AGP44 : "Knightwise Intro Fail".
Apr 12Guest Spot on the Aussie Geek Podcast. Every 2 weeks I sit in as a regular co-host on the Aussiegeek podcast. A podcast featuring a Canadian, an Australian and a Belgian geek (me) who talk about the latest news in technology, rave about new applications, websites and services and have friendly (but not always family safe) banter. If you want to tune in feel free to listen to the episode. Visit the AGP Website for more information and the shownotes or subscribe to the AUSSIE GEEK PODCAST FEED below. This week we talk geeky about Linux, Apple, Google, Microsoft and more. I blooper up so bad that I get the show named after me and everybody ELSE thinks is funny. Want to see this podcaster stumble ? “Check out Aussie Geek podcast 44 : Knightwise intro fail”
Listen.
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Wookie the Chew needs some help.
Apr 12James Hance, The name won’t ring a bell I presume, but I bet when you see the picture below, you might have an idea who i’m talking about. James’ art has surfaced all over the internet here and there and kind of clings to you in a geeky-romantic and endearing way. This man has the power to capture simple beauty and “relentless cheerfulness” in subjects that weren’t ‘intended’ to be that way.
That trait is something James is going to need in the next couple of months as his six year old daughter (who won me over by posing with a giant lightsaber) is sick. Medical bills are high and James is looking for help. You can go over to his site and donate, and if you’re over there check out James’ wonderful artwork. As a bit sci-fi geek I love some of the prints he has put up there, and some of the crossovers he makes turn me into a big softie. I mean : a Scout trooper hugging a pet AT-AT ? How cool is that.
So, check out his website, and consider making a donation for this little sweet kid. You can even write her a cool message to cheer her up. And while you are there, browse through the ‘endearing’ gallery of prints, paintings and his illustrations for “wookie the Chew” and if they make YOU smile, why not return the favor to the little girl.
Links : http://www.jameshance.com/
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Twidge : Automating twitter from the command line.
Apr 10
Today we take a quick look at another command line gem i’ve found over the last few weeks and that has been giving me quite a bit of joy. TWIDGE is the name of command line twitter client / command to read and update your tweets. But with most “command line tools” you can use some creative thinking to get a whole lot more out of them. fyi : commands are in bold font.
First of all : Lets start out by taking a look at the basic options.
twidge setup After installing Twidge, use this command to setup your account and enter your username and password credentials. Be sure to have a browser standing by, since you Twidge will setup your own API key on the twitter service and you’ll need to enter that into the setup process.
twidge update “your tweet” The simplest way to ‘tweet your tweet’
twidge lsrecent : For the latest 20 updates from your friends stream.
twidge lsrecent -su : Same thing but only the updates you haven’t read.
twidge lsreplies : This command will give all your @replies.
twidge lsdm : Your latest DM messages.
twidge follow knightwise : this wil let you follow us.
twidge unfollow knightwise : this command you’ll probably never use.
twidge lsfollowers : Who is following you
twidge lsfollowing : Who are you following
Now with some simple bash scripts that you can even schedule via a cron command you can automate tweets. For example I have written a script that goes something like this.
echo “good morning interwebs” | twidge update this script runs every morning at about 5.30 to wish all of you guy good morning. By that time i’m already up and running, but am way too groggy to do that manually. Its of course not meant as spam or something, just a little way to let technology work for me.
I’ve also setup a separate twitter account for our home server. I’ve made the tweets ‘protected’ and i’m the only one ‘following’ this account. This allows me to have my server report things like diskspace and uptime every day. The scripts look like this.
fortune | twidge update This command gives me a daily ‘fortune cookie’ text. I use this tweet just to have my server preform a “ping of life” to my twitter feed.
uptime | twidge update With this command I get a daily report of the average load of my server
df -ah /dev/sda6 | tail -1 | twidge update This command gives me a (condensed) report about the amount of diskspace I have available on my backup drive
There are plenty of simple ways using standard linux commands and pipe outputs to make geeky combination with Twidge. I also put an echo “i’m done” twidge update line under some of the automated scripts I run , that way I’m always in tune with what my server is up to.
Weird ? yes, Practical ? maybe, Geeky ? Sure ! I know its dorky but why not give your home server a little more “personallity” by having it tweet to YOU instead of having to and look for them. Just make sure you don’t write lame twitter scripts that annoy your friends. Keep any automated tweets you do to a minimum. ( Full disclosure : I do two or three automated ones a day at time intervals where some of the fans of the show are awake and i’m asleep. It has to do with planetary rotation and timezones). But aside from that ? echo “have fun with twidge” | twidge update
Links.
Ultimate Geek Stuff : The twidge manual.
If you are still on Ubuntu 10.10 best download the Twidge .deb package here.
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Bandwith problems.
Apr 10
Hey guyz, girls, time for a little service announcement regarding some bandwith issues we’ve had over the last 2 weeks. Doing a podcast is a lot of work but its also a lot of fun. However it does require a website AND a place to plop down all of those podcasts AND screencasts. Now if you only do ONE show and then podfade, you can host your entire podcasting enviroment on a USB stick, but thats not practical AND we are NOT podfading. So with 50 podcasts and 25 screencasts on the interwebs we need a little more then just a USB stick. Thanx to BLEUHOST we managed to get a place on the web where we could our files in “Unlimited storage with Unlimited bandwit
h” for 80 bucks a year ! Sweet ! However erm .. that “Unlimited Bandwith” promise went away a few weeks ago. So now the site is capped at a bandwith speed of 10mbits. Superfine if its just watching the articles and stuff, but when downloading the 400 megabyte files of the average screencast .. not so fine. Especially if ALL of your podcatchers are doing that at the same time. Suddenly “download times” are going up from minutes to hours and .. well we all know you cant wait for your weekly dose of KWTV THAT long.
So we are going to preform some maintenance and see if we can move the “hosting” of the video files to VIMEO ( This is the same online service we use for streaming the files on the site ) and see If i can still get the files to your podcatchers.
So if all goes well you’ll be getting a “maintenance” episode in your feed the coming week. I’ll try to work up something short to keep your entertained. Thanx again everybody for being so patient with the download speeds and bandwith issues, we’ll do our very best to get it all solved as soon as possible.
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KWTV225 : "Reviewing the Motorola Xoom".
Apr 09This week we take a look at one of the touted “Ipad Killers” : the Motorola Xoom. We turn this 10.1 inch Tablet running Android Honeycomb 3.01 inside out, check out the hardware , the software and see how it measures up to other tablets on the Market.
Shownotes.
