Well, I see that there is a gap of two years since my last blog post. Not a record, but a serious lapse nonetheless.
I'm retired from active coding now, and there have been rumblings in my subconscious telling me I should be writing. At least, it gives me an answer to the "So, what have you been doing" queries from friends and relations.
Let's see how it goes.
(Target audience: command-line fans on something Unixy, who have or will be able to find bash, vlc, curl and xmllint.)
My preferred method of music consumption is a collection-wide shuffle. My local media drive has, well, let's see...
dad@arlo:/media/dad/brick/media/music$ find . -name "*.mp3" | wc -l 65458
over 65 thousand tracks. (I've been collecting for a long time, all my vinyl is digitized, yada yada yada.) I have a script that creates a playlist of random selections from the collection, and then I open that playlist in VLC.
Quite often, an underappreciated track catches my ear, and I would like to add it to a favorites playlist. So I would flip over to the VLC window, right-click my way into the current selection's Information window, follow that with a mouse-select of the URI of the currently-playing mp3 and a paste into vim, where the favorites playlist is open.
This is why I hate GUIs.
Now, seriously, how un-Unix is that? What I need is a command-line utility that will just give me the currently-playing file, so that I can just append-pipe the filename into the favorites playlist.
So, how can I ask VLC to give me that?
Turns out, it's not too bad. VLC can be started with multiple live interfaces, one of which is HTTP. This gives us a web-based interface that can be opened in a browser, but more importantly for the task at hand, it gives us a REST API into the running VLC. And that REST API will give us an XML document describing the current playlist, including which track is currently playing.
One weird bit to note - the HTTP interface won't work unless you set a password to access it. Okay, that's not so weird, except that you don't (you cannot) set a user name, so the user name is (must be) the empty string.
The good news is that cURL handles empty-string user names just fine, by passing just a colon and password to the -u argument. Like so:
# /bin/bash # get current playing by file name curl -u :myterriblepassword http://127.0.0.1:8080/requests/playlist.xml 2>/dev/null \ | xmllint --xpath 'string(//leaf[@current="current"]/@uri)' - \ >>favorites.m3u
That's it. Feel free to improve on this in the comments.
Once my workday ends, and the MacBook relinquishes control of the starboard monitor, the ambient Chromecast slide show takes over and begins pulling from my ever-expanding online photo cache, of my own creation. A dedicated camera. A Nikon. Occasionally, one catches my eye as I hack away on the Ubuntu box on the port monitor, and I toss it into the "to be published" folder.
I should start publishing them.
Hey, this is my blog, isn't it?
Elon Musk has started an interesting chain reaction.
The Flight from Twittr (ah, remember those days, when the missing vowel was endearing) has led directly to the "alternatives-to" sections of websites filling to the brims with recommended replacements.
Early betting gives the Mastodon collective a decided edge, as it gives us a moment to step back and reconsider what a social network should be, could be, will be.
I just posted to Facebook and tweeted my Tweet with my latest nom-de-cyberverse: @jimrussell@mastodon.online
Mastodon reminds me of ILink, which was a collective of BBS's sending each other QWK packets. No one BBS owned the whole lot, but everybody had the whole lot.
Let's do this with Mastodon. This could work.
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