dots and loops

I kind of like the "genius" playlist feature in the new iTunes, so I attempted to do something similar for J. River's Media Center (my music manager of choice at the moment).

The idea behind iTunes "genius" feature is to scour your music database and queue up tracks similar to the one you are currently listening to. How well it does this is debatable. iTunes seems to cook up it's "similarity" data based on the listening and purchasing habits of it's users. Interestingly, if everyone's listening habits were completely eclectic, and if they always kept their player on random, there would be nothing to go on. Fortunately, this isn't the case.
continue reading

Edit: The Lilina website has moved here. I believe this new incarnation has incorporated many of my hacks, so I would recommend checking it out.

Lilina-head is my hack of the lilina aggregator.
continue reading

Edit: This post is outdated.

I am a bona-fide syndication freak. Before the advent of RSS, atom, and other world live web technologies, the only site I read regularly was the BBC. Now, with the help of aggregators, I sit back and let the headlines come to me. Now my online reading encompasses countless sites… many of which I would otherwise forget about if it wasn't for the occasional headline trickling in. The time for the world live web is now, and the possibilities are endless.
continue reading

Backing up your data is fun and profitable. For my main data drives I use either rsync or Dantz Retrospect to simply mirror them to external USB drives (powered on only for this express purpose). This has me about 80% covered, but my system files and home directories are not backed up. The following script is meant to pick up the missing pieces.
continue reading

I think guestbooks are kind of neat. Sometimes you want to leave a general comment on somebodies blog, but you don't know exactly where. You don't feel right leaving your comment on any of the posts, because you just want to say "cool blog !" or whatever, and it doesn't really apply.
continue reading