whatever happened, happened

Recently I decided to adopt cmus as my full time music player. For those haven’t heard of it, cmus is “a small, fast, and powerful console music player for Unix-like OS”. Oh, and it supports FLAC, too.

This is intended to be a collection of tips and tricks to make cmus play nice with your normal workflow. HUGE DISCLAIMER: Having used cmus for only couple of weeks, I’m not yet intimately familar with it, so please take this with a grain of salt.

My assumption is that you’re running OS X, use homebrew to install cmus, replace the default Terminal app with iTerm 2, and is able to program your keyboard macros with tools like Keyboard Maestro.

The cmus tutorial does a good job of introducing you to cmus, so I also assume you have installed cmus and added your music to its library.

Add F-keys support

I used Keyboard Maestro to add F-keys support: F10 to go back to previous track, F11 to play/pause current track, F12 to forward to the next track. Similar to how iTunes works, if I press F11 when cmus isn’t running, it’ll be launched in a new iTerm tab.

I also customized F9 to display a notification listing the current track information (name, album, artist).

The “Previous Track” macro:

• Triggered by this hot key: F10
• Will execute: Shell Script (text script, ignore results)

The “Next Track” macro:

• Triggered by this hot key: F12
• Will execute: shell script (text script, ignore results)

The “Play/Pause” macro:

• Triggered by this hot key: F11

• Will execute:

  • If condition:

    • The shell script text

    • result is not

      [leave this blank]

  • execute: shell script (text script, ignore results)

  • otherwise: execute AppleScript (text script, ignore results)

The “Current Track Notification” macro:

You need to install the terminal-notifier gem for this.

• Triggered by this hot key: F9

• Will execute: shell script (text script, ignore results)

Add last.fm support

Use the last-cmus plugin.

toastr:

Naked Beer

(via mmminimal)

For some strange reasons, I had to part with my iPhone 4, and chose to switch to another platform while waiting for the next iPhone’s imminent launch. I picked Windows Phone 7 and bought a Nokia Lumia 710 to go with it.

There’s not much to talk about the phone itself. Being a low price model, its build quality is subpar; the plastic case feels cheap, and the screen quickly attracts smudges and dirts. The speaker isn’t well placed, so listening to music loudly is a bad option. The camera is so-so. That said, I don’t expect much from the hardware; if I want something impressive, I’d go with the 800 or 900 model. The 710 one is a bang for the buck, and I appreciate that.

The absolute downer is that Lumia 710’s battery drains WAY faster than I expect. A full recharge lasts me only slightly more than half a day. Bummer.

Windows Phone 7, on the other hand, is refreshing to use. In terms of UI, it looks nothing like other platforms. Live tiles, panoramic views, typography-base UI are nice to look at. The way social networks are integrated deeply into the system makes it really useful for information junkie like me. I love the ability to link profiles from different networks to a contact, and check out that person’s updates in one place.

Good things end there though. The platform is pretty much in its infancy, much like iOS 2.x back in the days. Basic functionalities like multi-tasking, orientation lock, and screenshot capture (!) are missing. Built-in Vietnamese typing method is nowhere to be found. It’s easy to mistype. IE sucks. And after a while, the ‘flat’ interface feels tiring. I have no idea if a tap is registered or not, and with Lumia 710’s low performance, it means repeated tapping is necessary to ensure things happen.

Come to think of it, the main drawing point of iOS is its abundant supply of high quality apps. Windows Phone 7 has its own marketplace, but the number of choices are severely limited. There’s no Tweetbot-level Twitter app, nor Reeder-class Google Reader app. Paid apps leave many things to desire. Official apps like Facebook are slow and unresponsive as hell (not that the iOS version is better).

I travel to and back from work in the tube 1 hour a day, which means I need a large dose of readings to kill the time. Normally I will catch up with last night’s Twitter stream, Google Reader’s unread items, and Instapaper’s queue. Best alternatives I’ve found so far on Windows Phone are rowi, NextGen Reader, and Articles for Instapaper. While they provide the basic necessity, I miss the refinement that iOS apps bring. For example, there’s no quick way to send a tweeted link to Instapaper, nor the possibility to archive/delete Instapaper articles offline. It severely limits my workflow. I’m forced to find another pastime on the go: listening to podcasts. Again, the best app I could find, WPodder, is no Instacast.

As for games, Microsoft builds some free ones for Windows Phone, but they’re riddled with ads. I wish I could pay to remove them — I’d rather pay than looking at those (admittedly unobtrusive) ads. In the end I settle with only one game: Angry Birds.

The nice thing about Windows Phone’s Marketplace that I really appreciate is the ability to try an app before buying; I wish that would come to iOS eventually. Having to buy a bunch of similar apps only to try and find the suitable one is painful.

All in all, I find Windows Phone more like a toy platform than a serious one (at least in the current state). I can’t wait to get back to using iOS.

Tumblr’s new Spotify & SoundCloud integration is AWESOME.

writingkitblog:

Freshly baked GIF detailing Writing Kit 3.1 features by your truly.

Check for Updates if you haven’t done so — 3.1 is awesome!

fuckyeahlost:

LOST valentines, part 4.

writingkitblog:

The first thing you will notice in this 3.0 update is the brand new app icon. Under the hood, Writing Kit 3.0 is a major release that helps refine many of the app’s powerful features, make them more friendly and easier to use.

Let’s go through each of them in brief details.

My latest major update to Writing Kit is out. Check it out, guys.

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From the guy who made Trainyard.

Couple of days ago I noticed that MAMP Pro seems to have problems with Lion: The Apache server couldn’t be started at all. Googling the problem revealed that I was certainly not alone.

I managed to track down the problem to be with the unique_id_module. Simply disable it in the control panel fixed the issue.

seifestattgel:

Alter Scheiß, aber immer wieder gut…

sunaorlater:

this is amazing!

(Source: 9gaga)