Open Cubic Player

Posted by Cirrus on March 22, 2014
Posted in: blog, General TechnoBabble, Software, Tech. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment

Hi

Again ill be writing about yet another TUI application, which will run with or without an X server. Those who know me are aware i prefer to use the console where possible, not because i wanna be l33t but merely because i find it does things better, faster and in many cases opens up moar options/preferences than you get with the GUI counterparts.  My latest find started life in or around December of 1994 as a DOS binary-only freeware. Thankfully at the tail end of 2003 someone took the time and effort to port it to Linux, and other ‘Unix like’ Operating systems.

Open Cubic Player as mentioned will run in a TTY as well as in a graphical environment, here’s a few scrot’s of OCP

2014-03-22-174907_476x182_scrot         2014-03-22-174127_644x418_scrot

Both images above are from the ocp-X11  ( the graphical environment)  now it’s only fair i show you some scrots of OCP running in a non graphical environment.

2014-03-22-175327_954x515_scrot2014-03-22-174541_644x421_scrot

Using ocp-curses we dont get the same visualisations, only the spectrum analyzer, whereas in the X version we have choice ofaround 4 visualisations

Video of ocp-curses

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Radio Ga-Ga

Posted by Cirrus on March 3, 2014
Posted in: General TechnoBabble, Software. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a comment
  • Pyradio0Hi

I reckoned it’s about time i posted something here on my neglected corner of teh interwebs, this time ill be harping on about yet another TUI (Text User Interface) application named pyradio,  Yes it’s python and yes it’s a radio (remember those ?).   Sure we could write shell aliases to fire up our favourite radio stations/streams, however pyradio will save you the time and bother.  Get it here by typing/pasting

git clone https://github.com/coderholic/pyradio.git

into a shell, then cd into the newly downloaded directory and run this command to install itPyradio1

sudo python setup.py install

if that sounds too much like hard work you may be able to find it in your favourite repository

<—-Here’s what it looks like ..

If pyradio is for you and you have gone and installed it then i have taken the time to go and dig out some radio stream URL’s for you to add to the stations.csv file, which can be found in this directory

/usr/lib/python3.3/site-packages/pyradio/

should your distro be on an older version of python, maybe 2.7 then cd to

/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pyradio/

you get the gist,  paste the contents of Radio Stations  into the stations.csv file (you will need elevated priviliges to write to this directory).

I also edited the player.py file from the above directory and changed line 101 from mplayer to the much prefered mpv media player, for good measure i edited the radio.py file to change the default curses colours.

That’s all folks, Thanks for dropping by.

cirrus

UK Linux users, watch Live TV in VLC / mplayer

Posted by Cirrus on October 19, 2013
Posted in: Software. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 2 Comments

I came across this shell script & i thought it worth sharing, sadly it is only usable for those with a UK IP. It enables us to watch these UK TV channels in any external media player.

2013-10-19--1382205210_704x472_scrot

First off you will need to head over to tvcatchup and sign up for a free account ( it takes only a few minutes ) then we head here for the shell script

As you see in lines 4 & 5 of script is where you enter your recently created username and password from tvcatchup.com, save the script as tv.sh to your home directory, make it executable and in terminal type ~/tv.sh you will see …

2013-10-19--1382205253_515x287_scrot

Pick teh corresponding number to channel you want to view and “thats all folks”

*shell script would prolly work in OSX, id urge any OSX users to test and let me know.

** you can ofc edit script to replace default VLC with your media player of choice.

ode to a sheep (Scot’s sonnet)

Posted by Cirrus on June 19, 2013
Posted in: General TechnoBabble. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

prism_index I felt an urge to write a quick blog post specifically aimed at these people who think that PRISM is a good deal, and it will keep our soldiers safe and stop people with brown faces blowing up our citys, blah , blah , blah.

(for the record i support our troops fully, they are just doing their job)
It is hard for me to comprehend that people like this actually exist, but i guess the meme ” you cant fix stupid ” applys. SO you want the powers that be to know every detail about your life, do you really want them to know what you searched on google last Saturday night when you were drunk and even /b/ was boring ? , I dont. So you trust these suits with all this information about you and your likes/dislikes, political persuasion, religious beliefs, whether you prefer blondes or brunettes, whether you prefer MILF or amateur ? all in the name of protecting you from the big bad brown faces who wanna blow you to the great gig in the sky ? Ironic the war on drugs created more drugs in our inner cities, the war on terror created more terrorists  FYI more people die per annum from falling down stairs than do from terrorist attacks. You trust these suits to do the right thing ? listen THE WORLD IS IN THE STATE ITS IN BECAUSE OF THESE SUITS whom you blindly elect every 4 years (meet the new boss, same as the old boss)
Recently i was privvy to a discussion with a few ‘tech enthusiasts’ the majority of these experts didnt give a hoot about PRISM or their govt spying on them they seemed to be more concerned with what new shiny device these PRISM advocate companies will release next, what was most strange to me was some of this group are podcasters, i dont think they browse the same web as me see HERE ( i wonder who is earmarked to fill the 6 FEMA camps the US govt just built inside USA, last time it was INNOCENT AMERICAN CITIZENS they locked up in the FEMA camps during wwII ) Will it be the citizens who are capable of rational thinking ? or the sheep who believe everything they hear on Fox news & CNN ? those who are pro gun ? podcasters ? gingers? Linux users ? time will tell.
I dont claim to know it all but i do know your government does not give a fuck about you or your loved ones, their only concern is money & power ( and mining silicon from 3rd world countrys )
These idiots who support PRISM are the very same idiots who heard the words ‘terrorism, weapons of mass destruction etc’ so often on their televisions they supported the war on Iraq, and turns out it was all based on a big fat fuckin lie. In our name they went in and blew up innocent women & children their only crime = they had brown faces.
Thats just one recent example where the suits have told us bare faced lies, and nothing has changed, nothing will ever change until we the people stand up and say enough of this shit not in my name.

Linux Desktop

Posted by Cirrus on April 5, 2013
Posted in: General TechnoBabble. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 3 Comments

2013-04-05--1365186923_1630x1079_scrot

Click Here for a better view

The image above is a scrot (screencapture) from my 2nd monitor which i tend to use for CLI apps, in this post i aim to show you what apps im using and share some of my dotfiles, even though this is on an Archlinux OS, there is no reason why it cannot be replicated on any GNU/Linux system.

Now from the top, the terminal emulator im using is named ’tilda’ and in the prefs of the emulator i have it execute the ‘tmux’ command on startup, tmux is what allows us to split the terminal up into individual panes, here is a link to my .tmux.conf  which you should create in your home dir.,  after installing tmux of course, so install tmux and paste contents of this into a file named .tmux.conf  in your home dir.  .tmux.conf  (now do  source ~/.tmux.conf   so the new conf wil be seen) then     browse to your repo for the emulator named tilda (tilda is a GTK dropdown terminal emulator)  once installed right click for its prefs and edit to suit, then add the word ‘ tmux ‘ under the title & command tab in the custom command field, now when you start tilda tmux will execute , using ctrl+a+” or % (Ctrl+a+shift 2/5) will split the panes accordingly.

Now that we have the blank canvas, lets get painting :)  OK in the top left pane is my IRC client of choice named weechat, being a Scot i was drawn to the name, turns out its an amazing highly configurable IRC client,  it has a very large selection of scripts so you can tweak it till your hearts content, weechat too will be in all good repo’s  (also runs on Mac OSX)  once installed have a look at my weechat cheat sheet it shows how to set up weechat so we can connect to our favourite servers & #chatrooms weechat.txt  you should also check out my buddy FiXato’s guide Here

Directly below weechat to the left is ncmpcpp which is a media player for MPD (music player daemon) i use it to stream my music over http and to annoy the neighbours. MPD can be difficult to set up for the novice so if you are a new linux user id suggest replacing MPD/ncmpcpp with ‘ mp3blaster ‘ which as you see is just an ncurses media player, however if you want to stick with MPD/ncmpcpp then check out MPD  Once installed and configged , install ncmpcpp and here is my modified config which belongs in /home/USER/.ncmpcpp/config.

  Beside ncmpcc to the right is simply the links browser which as you might have guessed is a browser which again can be installed from any good repo.

If we keep going right this is youtube-viewer which i love, it enables us to watch you tube video without using the much despised flash plugin, the mplayer config file doesn’t  require much editing, below ill show you how to use it ..

       youtube-viewer -C             #start youtube-player with colour

  youtube-viewer -d [URL]         #download said you tube video

youtube-viewer -login       # Login to your account

         youtube-viewer -C -S        # colour output &  subscriptions

The chosen you tube video will open in an application named mplayer, to have mplayer maintain its size add xy=600 to ~/.mplayer/config file. Your distro will most probably come with mplayer installed if not simply install it from your favourite repo.

If You use an Nvidia GPU listed here

then  enable VDPAU by adding these two lines to ~/.mplayer/config file

vo=vdpau,

vc=ffh264vdpau,ffmpeg12vdpau,ffodivxvdpau,ffwmv3vdpau,ffvc1vdpau*

*I had to comment out the 2nd command, i use an Nvidia 8800GT GPU

If you use another GPU, for best results i suggest you read the mplayer section in the tremendous

Archlinux Wiki

Last but by no means least is an excellent RSS reader named newsbeuter this runs too on Mac OSX systems, simply install it and add URLs of feeds to  ~/.newsbeuter/urls  here is a list of some of my chosen feeds, edit to suit.  RSS URL’s

As you can see i prefer to use the terminal for things as its more stable/faster than any GUI equivalent  , It might not have lots of big shiny buttons but it gets  the job done and done well, (this is what the shiny buttons are doing under the surface).  I hope you found something of interest. Who knows it might even urge an OSX user to use his terminal, If you get stuck or have any questions feel free to leave a comment.

Regards

Cirrus

Anonymous Android

Posted by Cirrus on January 16, 2013
Posted in: Software. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

2013011502493520130115023839

I came across a nice tool for keeping your droid anonymous online,  excellent work from the folks over at The Guardian Project and i have to say this is without doubt the fastest tor  network ive ever used.

Welcome to Orbot, one of the many great features is that you can choose what droid apps will use tor, or you can have everything connect via tor.  I spent a good few hours playing with this with both the Orweb Privacy Browser and the Firefox ProxyMob Add-On  and i was impressed. They also have an app named Giggerbot (Secure Instant Messaging XMPP) which works for Google talk. I would urge anyone who is concerned about their online privacy to give this a go. Its free and is available from the Google play store.