package let me know. I’ll try to keep an up to date Ubuntu package on the site from now on.
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