Sharper Image Bluetooth Speakers (Kubuntu)

I was able to get the Bluetooth 1.2 Wireless HI-FI Stereo Speakers to work on Linux, Kubuntu 7.10 to be a bit more exact.

I did not update or install any additional libraries.  The Sharper Image Bluetooth dongle works perfectly.  I found and followed the steps for Amarok here.

Side affects? Yup…Sometimes when another song begins to play, the sound begins playing back on my laptop speakers.  I go back into the settings and notice that they defaulted back to the non-bluetooth settings I just saved!

I haven’t found a resolution for it yet!!!

Sharper Image Bluetooth Speakers

I had been watching the Bluetooth 1.2 Wireless HI-FI Stereo Speakers at Sharper Image for some time now. Original price $200 down to $99. Priced them at Amazon too, they also had reduced them. Since I had store credit, I decided to buy them at the store. I’ve kind of grown irritated by the tiny speakers in my laptop and the other pair of speakers on my HP w22 LCD. The display looks great, but the speakers … well uh…suck! I think Talking Elmo has a better speaker in it!

Create simple ANSI based UI with Python-Newt

I stumbled across this simple UI, Python-newt.  Newt which is common to many non-graphic installs on various Linux flavors. Newt is a simplistic UI that lets a programmer specify entry fields, radio buttons, ok/cancel buttons. You name it…

The Python extension is called Snack. Read more on support here. Two examples come with the docs, showing how easy it is to assemble UI entry request pages/forms.

Linear TV’s demise?

Apple TV sells you movies and tv shows.  Tivo plays rented or purchased tv shows and movies from Amazon!

When will Comcast and the broadcast networks finally make the big plunge? It seems Comcast has in some ways.  When you watch new episodes of the final season of The Wire, you are already watching a show a week old.  Why? Because Comcast and HBO worked a deal to allow Comcast to release the episodes one week early for Comcast customers.  I was DVR’ing the show, when I realized it was being offered on Comcast’s ON DEMAND network.  So there it was, next weeks show and I just finished last week’s?

What I would like…to pay $24.95 and get to watch every episode of The Wire when I want.  Good for me to watch at my leisure over the next 30 days.

I’ve heard and known of Apple Tv.  Quite tempting.  I have netflix at home.  Convenient.  Now Tivo plays Amazon rented/purchased movies and/or tv shows.  Why am I paying for linear Tv I don’t have time to watch?

I’ve even found the few children shows my kids watch are being replayed from DVR.  Sure they catch a Sponge Bob once in a while, but they don’t like having to see if its on.  My daughter wants to watch sponge bob when she has TV time, not waste 30 mins of her TV time on something the networks want her to watch.  And she’s only four!

Why can’t I pay a monthly fee ($4.95) and get every episode of Sponge bob delivered? Maybe allow the kids to mark their favorite episodes while you shuffle new and old episodes in?

Its getting quite tempting.  I’m about to call Comcast and pull the plug.  But first I have to decide on Apple TV and/or a Tivo like device.

News? LOL…are you kidding me? We actually make sure we set channels back to kids channels, because the news has become too graphic for young children! If I need the news, I can always catch up on it via the internet.  Sorry CNN…but CNN.com sounds better and keeps my kids from stumbling across another sentence with words like bullet, murder, or rape.

What about new cartoon content, or new TV shows? How do you get someone to subscribe? The same way you do with movies.  Premier them.  Give us a free episode or two…heck even let us vote.  Why not…? 

Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon…anyone have any ideas.  Has anyone made the change already? If so, I’d like to hear your input.

LiveMarks

Pretty interesting site, LiveMarks,  I came across.

Its an AJAX site that shows you bookmarks as they get added to del.icio.us.

Show Me Do screen casts

I came across this site, Show Me Do. I must say I am quite impressed. There are a ton of instructional videos or screen-casts on the website, a lot of which cover topics I am very interested in, Python!

The first one I noticed had a kid who was showing how he used a programming environment called Rur-Ple to write and execute his very own program. That is great to see young kids very interested in tools like these. I remember when I was a kid and wrote BASIC program and saved them to a cassette tape. It seemed to take forever to write or read too the tape.

As I began pouring over the videos, I noted some were introductions into Python, IPython, or PyDB. While I use these tools, I am always willing to learn a new trick here or there that I haven’t uncovered yet.

So here is my assessment of the videos I watched, and following a list of videos I haven’t watched yet.

django + screen

I was working on a website, and quite often I open shells (I use Konsole), often leveraging the tabs Konsole has built in. But I sometimes hate having to switch tabs to see something, compare, reference etc.

My best solution was to keep Konsole windows separate. In Django I would run a konsole window on my top LCD display to display the running application (you know the ./manage.py runserver). While in a konsole window on my laptop display I would run yet another Konsole window to write code, etc.

I often use screen, but similar to tabs with Konsole, I get tired switching screens. Well there are the multiple windows in screen you can set up with a few simple keystrokes, something which I even blogged about previously. Yeah, I know its a cheap shot to link to your own blog! But I assure you, I could care less about how many visitors I get.

My latest problem with screen has been … on my laptop I reboot often. In fact, I like the idea of being able to shut down, take my laptop with me and pop it back up in a coffee shop, at my skydiving dropzone or even the library. What happens when I reboot? Screen settings are lost, and I have to reset everything back up once I turn the “machine” back on.

pyAtl January Meeting

I attended the Atlanta Python meeting tonight and discovered a few new things to help me out.

KeyJnote
KeyJnote is a fancy way to display slides during a presentation. It uses smooth transitions to create some nice effects. It uses OpenGL hardware acceleration support for the cool effects. The program is actually one file, and written in Python. I had some issues getting it to work on my laptop at first. My current version of pdftoppm would not convert the pdf pages to images. So after a bit of searching, I found if you edit the file, there are configuration settings at the top of the file. Simply setting UseGhostScript to True, resolve my issue.

I had to export a Open Office presentation to a PDF document. Then KeyJnote actually converts each page in the PDF document to an image and renders it nicely.

virtualenv
Virtual Python Environment builder…do I have to say anything else? I mean how many times have you wanted to isolate a development environment without moving libs around, re-linking, etc. The first thought that came to mind is I can now isolate customer1’s environment on my development pc separate from customer2.

buildout
Wow, after seeing virtualenv, I thought I was all set. Then we were shown buildout, what it is, what it can do for you, etc. Think of it this way. You specify what your product environment contains, and it ensures you have what you claim you should have. This includes libraries and source code. You can set this up, and hop on another machine, like a production machine and quickly update the buildout there knowing everything will just work. The required libraries are there, and so are all of your product source files.

While the latter two are Python specific. I can’t wonder how much pain it would have saved us before and would save us even today in other development worlds to have tools similar to these. I’ve seen many times what it takes to set up a new development laptop project environment. I’m not talking the tools, I’m speaking of making sure 3rd party libraries, source code and .NET libs are all installed. buildout offers a nice snapshot solution.

Of course some of us are still content with just storing things in subversion and checking them out. There is nothing wrong with this, as long as you don’t forget about that pdf library and image conversion library you needed to install. Did I mention you needed a specific version too? Sound familiar? Yah…we’ve all seen it.

All in all it was a good night. Then I struck up several conversations about Linux, developing and stuck around until midnight…crap I need to be back here in a few short hours. Time to bolt.

*One small note.  hash -r clears the memorized program locations in bash.  It caught me tonight, and luckily Bernard was there to kindly point me in the right direction!