Using Thunderbird in Linux with Office 365

My company is using Office 365, but as a software developer with a passion for *nix I really can't live inside a windows environment. So for email use Thunderbird and the splendid Lightning addon together with a calendar provider for office 2010. It works great!

Thunderbird Lightning Calendar Office 2010
http://www.1st-setup.nl/wordpress/?page_id=133

Using calendars from Office 365
http://www.1st-setup.nl/wordpress/?wp_super_faq=add-a-microsoft-office-365-calendar

Wireless streaming from Spotify to PS3

After many hours trying to get wireless streaming from Spotify to Playstation 3, I finally found a working solution on Linux (ubuntu).

My setup:

• Machine with Ubuntu Linux


• PS3


• Spotify for Linux


• PS3 Media Server


• Icecast

I used the solution described in this blog.

But I failed miserable with only streaming the echoes of silence...

Then I found another Spotify streaming blog post, only this time for squeezebox.

This inspired me to try the same trick creating a PulseAudio null-sink.

pactl load-module module-null-sink sink_name=spotify

Setting the sound output to the new sink:



install the lame encoding library to be able to stream mp3:

sudo aptitude install gstreamer10.0-plugins-ugly-multiverse

make sure icecast is running

/etc/init.d/icecast2 start

and then fire up a mp3 stream:

gst-launch-0.10 pulsesrc device=spotify.monitor ! audioconvert ! lame bitrate=320 mode=stereo ! shout2send ip=localhost port=8000 password=PASSWORD mount=spotify.mp3

I then added the following line to my WEB.conf in the ps3mediaserver root folder:

audiostream.Web=Spotify,http://localhost:8000/spotify.mp3

Now start up your PS3 and PS3 Media Server. On your PS3 go to the 'Audio' section, select 'PS3 Media Server', Web-folder and Spotify. Be patient it takes a couple of seconds before it starts.

The Silver Bullet for PS3 Streaming and transcoding

A while ago I bought a Sony Playstation 3 (PS3) to use it as a gaming and media box. But finding a decent video streaming solution on the linux platform turned to be quite a hassle. After a lot of time searching for the ultimate solution supporting all kinds of codecs and transcoding to the ps3, I landed on Fuppes. It wasn't the perfect solution but it solved most of my media issues.

But then I found the ps3mediaserver-project. The feature list is huge, it supports all kinds of codecs through a ton of libraries. Runs on Java, and therefore platform-independent, Yeay!

Current features (from http://code.google.com/p/ps3mediaserver/)

* Ready to launch and play. No codec packs to install. No folder configuration and pre-parsing or this kind of annoying thing. All your folders are directly browsed by the PS3, there's an automatic refresh also.
* Real-time video transcoding of MKV/FLV/OGM/AVI, etc.
* Direct streaming of DTS / DTS-HD core to the receiver
* Remux H264/MPEG2 video and all audio tracks to AC3/DTS/LPCM in real time with tsMuxer when H264 is PS3/Level4.1 compliant
* Full seeking support when transcoding
* DVD ISOs images / VIDEO_TS Folder transcoder
* OGG/FLAC/MPC/APE audio transcoding
* Thumbnail generation for Videos
* You can choose with a virtual folder system your audio/subtitle language on the PS3!
* Simple streaming of formats PS3 natively supports: MP3/JPG/PNG/GIF/TIFF, all kind of videos (AVI, MP4, TS, M2TS, MPEG)
* Display camera RAWs thumbnails (Canon / Nikon, etc.)
* ZIP/RAR files as browsable folders
* Support for pictures based feeds, such as Flickr and Picasaweb
* Internet TV / Web Radio support with VLC, MEncoder or MPlayer
* Podcasts audio/ Video feeds support
* Basic Xbox360 support
* FLAC 96kHz/24bits/5.1 support
* Windows Only: DVR-MS remuxer and AviSynth alternative transcoder support

Go get it now!

Linux one liner: When did I come to work today?

I'm usually quite tired when I get up in the morning. Beeing a consultant with flexible hours, it is often easy to forget exactly when I got to the office in the morning. So I figured i had to write a script to check when I started my computer. What it does is checking the syslog for the first occurence of todays date. I'm running Ubuntu linux and the syslog file is rotated a while after my computer has started. This is why I'm checking syslog.0.

The magic one liner:

date "+%b %d" | xargs -i grep -m1 -i {} /var/log/syslog.0 
 |awk '{ print "Today I got to work at " $3 }'

(Syntax plugin didn't handle long lines properly. Remove the and put the entire thing on one line.)