prasun.info/blog

I wrote my first ever rss feed today. It isn’t too complicated, you just output some specially formatted xml with the right mime-type.

The motivation behind this was to replace the default feed in the “Random signatures” feature of Gmail Labs because it contained some quotes which were a little too risque for emails to professors! I wanted to use the unix fortune program, but my hosting service does not have it. There is a webpage which prints the fortune out as html. I took that url and parsed the html (this was the most irritating part because I wasn’t familiar with php regexes) and print that out as rss xml.

To check it out click on the rss icon at prasun.info or directly go to the rss url

What do you do when you have a music device but no obvious music player that syncs your player or even recognizes it as a music device (e.g. if the “device” is a USB stick or an SD card).

Well, you write your own — as long as the device supports the Mobile Storage Class (MSC) mode. I don’t know what you need to do for Media Transfer Protocol (MTP).

I just wrote a little shell scipt which is just a fancy rsync wrapper which does this for my Sandisk Sansa player (and any SD card , USB stick etc).

I use Rhythmbox (or any music player) to generate custom playlists (usually based on Artist, Genre or just Play Count) and export it in m3u file (which is just one filename per line and saves you the parsing hassle).

I then create a temp dir containing links to the actual files and sync this temp dir with the device using rsync (before which the device has to be mounted).

Grab the script here if you want to.

—
More on MTP and MSC

PS: This of course only syncs files and not metadata like play/skip count etc. But the sansa player doesn’t support that anyway

To move/delete all songs of low bitrate :
Make a playlist in Rhythmbox (or iTunes, banshee etc - any player which allows “Smart” Playlist).
Select bitrate < x as the selection criterion.

Save this playlist with an m3u extension.

On a shell type:
cat playlist.m3u | while read filename; do mv "$filename" folder/; done

ps2pdf looks at the text in a page and decides to orient it accordingly! I learnt it the hard way when I kept getting pdfs which had a page with a figure rotated.
The fix is : ps2pdf -dAutoRotatePages=/None file.ps