The server side of things is taken care of by a Synology NAS. It’s built in UPnP server can send FLAC files as FLAC files (unlike my other NAS boxes from Buffalo and HP).

I can split the clients into 3 categories – computers, AV Equipment and internet radios. The internet radio doesn’t support FLAC and it doesn’t scrobble. What I think I need here is some form of UPnP bridge server that does a conversion (probably to MP3, but I should check if the radio will take WAV or WMA Lossless) and scrobbles tracks. Some of my AV equipment will play FLAC quite happily (the Cyclone MKV in particular) but none of them scrobble, so it looks like I need a bridge again. Computer-wise, things get a bit complicated.

As Ubuntu is, for now, my OS of choice I first looked at Rhythmbox and the coherence based plugin and while it would play FLAC served over UPnP I ran into two showstoppers. First, while you would see several servers listed in the right hand side, they didn’t work as expected as clicking on a server would (after a longish wait) display a random and incomplete assortment of tracks from various servers (the user experience could best be described as “buggy as hell”). Second, it would not scrobble tracks played over UPnP. I then wanted to try the rhythmpnp plugin but there were no debs for amd64 and I just could not get the source to compile. So Rhythmbox is out of the running and with Ubuntu planning to drop it in favour of Banshee it was now time to look at Banshee. Sadly, it was only a quick look – Banshee’s UPnP support is somewhat lacking. This is the second time I’ve looked into switching to Banshee from Rhythmbox and the second time it came up short – I used to access my music over SMB which Rhythmbox could handle with a smb: url, while Banshee had no such support.

So, here are the itches. I need a bridging server and I need a simple UPnP enabled scobbling media player. I’m still looking for options, but it’s starting to look like I’ll have to “build instead of buy”.

To do it I’ll need an electronic replacement for cash. I don’t want to use my debit card – I shouldn’t have to give the person I’m buying lunch off of access to my current account. I also don’t want to use a credit card – I want to pay for today’s lunch today and not at the end of the month and there is much the same security concern with a credit card as a debit card. I think I’ve found the solution in a Virgin Money Prepaid Mastercard. I should be able to charge it up with a week’s worth of “lunch money” and not have the security concerns of a debit card (I’m much happier risking my lunch money than my mortgage payment).

Unfortunately, prepaid Mastercards aren’t free – besides the one off fee of £9.95 for the card, with Virgin you can either pay 2.95% of every “UK Card Transaction” or pay a monthly fee of £4.95. There are also various other fees (such as withdrawing cash at an ATM) at various rates, some of which are lower if you’re paying the monthly fee. A quick calculation worked out that if I do use the card as a cash replacement I’ll be best off paying the £4.95 a month. One good thing is that you can switch between the monthly fee or the pay as you go charge once every four months, so if the experiment fails I can just switch to pay as you go and let the card sit idle.

There are various ways of charging up the card – some free, some with a fee, some instantaneous, some taking a up to four business days. I’m thinking for day to day use I’ll set up a regular transfer of a week’s worth of cash. I guess I’ll fall back to the debit or credit card for unexpected extraneous transactions (though I’d like to keep these to a minimum for security reasons). One side effect of all this might be better budgeting, another possible side effect is so much inconvenience that the experiment fails. The only way to find out is to try.

I’ll assume that you’ve got your DVB card/stick up and running and that you can watch DVB channels in Totem (GStreamer version). All you have to do in Rhythmbox is add a new Internet Radio station and use a dvb:// URL. For example, BBC Radio 4 is (on my system) dvb://BBC Radio 4(BBC). You can work out the URL from either Totem’s DVB Playlist or from the first column in your ~/.gstreamer-0.10/dvb-channels.conf file.

The biggest problem I had with it was finding a case to carry it about in. It’s a little bit too big for most netbook cases and too small for notebook cases. In the end, I found a padded pouch for 10 inch netbooks (but required some modifcation to hide the pink swirls) and a cheap notebook backback – both from Tesco.

via: The Guardian

It’s one thing going after Facebook, but I think one the bigger threats to privacy on social networks (and Facebook in particular) is all the little apps such as those silly tests like “what decade best suits you” or “what kind of vampire are you”, etc, that for some reason “need” to have full access to your profile, your friends, your photos, your first born – pretty much your entire social networking personna. Hopefully the Data Protection people will wake up to these privacy leaks and start putting pressure where pressure is needed.

It feels a lot faster than eeeXUbuntu, which isn’t surprising as it’s running off the internal SSD and not an SDHC card in the SD slot. It also feels far more polished.

What I think I’ll try (when I get around to it) is moving /usr over to squashfs and then use unionfs with an SD card to boost the space. It’ll probably slow things down a bit, but it should still be a faster experience overall.

This will be the first time I’ve been able to buy a machine with the OS I want on it in a very, very long time. While the eee had it’s own version of Linux, it wasn’t Ubuntu or one of it’s derivates so I’ve been running eeeXubuntu 7.10 off an SD card. I’ve been using Ubuntu as my primary OS (both at home and a work) for a few years now – it will make a change not having to install it.

Even though I don’t have to install Ubuntu, I think 8.04 is a bit old so I’ll probably upgrade to 8.10 straight away. 9.04 has severe issues with the new Intel graphics drivers and the 10v has Intel graphics so I’ll hold back on that one.

It’s currently “In Production” and should be with me in a couple of weeks.

One thing – it does make you wonder what would have happened had Twitter been around in November of 2000.