Archive for January, 2010

Google Reader Shared Items For January 26, 2010

Posted in Computers on January 26th, 2010 by hurt – Be the first to comment

Gotta Love Tea: Creamy Nut Oolong

Posted in Tea on January 19th, 2010 by hurt – Be the first to comment

I have always been a avid tea drinker from a very young age, as far back as I can remember I have had at least 1 tea a day. Not sure why my parents thought it was fine for me to drink tea at such a young age, but I don’t think it hurt me any in the end.

Tea in my home growing up was always Red Rose tea, and Tea at my Nanna’s was always Tetley. Out of the two I much prefer Red Rose tea. Being a fan of tea and drinking a lot of it, I have always wanted to try different kinds of tea. Loose leaf tea offers the best way to do this and for xmas I asked someone made this possible with a Teaopia Tea Master Starter set. Day one having the Teamaster I used it at least 5 times and tried all the different teas that it had come with.. Since then I have calmed down and during the week use it once a day and on weekends use it on avg twice a day. while trying the many teas I thought it would be interesting to track the teas I have tried and which once I liked. I am by no means a Tea Conosur, so this will be for my own record of which teas I should keep in stock and which ones to never get again.

I will start with the one I am drinking right now…

Creamy Nut Oolong

Creamy Nut Oolong

Creamy Nut Oolong as teaopia describes it:

This high grade Chinese Oolong contains apple pieces, caramel bits, almond pieces, safflower, sunflower, mallow flower and natural aromas. This delicious Oolong is a nut lover’s delight. The natural inherent nuttiness of the Chinese Oolong combined with the addition of almonds and caramel make this tea a must try. Great for multiple infusions, infuse the first cup for under one minute, and the second and third infusions at 1.5 minutes.

This is the first Oolong tea I have every had, but I have been having it the past two nights after dinner. It is not a very strong tea, but I do like a very small amount of milk it it. You can smell and taste the Almonds in it over everything. I would not want to drink this first thing in the morning, but as a afternoon or evening tea it’s very good.

Recommended brewing time from Teaopia for Oolong Teas is 4 min (They say a min in the above from the site), but I like to let this one sit for 5 to get a little more of the flavour from it.

Dual Location MPD File Stores

Posted in Computers on January 11th, 2010 by hurt – Be the first to comment

I run a mpd server on my laptop as I like the gmpc music client. I use my laptop both at work and home. When I am at home I have my laptop on the dock most of the time and my music is located on my file server under a directory /storage/music/. This is normally mounted to /mnt/storage/music. When I am at work I have a little media system that holds all my music in the folder /media/music. Up till today I was using to separate gmpc profiles and having to switch them manual. This created havoc if the mount point was not mounted when mpd started up.

Since both music directories on the servers contain the same music with the same file layout, I decided to write a quick little script to correct this and make playing music at home and work as simple as possible.

First I wanted to run my script on boot up of the system.

This use to be done with a bootmisc file located in /etc/… Not sure why this is gone in this day and age but I found a nice little howto and will break it down short for you.

as root:

touch /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh

chmod +x /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh

update-rc.d bootmisc.sh start 20 2 .

The above few lines will create a file called bootmisc.sh in /etc/init.d/ that you can put some handy bash commands in to run on startup. Good for more than just setting up mpd how you want auto magically.

Next we need to make our script to load mpd depending on our location


ifconfig | grep '172.16.10.'

if [ "$?" = "0" ]; then
mount 192.168.0.2:/storage/music /home/richard/Music
/etc/init.d/mpd restart
/etc/init.d/mpdscribble restart
fi

ifconfig | grep '192.168.0.'

if [ "$?" = "0" ]; then
mount 192.168.0.2:/storage/music /home/richard/Music
/etc/init.d/mpd restart
/etc/init.d/mpdscribble restart
fi

Paste the above in your bootmisc.sh file we created and setup mpd to load the music from the default ubuntu ~/Music folder on your system.

To explain the above a little I will just say that it will check for you ip address, and depending on which ip address you have issue the mount command for the server it needs. Anyone that knows basic Bash should be able to figure out how to change this to what they need, but if you stumble across this and really need it to work and have no clue what needs to be done just leave a comment and I will try to explain this a little more.

I am loving the boot up and play my tunes from a remote server with no mounting or restarting of mpd! :)

Good Haul of Classic Video Games This Weekend

Posted in General on January 10th, 2010 by hurt – Be the first to comment

Got a good haul of some classic games this weekend.

SNES:

Super Return of the Jedi
Super Empire Strikes Back
Castlevaina Dracula X

N64:

Mace: The Dark Ages
Wipeout 64

Playstation:

Army Men Collectors Edition (Army Men: 3D, Army Men: Air Attack, In Army Men: Sarge’s Heroes).

Weekend Classic Game Haul

Weekend Classic Game Haul

I Hate My Work Mailbox

Posted in General on January 3rd, 2010 by hurt – 2 Comments
Work Inbox

Work Inbox

Guess I should have not gone all weekend with out looking at my Work Inbox.