Thu Jan 24 21:39:12 EST 2008
Buying Off the Middle Class
Now, don't get me wrong here, I sure appreciate that the government is giving
us some money to help "stimulate the economy". I will sure but it to good use.
However, I can't help but feel like they are simply trying to buy off the
middle class. All it seems to take is a fist full of cash waved in front of
our eyes and we fail to notice things like the richest of us getting taxed at
about 15% while the rest of us get socked with 25% to 30%. Or the fact that
this thing also comes with an extension of the tax cuts already in place. You
know, the ones that already favor the rich? How about we try this out for an
idea? Lets tax the rich at 25% to 30% and the rest of us at 15%? Wouldn't
that put more money in the governments coffers for programs to benefit all and
also put more money more consistently in the middle classes pockets? If the
middle class drives the economy as I've read around the net then wouldn't it
make more sense to increase the buying power of the middle rather than just
give them a one time pay-off? I'm no economist but this strikes me as a
shortsighted solution to a long term problem.
My personal plan is to take this money if/when it arrives to pay off any credit cards we have and then put the rest away for if/when the economy tanks for real.
Now, I've done it. I've made a post about politics. These usually get some good comments.
My personal plan is to take this money if/when it arrives to pay off any credit cards we have and then put the rest away for if/when the economy tanks for real.
Now, I've done it. I've made a post about politics. These usually get some good comments.
Fri Jan 18 21:20:33 EST 2008
Baby Praying Mantis
I just saw the coolest thing in my own living room. I'm sitting here at my
laptop and suddenly I feel something crawling on my arm. I normally just flick
whatever bug I see off or sqash it with a tissue, but this time I notices it
was a baby praying mantis. It was about 1/4in long but otherwise looked like a
miniature version of the 6" adult I saw this past summer.
I should have tried taking a picture but I doubt my camera will make a clear picture of something that small. So I just took it outside and left it go. I know it may be a bit cold for them but it's better than squashing it and I doubt my wife would be happy letting any bug grow up in the house like a pet. :P
I should have tried taking a picture but I doubt my camera will make a clear picture of something that small. So I just took it outside and left it go. I know it may be a bit cold for them but it's better than squashing it and I doubt my wife would be happy letting any bug grow up in the house like a pet. :P
Sat Jan 12 12:38:58 EST 2008
Home Music Server
This is sort of old news but I thought I'd share a little project I've done at
home.
The CD player on the living room stereo finally died, well mostly. It plays sometimes, other times it doesn't. So, rather than replacing it I decided it would be time to be able to play the tunes from my computer downstairs on the stereo upstairs. I was previously using gnump3d to stream music at work, but due to a sever security flaw I decided it was time to drop it and try something new. After asking around it was suggested I take a look at Slimserver. It's commercially developed, GPL'd, and has a slew of features. It runs fairly well but seems not as stable as gnump3d. I've had to restart the daemon a couple times a week. It is designed to work with hardware that they sell (price range from $300 to about $1000) but will work with most any player. I've tried winamp, xmms, and amarok.
Setting up the server software isn't that hard as there are packages for most popular distributions at the download site. It also run on Windows and Mac which is cool. If you run Slackware there is a slackbuild available at slackbuilds.org. Once that's installed you just connect whatever player you choose to run to the stream at http://<serverip>:9000/stream.mp3.
As far as getting the music up to the stereo I went as frugal as I could. Rather than buying a Slimdevice of some sort I just used a spare small form factor PC I had around that has integrated wireless. It's small enough to fit behind a speaker of the stereo. It's running Slackware 12.0 (any distro will do) and connected automatically on boot to the stream with mplayer. I'm not sure how to do such thing with Windows but the way I did it was to write a small script and call it in my rc.local. The goal was to have it connect on boot and automatically retry connecting if it lost connection to the stream. I put the script below somewhere in my path and called it start_mplayer. I'm sure it could be improved by someone who actually know scripting well but it seems to work. Of course, the username, password, and IP address aren't real.
Finally, in my rc.local I put:
This works pretty well for the most part. Like I said, I have to restart the slimserver daemon a couple of times a week. The client computer also looses it's wireless connection about once a day. The client issue is probably because the wireless chipset it has is not supported well under Linux.
The CD player on the living room stereo finally died, well mostly. It plays sometimes, other times it doesn't. So, rather than replacing it I decided it would be time to be able to play the tunes from my computer downstairs on the stereo upstairs. I was previously using gnump3d to stream music at work, but due to a sever security flaw I decided it was time to drop it and try something new. After asking around it was suggested I take a look at Slimserver. It's commercially developed, GPL'd, and has a slew of features. It runs fairly well but seems not as stable as gnump3d. I've had to restart the daemon a couple times a week. It is designed to work with hardware that they sell (price range from $300 to about $1000) but will work with most any player. I've tried winamp, xmms, and amarok.
Setting up the server software isn't that hard as there are packages for most popular distributions at the download site. It also run on Windows and Mac which is cool. If you run Slackware there is a slackbuild available at slackbuilds.org. Once that's installed you just connect whatever player you choose to run to the stream at http://<serverip>:9000/stream.mp3.
As far as getting the music up to the stereo I went as frugal as I could. Rather than buying a Slimdevice of some sort I just used a spare small form factor PC I had around that has integrated wireless. It's small enough to fit behind a speaker of the stereo. It's running Slackware 12.0 (any distro will do) and connected automatically on boot to the stream with mplayer. I'm not sure how to do such thing with Windows but the way I did it was to write a small script and call it in my rc.local. The goal was to have it connect on boot and automatically retry connecting if it lost connection to the stream. I put the script below somewhere in my path and called it start_mplayer. I'm sure it could be improved by someone who actually know scripting well but it seems to work. Of course, the username, password, and IP address aren't real.
killall mplayer
mplayer -user USERNAME -passwd PASSWORD http://123.45.67.89:9000/stream.mp3
if [ $? = 0 ]; then
start_mplayer
fi
The idea is that it kills all instances of mplayer just to make sure no extra
mplayer processes are running taking up resources. It runs mplayer and
connects to the stream. If mplayer exits with an error it restarts itself.
Finally, in my rc.local I put:
/usr/bin/start_mplayer 2> /dev/null 1> /dev/null &There is a 1/8" audio to RCA cable I had laying around that I think I bought at RadioShack ages ago that connects the PC's sound card to the CD in line of the stereo. Now I just choose what I want to play from my laptop and it come out of the stereo.
This works pretty well for the most part. Like I said, I have to restart the slimserver daemon a couple of times a week. The client computer also looses it's wireless connection about once a day. The client issue is probably because the wireless chipset it has is not supported well under Linux.