NTS:: Aureal brand Infrared remote

Here's where to get the instructions for the patch to get this "Computer Remoter Control" "P-01RN" working.

NTS:: XBMC + MP3 playback

This took some checking to find, and it's kinda counter-intuitive... do not, not ever, use Crossfade in XBMC if you want MP3 playback to work with a guri el-cheapo spdif soundcard to work under XBMC.

Under Crunchbang 9.01, avoid PulseAudio, ALSA works just fine, thanks very much - here's my asound.conf if you're in the same boat as I was:

pcm.dmixer {
type dmix
ipc_key 1024
ipc_key_add_uid false
ipc_perm 0660
slave {
pcm "hw:0,1"
rate 48000
channels 2
format S32_LE
period_time 0
period_size 1024
buffer_time 0
buffer_size 4096
}
}

pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "dmixer"
}

NTS:: #! setup

CrunchBang is my favourite Linux distro, and I have it running on my fileserver, which is running on a paltry 256Mb of RAM.

I discovered after poking around how to shutdown OpenBox properly, without the whole sudo shutdown problem (I found it would hang, and power-off). This script allows me to power-off once downloads are complete, using auto-shutdown, together with DownThemAll.

#/bin/bash
#
let wait_time=$1*60
echo "will shutdown in $1 minutes"
sleep $wait_time
gdm-control --shutdown && openbox --exit
exit 0

One of the things I've got going nicely is DropBox, which normally works well under Nautilus, so not really so good on OpenBox. DropBox works well following the instructions on the OpenBox wiki.

NTS: SMP8635

There seems to be plenty of software out there to build a firmware - there's various places to look, but I think there's a complete picture between them:

http://b-rad.cc/wdlxtv/
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=1001&sid=112&lang=en
http://www.networkedmediatank.com/download/firmware/nmt/gpl/gpl.htm
http://wiki.opentvix.com/Sigma_Tools
http://www.wdtvc.com/downloads/
http://download.opentvix.com/

I've asked MagicTV NZ (aka HookTech), and they're in contact with Hong Kong, and hopefully trying to get the code from PixelMagic. It would be nice if there were media player abilities on this box:
... but I'm worried I'll brick the box in the process (and fall out of favour in the process!).

Slippery slope for linked data

I've been wondering for a while how to create a platform that used linked data natively.

There are plenty of platform building options which understand ordinary relational databases, but, for my requirements, there's nothing like Yii with a linked-data backend.

Anyway, I'd really like to see an OpenURL resolver re-use the data by making the requests it's given available as linked open data, in much the same way as SFX exposes it's data for other purposes, such as the bX service.

I also hope I can see a time when publishers, or a body representing them (CrossRef)will make the metadata for the articles they produce freely available, like Nature Publishing... hell, a lot of them expose their content to Google, so why not maximise their exposure via other means?

CrossRef Labs - worth a look!

If you work in the "information space", then it's nice to know that CrossRef have some developmental services, but there's one, (okay, two), in particular that I really like the look of:

1. Metadata Search complete with an OpenSearch plugin. This is not, of course a complete "search": "Instead, CrossRef Metadata Search is focused on allowing researchers to lookup citations using only terms that might appear in the bibliographic metadata of the item they are searching for."
2. an undocumented aspect which I discovered which is a more RESTful service providing the metadata for a given DOI. This is of the form: http://api.labs.crossref.org/{DOI}.xml

txtckr stage 1

Well, I've just committed a batch of updates to txtckr, which has finally moved beyond a mix of php & pseudo-php to a stage where I run it on a laptop without any errors (with the included very simple test).

It's almost at the stage of adding the finishing touches to the name handling, where the various openurl name parts get humpty-dumptied again. It's just skeleton coding at this stage, but hopefully a pretty sound basis for what's to come!