Vista

These days when I listen to music it’s usually streamed from Last.fm via XBMC, either my own loved tracks or those tagged “ambient“, however sometimes I want to listen to my offline music collection and for that I use Amarok.  Given how much hassle it is to get working and that they’ve removed the features I found most useful*, increasingly I wonder why I bother but for the moment I do and this is an aide-mémoire to help the process go much smoother the next time I have to install it.

1. Check that libxine1-ffmpeg is installed
2. Check that phonon-backend-xine is installed
3. Check that phonon-backend-gstreamer isn’t installed
4. Configure phonon (Amarok > Settings > Configure Amaraok > Playback > Configure Phonon) so that the uppermost option for each “Device Preference” category actually works.  Use the test button to check each option if you’re not sure.

That should get the audio working.  Now to figure out why it doesn’t seem to be scrobbling…

* They have promised to put them back in but it doesn’t look as though it’s going to be any time soon.

Usually I code in Eclipse. It saves me a lot of time, especially thanks to plugins such as oXygen and Mylyn.  However, it’s been frustrating me for a while that although I can pop-out individual Views and position them on my second monitor, it didn’t seem possible to open a second instance of the same View. I was wrong!  Just select “New window” from the “Window” menu.  It seems to have full functionality, you can even select an entirely different Perspective, if you wish. Simples! As Aleksandr Orlov would say :)

A very good friend of mine has (very politely) bemoaned the fact that his incoming twitter stream is full of tweets from people he doesn’t know (and has no interest in hearing from/about) all because I retweet so often. He doesn’t want to stop following me and I don’t want to stop retweeting. Luckily, there is a solution to our problem.

Although there’s no option that allows you to block all retweets from all people you follow in one fell swoop (yet), you can block all retweets from each person individually.

So, if, for example, you’re following me (@sheilaellen) on twitter and wish to stop receiving all the messages that I retweet:

1. Go to my twitter page: http://twitter.com/sheilaellen
2. Find the retweet icon
3. Click on it.

Before:

Retweets On

After:

Retweets Off

This should mean that you will now only receive messages from me that have been written by my own fair hand (or, possibly, a spammer who’s p0wned my account).

Repeat for each other compulsive retweeter that you follow.

Having bitten the bullet and deleted a batch of apps that I like but don’t use very often, because my phone was low on space, I almost immediately installed a new one…

Bites is very simple recipe manager, in interface and functionality; beautifully quick and easy to use. What makes it special, though, for me, is its integration with OI Shopping List: at the press of a button in Bites, I can add all of the ingredients I need to my shopping list.

If I already have an ingredient, I can tick it off before I copy it across and only the ingredients I really need will be added. If, like me, you have more than one list set up in OI Shopping List, the process allows you to specify which one, exactly, the ingredients should be added to. Also, to help you remember why it’s essential that you buy black treacle this week, the name of the recipe it’s required for (fruit cake) is appended to each ingredient name in the Shopping List.

The only feature that I miss, from both apps, is the option to specify the name of an ingredient/item and the quantity required separately. I’ve requested this from both app makers and have my fingers crossed that it’ll be added in the New Year.

Christmas planning is going so much more smoothly with the help of these two apps (and RTM), though. Only a zillion things left to do..!

I recently had to revert back to using a 1GB memory card in my G1, since the 16GB card spontaneously corrupted.  Ever since, my phone’s been helpfully pointing out, at least once per day, that it’s short of storage space and suggesting that I manage my applications; by “manage” it means “delete”.

There are some apps that I could delete but I’m reluctant to do so because I like them and might forget what they’re called should I acquire a more powerful android device and wish to reinstall them.  There are others that I rarely use but do exactly what I need them to do on those rare occasions that I do need them.  Until now, I’ve been managing to hang on to the aforementioned apps by deleting apps that I’ve installed either because they looked as though they’d do what I needed but didn’t or simply because they looked shiny in the store but quickly dulled with use.  However, with Christmas looming, last night I thought I’d try installing the RTM android app – and it’s a whopper (~3.75MB).  I’m determined to give it a proper trial but this means that finally I’m going to have to get ruthless with the other apps.

As I shall probably wish/need to reinstall some of them at a later date, if not on this phone then another, here’s a rollcall of the victims of this cull:

The RTM app had better be good…

Jeni Tennison is an XSLT guru who shares her expertise unstintingly on paper, at conferences and online.  If you’re an XSLT programmer, Jeni needs no introduction; she’s probably helped you out sometime or awed you with an elegantly simple solution to what you thought was a horrendously complex problem.  She has a knack for it.  And this skill for simplicity and elegance in code is something I aspire to.  And that’s easier said than done in XSLT – no sooner have you matched a “/” and before you can say value-of,  you find you’ve applied templates to the descendant of an ancestor, sorted three ways, with a mode and priorities applied.  So I salute you Jeni and will spend at least some of Ada Lovelace Day refactoring in your honour.