I recently got a Wii as a new toy, and wanted something good to stream videos to it.
I had a look round at some of the various “Media Center” options out there, but didn’t find anything I liked, so I’m writing my own.
So far I have a working system in Perl which allows you to browse the pre-set video dir(s) and presents a list of files + folders, when you select one it then uses a Flash streaming player, and either presents the file directly if it was a .flv video, otherwise it uses ffmpeg to transcode it to FLV on the fly and stream it to the Flash player.
Finally released SMS::AQL Perl module">SMS::AQL v0.04 to CPAN last night, incorporating improvements kindly submitted by Ton Voon from Altinity. Thanks Ton!
The changes include better parsing of server responses, documentation improvements, and a new test script using Test::MockObject to exercise the module without actually interacting with AQL or sending messages. Brilliant stuff.
Altinity look to be a nice company doing Open-Source data centre management tools, and actively support Open-Source projects by contributing code and bug fixes.
I’ve decided to do a few posts about some of the cool tools and tricks I use most in my day to day usage of Linux, and I’ll start with sshfs, the SSH filesystem.
As the name might suggest, sshfs allows you to mount all or part of a remote system’s filesystem with nothing more than an SSH connection. Here’s some examples of how to use it. Continue reading sshfs – Mount a filesystem over SSH→
Just released version v0.4.0 of Lyrics::Fetcher - a Perl module to fetch song lyrics">Lyrics::Fetcher to CPAN… it’ll take a little while to be distributed to the various CPAN mirrors.
Version 0.4.0 introduces the ability to automatically try all available fetcher modules until one suceeds, or pass an arrayref of fetchers to try in order. Lyrics::Fetcher::LyricsNet has been removed from the package until it can be fixed up (the LyricsNet search doesn’t seem to work at the moment).
I bought a cheap (~£20) Logitech Quickcam Messenger to connect up to my Linux box at home to act as a basic security camera – coupled with the cunningly-titled motion detection program “motion”, it can detect movement, capture images and/or video, and execute any commands etc. (More on this setup in a future post!).
The Linux kernel now includes a quickcam_messenger driver, but it didn’t work for my camera. Checking the USB ID showed that it’s a different product ID, so they’ve changed the way the camera works, but kept the name (I wish they wouldn’t do that). I had to use the spca5xx/gspca driver. Continue reading Logitech QuickCam Messenger under Linux→
I’ve got a Samsung ML-1610 laser printer, which is a great value solid little laser printer (it was around fifty quid IIRC). Samsung even supply Linux drivers for it, which is great. However, their drivers use a GUI installer, which isn’t a lot of use if the box you’re connecting the printer to doesn’t run X (i.e. it’s a server).
For my future reference, and for anyone else who finds it useful, simple steps to get it working (for CUPS):
I bought a cheap (~£20) Logitech Quickcam Messenger to connect up to my Linux box at home to act as a basic security camera – coupled with the cunningly-titled motion detection program “motion”, it can detect movement, capture images and/or video, and execute any commands etc. (More on this setup in a future post!).