This week I received a logitech squeezebox radio, which is basically an expensive toy that allows you to listen to either "internet radio", or music streamed from your own PC via a portable device that accesses the network wirelessly.
The main goal of this purchase was to allow us to listen to media stored on a local computer in the bedroom, or living-room.
The hardware scans your network looking for a media server, so the first step is to install that:
- The slimdevices wiki has decent information.
- Or you can find the code on github.com.
The media-server has a couple of open ports; one for streaming the media, and one for a user-browsable HTML interface. Interestingly the radio-device shows up in the web-interface, so you can mess around with the currently loaded playlist from your office, while your wife is casually listening to music in the bedroom. (I'm not sure if that's a feature or not yet ;)
Although I didn't find any alternative server-implementations I did find a software-client which you can use to play music from the central server - slimp3slave - and again you can push playlists, media, etc, to this.
My impressions are pretty positive; the device was too expensive, certainly I wouldn't buy two, but it is functional. The user-interface is decent, and the software being available and open is a big win.
Downsides? No remote-control for the player, because paying an additional £70 is never going to happen, but otherwise I can't think of anything.
(Shame the squeezebox product line seems to have been cancelled (?))
Procmail Alternatives?Although I did start hacking a C & Lua alternative, it looks like there are enough implementations out there that I don't feel so strongly any more.
I'm working in a different way to most people, rather than sort mails at delivery time I'm going to write a trivial daemon that will just watch ~/Maildir/.Incoming, and move mails out of there. That means that no errors will cause mail to be lost at SMTP/delivery time.
I'm going to base my work on Email::Filter since it offers 90% of the primitives I want. The only missing thing is the ability to filter mails via external commands which has now been reported as a bug/omission.
Tags: audio, github, perl, procmail, random, squeezebox, streaming 10 comments