On my Windows Home Server, I have installed SqueezeCenter. This allows our SqueezeBox to play out music, and we don’t need to leave a separate computer on. I noticed that aac files were not playing, but the SqueezeBox was just skipping over them.
When I looked at the configuration of SqueezeCenter aac files are transcoded with mov123. This program is essentially just a wrapper for QuickTime. The problem is that Windows Home Server doesn’t come with QuickTime installed.
I didint want to install QuickTime, as this install brings of other stuff that I didn’t want. (i.e. Apple’s Software Update) I found this thread that describes mplayer and faad as alternatives to mov123.
After spending several hours to get either mplayer or faad to work, I decided to just install QuickTime. I had to search on Apple’s support site for a link to a version of QuickTime that would install on the home server. (The latest version of QuickTime requires XP or Vista, and the home server is running a deritive of Windows Server 2003
Continue Reading August 21st, 2008
A while ago, I configured del.icio.us to post the list of bookmarks from that day on my blocg. For some reason this stopped working for me. I like these type of automatic posts, as it makes it easy to share various pages.
I decided to write a plugin for LifeType that will import a rss feed, and then “summarize” the rss items and create a post with this text. I probably could have gotten the del.icio.us blog posting to work, but If I created the plugin, this woud allow me to include Google Reader shared items, or Twitter tweets in the post.
Google Reader does have the ability to share a list of items, but unfortunately, the only way to get this list is with some javascript. The problem that I have with this is that it is not possible to have the contents of the list remain static once posted. For example, if I look at a post from a year ago, I want to see the list of shared items that were shared a year ago. What happens now is that the latest shared items will always be shown, even for old posts that include the javascript.
Once I installed the plugin (I will create a wiki page for this plugin), the next tricky part was to get the feed to only contain items from th last 24 hours. del.icio.us doesn’t have a way to limit the items in the feed by date, but I found this Yahoo Pipe that can do that.
The next thing that I want to do is include the items that I share in Google Reader. One thing that doesn’t make this as easy as I would have liked is that there isn’t a way to determine the items that were shared in the last 24 hours. Unlike the del.icio.us feed, the entries in the rss feed aren’t dated with the date of when the item was shared. Instead, the date is the original publish date of the article.
I think that have a solution for this, and will write about this when I test it some more.
Continue Reading August 21st, 2008