Kludge It

Now I need to write the notes to a file, and determine when sessions start and end. This is pretty easy - I just see if any notes have been played in two minutes. If none, it's the end of a session and I can flush to disk. PyGame.midi input events are arrays with two values: another data array, and a timestamp. I normalise the timestamps by subtracting the first timestamp from each subsequent one. The data array is: status, data1, data2, data3. For a note on, this is 144, pitch, velocity, channel. For a note off, my piano is sending 144, pitch, 0, channel. MIDIUtil looked promising for saving this, but it handles the low level note-on/note-off business - data I already have, so I'd have to do complicated stuff to reverse that, pass it to the library which would then undo it. Something simpler is needed: mxm's midi writer .

For Christmas I have been given (very kindly!) a Kawai CL26 Digital Piano. In order to feel more deserving of this amazing instrument I've been planning to record my practise session times in order to amortize the cost (in a sense). But why not simply record everything ? My USB/MIDI converter works with raspbian without any extra plugins. Then, using Pygame.midi I can see incoming MIDI information in a polling loop: import pygame.midi import time pygame.midi.init() inputKeyboard = pygame.midi.Input(3) # this is the device id for the midi input, worked out by doing # pygame.midi.get_device_info(1-n) while 1 == 1: while inputKeyboard.poll() == True: print(inputKeyboard.read(1)) time.sleep(0.001) inputKeyboard.close() pygame.midi.quit()

Problem I need to access triple-store data for a work thing, but the data I have to test with isn't in their (sesame) triple store yet. There are RDF files, though. Solution Install 4Store on a pi (I had one with a default Raspbian running because it's the mumble server). sudo apt-get install 4store ...then I set up the 4store with instructions from here : sudo 4s-backend-setup saws sudo 4s-backend saws 4s-httpd saws then import the RDF files with a convoluted command: curl --verbose --header 'Content-type: application/rdf+xml' --upload-file MSH_Thales_Trans.rdf --url 'http://localhost:8080/data/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.purl.org%2Fsaws%2Fontology%23' (for each file - the url is the saws url encoded, the .rdf bit was done for each file). Then fix the RDF, because rapper rejects it all. To validate the RDF I used this: http://www.rdfabout.com/demo/validator/ Okay, now I can see things on the pi: http:// <pi ip address...

Problem:  Skype kind of sucks for games night things. Potential Solution: People have suggested ventrilo, etc., but murmur (the mumble server) will run on a raspberry pi. As I have a few of them, I reimaged an SD card with the newest raspbian, then followed the instructions here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=8615 If I put it in the DMZ, hopefully people from outside Nerdvana should be able to connect to it. It supports positional audio for games - I wonder if I could make a plugin that would just allow you to set your position, so that we could be around a virtual table with positional audio? ...Looks like there is: Mumble comes with a plugin for manually positioning audio. http://mumble.sourceforge.net/Games#Manual_Positional_Audio_Plugin

There's a Chrome extension called Play To XBMC which adds a little button that will send a YouTube, Vimeo, or CollegeHumor video to XBMC - provided you have the YouTube plugin installed. This is a lot more convenient that using XBMC to search directly, if you don't have a keyboard plugged into the XBMC box. The XBMC iPlayer plugin suffers from the same problem that browsing/searching aren't easy without a keyboard, so I wondered if I could make a chrome extension that would do the same for iPlayer. Chrome extensions are packages of javascript, html, and image files that get unpacked by Chrome when they're installed. You make a Manifest file (which is a JSON file) that tells Chrome what icons to include, what sort of package it is, etc. The Play To XBMC extension is a browser one - the button is always there. I made mine page specific - it only appears on valid iPlayer episode pages. You do this by putting in a javascript page that runs in the background every time ...

Since the 700 Mhz Raspberry Pi runs XBMC perfectly, I wondered if it would be possible to run it usefully on the G3 PPC iMac that we have lying around. With two devices, I could also do multi-room music syncing, which might be useful if I have a party coming up, perhaps. To get Linux on a PPC iMac, you need to get a Debian PPC installer , and burn it onto a USB key. To get into Open Firmware, you start up the machine with the CMD + OPT + O + F keys - I spent a long time not getting this right because I didn't know which keys CMD and OPT were. The CMD key is the one with the quad cloverleaf, and the OPT is alt key (which has the strange jumping-line symbol as well). Open Firmware will boot a Debian PPC install USB with the command: boot usb1/disk@1:2,\\yaboot (If this doesn't work, the devices might be wrong. Use dev / ls and devalias to find them out). Then at the boot: prompt you type install url=mintppc.org ..and that installs mint from the internet. Then ...

Problem:  I want to send JSON-RPC commands to XBMC on my Raspberry Pi. The XBMC install on there will allow JSON-RPC commands from the local box or a remote box, but I've passworded it. The easiest way to talk to the RPC interface through python appears to be using the python-jsonrpc library from here . The problem is that there's no way to send a login and a password. Investigation: Here's some simple code that should work (if passwords weren't turned on): from jsonrpc import ServiceProxy s = ServiceProxy("http://127.0.0.1:8000/jsonrpc") print s.GUI.ShowNotification("Hello!","This is a message") if the library supported login/password combos in urls, I could do this: from jsonrpc import ServiceProxy s = ServiceProxy("http://user:password@127.0.0.1:8000/jsonrpc") print s.GUI.ShowNotification("Hello!","This is a message") ..but it doesn't. If I try it that way the library ...