As a part of my conversion from Linux to Mac OS X, I’ve noticed a few problems with the Terminal app. While in Linux, the Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys all worked correctly. In Mac OS X, they Page Up/Down effected the scroll back, rather than sending the keys to nano for example. End and Home did nothing at all.
Terminal > Preferences > Settings > Keyboard
Use the “send string to shell” option for each key.
| Home | \033[1~ |
| End | \033[4~ |
| Page Up | \033[5~ |
| Page Down | \033[6~ |
I’ve solved part of the problem: Subsonic can stream music to my Android phone, iPad, and computer (via a website). They have a native Linux client, as the software is written in Java it must have been simple to provide cross platform support.
They provide:
No matter how large your music collection, you can stream it to your mobile device in real time over the cellular network.
While they claim to be an Open Source project, Subsonic is really open source donationware. Ads are displayed in the web interface and streaming to mobile devices is given as a 30 day trial until you make a donation of at least 10 euros (which at least is a reasonable price). I should note that the license is for the server software, not the client, so once you have the server software installed any number of clients can connect.
While I think it’s a good idea to donate to open source projects, I don’t like how Subsonic forces people to donate. So three minutes into the source code, I found this:
public boolean isLicenseValid(String email, String license) {
if (email == null || license == null) {
return false;
}
// Little point in doing anything more fancy, since there are
// easier ways to disable the nag messages.
return license.equalsIgnoreCase(StringUtil.md5Hex(email.toLowerCase()));
}
So basically, take the md5 hash of any email address, and you have the license code.
echo -n any.email@address.com | md5sum 529df0963c44d1ee53d2d574fa311e01
The interface could use some work, but the base of the software seems pretty solid. I’ll be testing it out for the next few weeks for sure.
The idea of storing all my documents and media on a server and streaming or syncing them to my computers and devices seems like a great idea. However, I’d rather not give up control of my files to unknown servers on the internet. I’m also not interested in paying the monthly fee for hosting the 2TB+ of media in my colection.
Ubuntu One’s service seems perfect at first, and I assumed (wrongfully) that they would release the source code for their server for all too use. So scratch that idea. There’s quite a controversy about it actually.
Sparkleshare appears to be getting closer to what I want for file syncing. The used the git protocol for version control. However git is not optimized for the syncing of large binary files like media. It would work perfectly well for text though.
Tahoe – LAFS is a very interesting concept which fully encrypts the data stream and spreads it out among various servers. It still doesn’t address the problem of media streaming.
With the options I found with Google exhausted, it looks like I need to start planning my alternative system. I can use some existing open source software to build upon.
It’s going to be a long project, but perhaps someday it will be completed.
Overall I’m very happy with my shiny new Google Nexus S smartphone. Gingerbread runs very quick and feels responsive.
The keyboard works pretty well in both portrait and landscape mode. I’ve also installed the swype keyboard, which is going to take some getting used to. I don’t really like the idea that the keyboard requires network access
The camera, while good for a cell phone still is not at the same level as the iPhone 4′s camera. While some people believe the lack of 1080p video is a major problem, I think it is just a selling point for advertising. A lens that small can’t really be expected capture HD video anyway.
Three display on the Nexus S is quite excellent and usable in sunlight. I still need a good app for reading epub and PDF books. On the iPad, I used GoodReader, but I have yet to find something for Android.
While the iPhone might have a superior interface, the Android phone’s voice recognition features are very useful. One handed texting via swype works quite well now too.
My whole family also got android phones (Samsung Replenish) which they are getting used to.