Playing With Sharp Objects

I’ve released the updated version of my modified FeedOnFeeds web-based RSS reader as Monkeychow. This is the last time I will refer to it by the old name. I have the monkeychow.org domain pointing to the Sourceforge page with the Home Page for the project pointing here. Starting with this version 0.1, I will maintain the releases on Sourceforge. Downloads are supported through Subversion and File releases.

If you’re a stable release kind of person, you can get the files from here. It will be a while before anything is updated as a File Release again, but the Subversion releases will stay up to date as I add features. Once I have enough to qualify for a major release, say a 0.5, I will again upload to the FIle Release area on Sourceforge.

The subversion release stands at revision 1 as of this very moment. Getting the files requires you to do

svn co https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/monkeychow monkeychow

The upside of this is that when you want to update your release, all you have to do is

svn update monkeychow

and you will automatically have the new files. Should there be something wrong with a new release, the file management of subversion will let you jump everything back to a previously known working copy. Such is the power of file management!

If you want to be brave, you can try getting this to work on Cygwin. It is my eventual hope to get this working so that anyone can set this up on any platform, point port 80 on their cable router at that system, and check their feeds from anywhere. At the same time I would like to set this up so that each install can support multiple users without having to rely on an .htaccess file.

We have a new addition to the family thanks to an early Easter present from my wonderful wife (hers on the left, mine on the right). I’ve retired my 40GB Creative Zen Xtra after discovering that I really wasn’t listening to most of the ~20GB that I had dumped on it from my server. However, I’ve totally filled the 4GB available on my iPod Nano with everything that I wanted to put on it - no room for expansion. It’s a shame, as I’ve been trying to fill holes in my iTunes library. All of this music has no art work, so I made extensive use of the iTunes Art Importer today to make sure everything in my collection has album cover art. I’ll have to make another pass through my library to see if I actually want all of it on my iPod. The 5-star rating system on the iPods helps with this since I can sort my library by rating to see what needs to be cleared. Anything under 3 stars will definitely get booted.

Having used iTunes for streaming over ssh, I’m pretty comfortable using it for everyday listening. I really love the “smart playlists,” something that no other music player seems to have. Useful even for backing up your library. And keeping track of my most played tracks, I now use the Audioscrobbler plugin for iTunes from Last.fm which generates a personalized RSS feed for my most listened to music, suitable for something like this blog site. I usually have it on the right, but it seems the RSS sidebar is not working after my upgrade to Rails 1.1.

Lastly, check out the middle ipod in the picture above. My son found a really nice use for that plastic adapter most of us toss aside, making the iPod Desk mod.

Update: Finally got rid of the Creative Zen 40GB player by trading it for an XBox. What a deal!