Automation Adventures

Another missing piece in the list of applications that I found essential seems to have been resolved: Banshee Music Player is replaced iTunes.

The version that is included with the standard Ubuntu 6.06 LTS is version 0.10, and although pretty good, I desperately missed the podcast support. Using iPodder to get the podcasts and import them into Banshee was a short-term solution – I don’t like doing repetative tasks by hand…

On the Banshee website was mention of version 0.11.3, which came out earlier this month, with support for Podcasts..! Since I had a little bit of trouble trying to install some of the plug-ins (missing libraries and utilities), I was a little wary to install 0.11.3 from scratch, until I found this excellent How-To on getting all the prerequisites, the source code itself, and all compilation/installation instructions!

It takes a while to get through them all (depending on how many libraries you already have installed), and I had two hiccups (#1 was during Step 1, I had to use libsgutil1 and libsgutils1-dev with Ubuntu 6.06 instead of libsgutils and libsgutils-dev, #2 was during the configuration of ipod-sharp – I needed to install the mono-gac package).

I just fired it up, and seems to work OK! I just added 6 feeds to the podcast module, and I’ll update the episodes a little later. For now, great stuff, and thansk to the folks at Banshee for creating the cool application, and GameGod of Linux Revolution for the great How To!

I ran across a new file sharing site, called divShare. It claims it’s a free file hosting service for everyone, no registration required – but if you register, you get access to the ‘advanced’ options.

Apparently there is no file size limit, and no limit on the time a file can be stored there. Is this the perfect backup site for your hard disk (although you may want to encrypt your backup…)?

I’m a man of my word…

Unfortunately, we got ourselves a little puppy November the 19th. Daisy is now 16 weeks old, and a serious handful. She’s halfway potty-trained (although last night we had a stumper – after walking her for 10 minutes, she comes in and pees on the floor… oh well…), and happy to chew on anything you put in front of her. We were hoping on starting her puppy training last Monday, but unfortunately that class got canceled. Luckily PetSmart has some classes as well, amongst them a puppy class starting tonight.

All this means that pretty much all the plans I’d made for the week of Thanksgiving got canceled. I’ve been planning on setting up a website for the Foresight User Group at www.foresightug.com, teach myself PHP, and try and get a Wii, but no such luck. But I can’t complain – even though sometimes you can strangle a puppy, Daisy’s saving grace is that she’s so cute.

On our home automation front not a lot has changed. I finally added a little qualifier in one of our MisterHouse scripts, to prevent our lights from going to 50% at 10PM if we’ve turned them off, and changed the schedule around a little bit to allow for 30 minutes puppy time in the morning. The MisterHouse Wiki seems to be doing great – I get a couple of update notices per day.

And that’s pretty much it. Hopefully we’ll have some more time on our hands after Christmas, but I hope to be able to post something before that.

Cheers!