Stream music from Linux to iPad – no app needed

Posted on November 25, 2010 by Mike Szczys

I’m a Linux guy but I’ve also got this iPad. I don’t run iTunes so there’s no music on it. I have a collection on my home server that feeds the computers and XBMC boxes in the house. But what about the iPad? I had looked all over, and managed to patch together a working system using gnump3d but it was a pretty gruesome hack.

Well, I’ve got some functionality working now. I installed mod_musicindex for my Apache server. It’s just an added layer on top of the indexing feature that Apache has. I like it, and it works somewhat acceptably. I can even password protect the directory, but I can’t seem to get anything to stream outside of the LAN. I also have one album that I can’t play but I have no idea why.

Is this crippled functionality really necessary? Why can’t the iPod app have built-in web address browsing? Nice hardware, but I detest crippled software. Grr!

Thank you SparkFun!

Posted on January 12, 2010 by Mike Szczys

The doorbell just rang and I saw FedEx standing there and thought “Who set me something”? He was holding a red box in his hand and delight washed over me as I realized it was my shipment from SparkFun. I was one of the lucky bastards who got a $100 credit on free day.

This is my first order from SparkFun and I love the way they package their products. I’ve been surprised in the past by the amound of packaging that comes in an order from Mouser. SparkFun doesn’t go with the one-component-model-per-bag, but instead uses up all of the space in each bag by heat sealing the plastic between each collection of parts.

I won’t fill you in on a complete list of items, but I am excited about the Arduino Duemilanove that I ordered. I’ve written about Arduino over at Hackaday so much that the commenters accuse me of being in love with it. I find it ironic because I’ve been purely AVR up to this point but I guess we’ll see what happens. Off now to blink some LEDs.

Thank you SparkFun! By the way, I want to work there.

WordPress on non-standard port (not Port 80)

Posted on January 9, 2009 by Mike Szczys

I have a copy of wordpress running on my home server as well as on wordpress.com. At home my ISP blocks several common ports (Port 80, Port 21, etc). Because of this I have to use port forwarding with my router in order to serve webpages.

I use www.dyndns.com to give my dynamic IP address a more easy to remember name (ie: yourmadeupword.homelinux.org). This works well except that I have to add the non-standard port at the end: http://yourmadeupword.homelinux.org:3333

This is all fine and good except when it comes to wordpress. After installation I could not figure out why I wasn’t getting to my blog from outside the house. When I try I keep getting redirected to the url without the port number at the end.

Well, after much searching, I found you need to make sure you have wordpress set up for that specific port.

Log in as administrator, go to settings and click general. Change both urls listed there to include the port number you will be using.