Projects

Little things done hastily.
  Home | Weblog | Projects | About

Grabbr

Thursday, June 09, 2005


Screen ShotGrabbr is a small application to smooth the task of uploading screenshots to Flickr.

It lives in the inconspicuously in the system tray until such time as you need it. At which point you hit CTRL+F12 and it springs into life, capturing the currently focused window.

You then have the option to, crop, title describe and tag the image before uploading it directly to your account.

It could barely be simpler.

New in 1.3 - Permissions support and the option to go to photo pages after upload

Grabbr is designed to be fast and use as few system resources as possible when not in use (it's not some bloated .NET application).

Permanent link with 18 comments

Rendezvous Protocol for Miranda

Thursday, April 14, 2005


This plugin for the Miranda Instant Messenger allows simple serverless chat on a LAN.

Because it uses the same protocol as Apple's iChat, you can now talk easily with all your smug Mac friends, and hang out with the cool kids at conferences.

Requirements:
To install, just unzip the following dll into your Miranda / Plugins directory.
Alternatively, if you're happy with your current IM setup and just want a simple Rendezvous chat client, you can download this stand alone version.
This is simply a stripped down installation of Miranda with all the other protocols removed. It still requires you to install Rendezvous.

The iChat plugin is free software licensed under the GPL. The sourcecode is freely available.

Permanent link with 55 comments

Greasemonkey Scripts

Thursday, March 17, 2005


This page is a permenant home for the small but growing number of Greasemonkey scripts I seem to be collecting.

Greasemonkey is an extension for the Firefox web browser. If you are not using Firefox+Greasemonkey then you aren't going to get a lot of milage out of this page.

Delicious Kinja

Adds a "Post to del.icio.us" link to all the items in your Kinja feed list. Will place the currently selected text in the "extended" field if you so desire.

[install]


Nice Titles

Displays a pretty version of titled links as described here.

[install] [more]

Blockquote Citations

Adds a link to the citation of a blockquote if it appears to be a url. It will use the blockquote's title as the link text or "source" if there isn't a title.

[install] [more]

Livejournal Editor

Adds some simple text formatting options to Livejournal so you can avoid their terrible rich text editor. "Inspired" by this similar script for Flickr.

[install]

Flickr Camphone Competition Entry Script

This one is increadibly niche. Adds an option to photo pages to add it into the current Camphone Competition.

[install]

Permanent link with 1 comments

Motherload

Sunday, March 13, 2005


Motherload

What is Motherload?

Motherload is a simple little application to load your mp3 player from your iTunes library in a way that is not completely dissimilar to the iPod Shuffle.

It takes the pain out of filling up a smaller player from a large music collection.

Download Motherload 1.0

How does it work?

It couldn't get much easier:

  1. Plug in your Player
  2. Start Motherload
  3. Select which playlist you want your songs to come from (or just leave it set to the whole library).
  4. Choose if you want to add songs to what's already there or replace the current selection.
  5. Choose to add the songs in playlist order or a random selection
  6. Choose the drive letter that corresponds to your player
  7. Hit "Fill"

Are there any limitations?

Well you're pretty much stuck with mp3 files. iTunes can't manage Windows Media and your player probably can't play AAC.

Where is it going to put this stuff?

Motherload creates a folder on your player called "_Motherload". All Motherload music is copied to this folder. Motherload will never touch files outside this folder, so you can still use the player as a portable drive if that's your thing. You probably want to wipe the player before you start or Motherload won't have anywhere to put its files.

Why doesn't it work?

Motherload requires:
  1. iTunes 4.7 or later (download).
  2. The .NET Framework (download)
Make sure both of these are installed.

Where can I get more help?

Try posting here. You never know.

Permanent link with 5 comments

iScrobbler For Windows

Monday, May 24, 2004


iScrobbler is a plug in for iTunes. It submits your currently playing track to Audioscrobbler, a site where you can share your dubious music taste with the world.

You will need an Audioscrobbler account to make this work.

The original iScrobbler for Mac OS X can be found here.

Comments are disabled, please use the forum on the Audioscrobbler site to report problems.

Permanent link with 0 comments

iScrobbler for Windows FAQ

Monday, May 24, 2004


In my user profile it lists the song I'm currently listening to, but it doesn't seem to record the songs I've listened to before that or anything. Anyone know what's up?

At times of heavy load, the server can't keep up. It will manage to do "Recent Tracks" but everything else takes a long time. At really really busy periods even this doesn't work.

Please be patient. The server remembers all data it receives and iScrobbler remembers all data that it can't send until it can.

You can keep up to date with the state of the server here.

How do I change my settings (username, password etc...)?
I've listened to "Hit Me Baby One More Time" a bazillion times on repeat and it's only submitted once. What gives?

Tragically the only way to spot track changes in iTunes is to look for the title or artist changing. If you listen to the same song over and over again, iScrobbler will only submit it once.

Why do I keep getting this "Authorization Failure" message?

This can happen for a number of reasons.

Why have I got a big "Spam Protection" error message on my user profile?

Who knows? The server insists that all submissions come in chronological order. Somehow, you have managed to submit songs out of order. The most likely cause is that you use Audioscrobbler on two computers / music players and some submissions have not been transmitted imediately. These submissions are cached until they can be sent. If you've submitted on the other computer / player in the mean time then the cached submissions will be rejected.

Of course this isn't always the case. Sometimes it's just a processing error.

In any case the best thing to do is to not get too stressed about it. You can clear the error message by logging into the website and selecting "Settings". Just hit the save button without changing anything and it will vanish.

How do I set my proxy server?

iScrobbler should pick it up automatically, but typically it doesn't. Set it manually in the format [servername]:[portnumber].

What's all this MusicBrainz talk about?

Please see this bit of the AudioScrobbler FAQ. iScrobbler for Windows will now send the MusicBrainz tags if your files contain them.

You should consider visiting MusicBrainz, downloading their tagger program and running it against your iTunes library.

If you do this, my tip of the day for iTunes MusicBrainz users is to open the tagger, go to View -> Options, chose the Naming tag and uncheck the box marked "Rename files when writing metadata tags".

How come my song is being reported with corrupt/duplicate characters on the end?

Some files have corrupt ID3 tags even though iTunes appears able to display them correctly.


If that doesn't work, simply overtyping them in the iTunes window is a tedious but reliable way of fixing this.

Thanks to skylarth for this tip.

Will songs I listen to on my iPod be submitted to Audioscrobbler?

Unfortunately not at the moment. The Mac bods have this working, but I don't have an iPod to implement it. Why not buy me one? I haven't had time to do anything about it. I believe there are people who are working on this.

How do I get rid of this stupid plugin?

If you are using version 1.0.1 or later, then it is in Add/Remove programs.

For earlier versions, look in your iTunes directory (typically c:\program files\iTunes) . There is a program called UninstalliScrobbler.exe. Run that.

What's this "Submission failed: 0" rubbish?

That's a bug in 0.0.3. Try upgrading to the latest version. You may also need to click the "Clear Cache" button on the configuration dialog.

If none of this works then congratulations, you have a genuine problem, try posting in the forum for help!

Permanent link

jTechnorati

Friday, May 14, 2004


jTechnorati is a java implementation of the Technorati API.

New in 0.3

Removed Xerces dependancy

New in 0.2

Support for the keyword search and a more sensible license. (GPL was all I had to cut and paste for 0.1)


Permanent link with 5 comments

iTunesOnTop

Saturday, October 25, 2003


27 October 2004: iTunes 4.7 finally supports this natively. Thank God. iTunesOnTop remains here purely as a historical curiosity

iTunesOnTop addresses the number one whinge levelled against the otherwise excellent iTunes for Windows : "why won't it stay always on top like winamp does?"

It's a visualisation plug-in that will force iTunes to stay on top when it's in it's small player mode. As an added bonus you don't need to make it the active visulization or otherwise enable it. This is kind of fortunate since the visualization it does would induce epilepsy (blame the Apple SDK sample code).

Simply download the dll into a directory called "Plug-Ins" (no quotes) which you should create under the main iTunes directory (typically "C:\program files\iTunes\"). That's it. You can ignore it from then on, but iTunes should stay always on top.

Here's hoping that Apple make this obsolete real soon.


What they're saying about iTunesOnTop:


Permanent link with 8 comments

Advertisement