Lillesvin Networks

I spent last weekend with the guys behind Webcafe.dk and one of the guys had brought his AirPort Express with built-in AirTunes, which is really cool, so I started wondering if this could be done on Linux – and with all sound (not just music, but video and application noises also) so I could get rid of that annoying mini-jack in my Thinkpad.

After searching a little on google with no luck I decided to write my own client/server application, but before I got to it I talked to this guy ‘gnome’ on #ruby-lang @ irc.freenode.net and he directed me to NAS (Network Audio System), which was actually designed for such a task.

Setting it up turned out to be a piece of cake. Simply:

# apt-get install nas

on the server, and

# apt-get install nas nas-bin audiooss
$ export AUDIOSERVER=server:0

on the client. (Just a note here. When installing the NAS package you will be asked whether or not NAS should lock the audio device. Answer yes, that should give the most stable implementation.)

Now I can simply use NAS-aware applications (e.g. mplayer and alsaplayer has NAS support) and make them output sound to the server, which is connected to my stereo. Or I can use audiooss and run e.g.: audiooss xmms &, which forwards the XMMS output (if it outputs to OSS) to the NAS server.

Now I can play music, movies and stuff from my laptop over my network and still be completely wireless – and in Linux that is.

UPDATE: I just stumbled upon a NAS plugin for XMMS, which can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.stack.nl/pub/users/willem/. (Look for xmms-nas-0.2.tar.gz.)

This is probably the funniest flash animation ever: http://home.swiftdsl.com.au/~haydn/funny_pics/funny_flash/dorld.swf. I was laughing so hard that I nearly threw up when I saw it.

Update (Jul. 9, 2007): Updated the link, as it appeared to have been removed from the original location.

Ok, now it’s time for everybody who gets by here to go to: http://lillesvin.net/ling/wr/ and help me out on my linguistics assignment by doing this little experiment.

The experiment is about word recognition and will probably take about 5 minutes to complete, so please spare me some of your time and give me some data to work with, ’cause I really need it… And fast… ;-) The deadline for the experiment is December 1st.

If you want to, you can help me by telling all of your friends to go here and do the experiment and/or link to it from you homepage/blog/whatever.

Yay, they’re here! Finally. I just booted the live-cd that comes with the distro and it looked so great. I’m really looking forward to trying it out, as I’m growing a bit tired of Debian, since it’s always sagging behind. Gnome 2.8 isn’t there yet, not even Firefox 1.0 (!) and it’s starting to annoy me. Hopefully Ubuntu will be more up to speed.

But of course, I’m not just installing Ubuntu on my old Debian partition, I’m planning on removing Windows instead, since I hardly ever use it for anything – only netbanking, which I almost never do anyway. Then I could be installing Ubuntu in a chroot’ed environment from my Debian. That would be a lot of fun imho.

I’ll let you know when it’s all gone wrong, all my partitions are erased and I’m soaking wet and crying in the gutter… Or something…

The Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research has apparently produced the biggest digital photo in the world. The image is at 2.5 billion pixels. Besides taking this big, but rather dull picture, they’ve made a funny little feature out of it – they’ve made a Flash application in which you can zoom in and out (far in) in the picture as well as scroll easily around. Go to Flash application and see if you can find the walking shoulders somewhere in the east – a pedestrian who got cut off from his chest down.

Other than that there’s nothing really exciting going on in my life. Coding a bit C# and am bored in general…