The Digital Lifestyle

It seems lately that I haven’t been doing a whole lot with the computers that I have at home. Lamar and I were talking about this some and I realized, that unlike when I was in college or right after, that I didn’t really have a lot of projects running that I could be thinking about.

Part of it is with rise of iPods and their ilk there is a lot less to do when if comes to music, which is one of the things that I worked with a lot before. My phone now has a lot of features that I would like to have with me. Looking back through the archives I realized I never posted anything about getting it. I have a Siemens SX66 now that I have been using for awhile. It is a PDA/Phone that has some really cool tricks. Me having mine actually sparked maxx to get one too. He can comment on how his works for him if he wants. I use it as a mp3 player too while I am on the mower and stuff.

So anyway, I decided to try and start some stuff up and see if I could do anything cool with them. The first thing I got done was updating my gallery linked digital picture frame so that it would sync a little cleaner to maxx’s servers where my gallery is hosted. Next I then updated my xbox settings to pull the pictures off of it as a screensaver. So now as music is playing it will be showing pictures off of my gallery and stay updated every night.

Some of the newer versions of XBMC have support for “Party Mode” where the xbox picks ten songs and puts them in the list. No matter what happens it always just keeps ten songs in there. So if you remove songs you don’t like from the list, it just fills it with others and ask you pick songs to play it moves them to the top and just keeps ten in the list.

I have also started working on setting up an Asterisk server at work and at home using Trixbox. I am waiting for hardware to come in for them though, so I haven’t made a lot of progress, yet.

The final project is that I am working on building my mame arcade cabinet again. I am rebuilding an old machine to put in it and I have added a few buttons to it too. Jeff helped me to wedge a 19″ monitor into it and I am thinking I am going to put the MythTV frontend on it so that it can play games and music too.