Entries Tagged 'Useful Links' ↓

I wanted to get Album Art for all of my (newly ripped) songs on my MythTV box. 

Thierry has a nice perl script which finds album art on Amazon and automatically downloads it, but unfortunately for me the music plugin for MythTV has upgraded their database schema and the script no longer worked.  I am using the trunk SVN code, so it's a bit more up-to-date than the latest packaged release, but this means that scripts designed for the packaged versions may not work. (This specific script had a problem finding the correct directory to store the album art, so all the album art was stored in the root directory, overwriting itself with each album.)

Luckily, I know just enough SQL and Perl to be dangerous, so I whipped up a few changes to his code that fixed my problem (after exploring the new database format). The updated script is here if anybody needs it.

UPDATE: I also added features that allow you to run the script multiple times (if an albumart.jpg file already exists, it will skip that album) and improved the searching (if "album by artist" is not found, it will try searching by "album" name only).

Updated New File: amazon_album_art_scraper.txt (Thanks to Mike Wilson for updates to Amazon’s HTML!)

OLD FILE: Amazon Album Art Scraper Script

PaperBackSwap.com is a service that I have used for the last several months and find extremely useful. They give you credits for sending a paperback to other members, and allow you to use your credits to request paperbacks. They also provide an easy to print mailing label and you can pay them to add delivery confirmation and/or postage to the labels.

When you first sign up, you get 3 free credits when you list 9 books with them as "avaliable" for other members to request, even before anybody requests the books! This allows you to request a few books before other members have requested yours.  I've personally traded at least fifty books using the website, and am very happy with it!

Unfortunately, as of  October 5th, 2007 they will change their policy and only give new members 2 free credits when they list 10 books on the site. So, if you are considering joining, you really should do it before October 5th!

Using directions from Felipe Alfaro Solana, I set up an encrypted home directory in Ubuntu 7.04. I only had one problem, that exhibited an error message as follows:

Command failed: Incompatible libdevmapper 1.02.08 (2006-07-17)(compat) and kernel driver

This was caused by the dm_mod module not being loaded. I fixed it for the session by issuing a  modprobe dm_mod command, and fixed it forever by adding dm_mod to my /etc/modules file.

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A list of the channels easily avaliable with a small amplified Radio Shack antenna from the Decatur Area:

• 2-1 -WSB-DT – ABC
• 2-2 (Blank, no signal)
• 5-1 WAGA – Fox HD
• 5-2 WAGA – Fox SD
• 11-1 WXIA-D NBC-HD
• 11-2 WXIA-D (NBC Weather, All the time!)
• 14-(1,2,3,4) – Ion subchannels.
• 17 – WTBS-HD – TBS
• 30-1 – PBS
• 36- WATL-D -MyATL
• 43-1 WUPA – CW
• 46-1 – WGCL-HD CBS

My new Motorola RAZR V3xx phone is Cingular branded, which means that Cingular has added many money making links to it ("Shop Cingular!") and have hidden some of the nicer features that Motorola originally built into the phone. For example, Cingular has hidden the IMAP4/POP3/SSL email client that is built into the phone. Luckily for me, by changing a few bits in the phone's memory I can re-enable the features I want. I have already fixed Java on my phone so that Google Maps doesn't ask for permission to access the network every time I zoom or scroll, which is another hack I recommend you do to your V3XX phone. Now I will describe the SEEM edit I made.

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I have a Motorola cell phone, and when it is plugged into my linux laptop via a USB cable it appears as a /dev/ttyACM0 device. (Unless I already have an ACM device plugged in, then it appears as /dev/ttyACM1).  BUT, it's much nicer to be able to point my phone programs (such as kmobiletools and moto4lin) at a logical device, such as /dev/mobile where the number won't change than to point it at the kernel device name.

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If, for some reason your linux computer won't boot, it could be because the bootloader has gotten correupted.  If you are using GRUB, a few things could have gone wrong, but I will describe how to do a complete re-install of grub, and then set up the boot menu again. The system I was working on was Ubuntu 6.10. Continue reading →

http://linux-wless.passys.nl/ has a very nice list of many different wifi adapters (PCI PCMCIA & USB) and their driver support status on Linux.

For the last month I have been able to boot and run my laptop's Windows partition from inside a vmware server that runs under my (dual boot) Mandriva Linux partition. This is very useful when I need to run something in windows but don't want to shut down Linux and reboot.

I found the instructions on Scott Bronson's blog  to be accurate and complete!

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PaperBackSwap.com is a website for people who want to trade paperback (and other) books. It allows you to post the list of books you have available to send. When somebody sees a book they want, they send you a "credit" to mail it to them. You can then use the credit to order a different book from any other member. (You also get a few free credits when you sign up and post your first nine books.)

I've been using this service for two months and have been quite happy with the process. They make sending books very easy with ready-to-print address labels (that double as book mailers). They will soon be adding the ability to print postage directly on the address labels, which will make sending books even easier.