If you’re like me, you’ve got a home network with a couple computers and a buttload of music in MP3, OGG, and FLAC format sitting on your Ubuntu server. You want to be able to keep all your music on that server, but play it from any computer.
What to do?
There’s a few solutions to this. If you want your music to play anywhere in the world, you can use Ampache. Ampache works great with Winamp and many other players. But on the downside, it requires some tricky setup and doesn’t work nicely with iTunes.
Another option is Forked-daapd, a strangely named piece of software that allows sharing your music with iTunes on a local network. It also works with iTunes compatible software such as Rhythmbox. Best of all, it’s super easy to setup.
This is all you have to do:
Install the forked-daapd package. From the command line, you can do this: sudo apt-get install forked-daapd
Edit /etc/forked-daapd.conf as root. Directions are in the file, but you’ll want to edit the directory to point to the path(s) of your music folders (it will recursively scan subfolders for mp3s, etc.) You may want to enable transcoding if you have OGG, FLAC or other formats that iTunes doesn’t like. Oh, and don’t forget to change the name of the share to something more fun.
Restart forked-daapd with sudo /etc/init.d/forked-daapd restart
Now open iTunes and see if your server appears. It should show up on the sidebar. If you click on it, there will be a handful of songs almost immediately. It may take a while for Forked-daapd to index all your music, so be patient.
It’s now been 20 days since I started the diet, and 10 days since the previous post.
The diet so far hasn’t been terribly difficult to stick with. As much as I love getting sandwiches at local favorites The Sandwich Place and/or Clare’s Deli, I stopped thinking about these dining options entirely. Substituting corn tacos for wheat burritos was a refreshing change, and you can’t go wrong with corn arepas (they’re delicious.) Plenty of Asian and Indian food is wheat-free. Honestly I wouldn’t have a problem eating nothing but sushi for the rest of my life.
It also seems I’ve inexplicably begun eating smaller meals. Somehow fruit and cheese started becoming my default breakfast recently. For reasons I can’t explain, everything else seemed disgusting all of a sudden. I started craving more rice and potatoes at lunch and dinner.
The scales, however, don’t show a lot of meaningful change. I’m starting to think carbohydrates are more addictive than wheat, since if I remove one with my diet I just add more of another.
There is one positive change that I didn’t anticipate. My skin has never looked better. I’m starting to think I might have been wrong about my acne. Could it be a simple wheat allergy? Or is there another variable at play here?
My “cheat meal” is coming up, and I feel somewhat bad about doing it. I want to push myself further and see what happens after a completely uninterrupted 30 days. On the other hand, it might answer whether there’s a link between acne and wheat, at least for me. Also, I never say no to a pizza making party. NEVER.
UPDATE: As @hryx pointed out on Twitter, the app is called SF.gov but the website is actually sfgov.org. SF.gov isn’t a website. Even the name of the app is an exercise in failure!
Why does the SF.gov iPhone app suck? We live in a city filled with iOS software developers. Any of them could do a better job than this.
Look, I’m not that picky when it comes to software. But I’m not going to put up with your app if it’s slower than anything I’ve ever seen, buggy as hell, and haphazardly organized.
Let me explain.
Let’s start with those tab buttons at the bottom of the screen. Check the screenshot above.
When you press one of those, you probably think it will switch to the corresponding screen. That’s because you’re not the alcoholic middle school drop out who wrote this app.
No, instead one of the following happens when you press a tab button:
It will switch to the screen you pressed.
It will switch to the screen you pressed, but there will be a “loading” screen that has a few extra buttons at the top of the screen for a fraction of a second (I couldn’t read fast enough to see what they said.)
It won’t switch and will stay at the same screen.
Several screens will flash by rapidly, and eventually the screen will turn white and lock up. You’ll have to force quit the app.
You have to hand it to this application, it’s original — no other app has those bugs.
The most useless tab is “services.” There’s only two options: calling 311, or a search box. The first option is self-explanatory. Strangely they don’t let you fill out a 311 report in the app; that requires a separate app that has completely different bugs.
The little search box gives no indication as to what it does. As you start typing into the box, titles appear below in a list. But you can only see two of them when the keyboard is open. You have to click the Done button to make the keyboard go away. If you skip that step and try to scroll the page, it will take you to the first page in the list. It’s not like you’re kind of busy when you’re using your phone to look up information. No, you have all the time in the world to tinker with UI glitches.
Whatever you click, it takes you to a mobile version of the SF.gov website. The browser is Safari, but for some reason it’s agonizingly slow. Fortunately there’s an unlabelled button which — as I discovered through trial and error — sends the page to Safari.
On the connect tab you can find Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube links for SF.gov and other city services. Each of these opens in the agonizingly slow version of Safari included in this app. None of this will help you get your car back after it got towed for too many street sweeping tickets, so don’t bother with this section. It’s largely links to irrelevant city press releases.
What’s more interesting is the photo at the top of this section. It seems to depict the last thing someone saw as their eyes closed and they died while waiting in line at City Hall. (Click the image above to see for yourself.)
In case you were wondering, the Updates, Media, and More sections are also just lists of links to websites. Why most/all of these links didn’t belong in “Services” or “Connect” is anyone’s guess. Like all the lists of things in this app, they don’t scroll smoothly but instead jerk around slowly.
Everything in this app suffers from the same basic problem: you shouldn’t get pregnant with your pet ape, give birth to the ape-man-baby out of your ass, buy it a Mac and then teach it programming so it can make an SF.gov app. That’s just not humane.
Spotted this strange poster on 14th St. yesterday, and I gotta say I’m a little baffled. It seems to be a record, a light bulb, and maybe some other symbols.
Stranger yet, it was far above eye level — about 6 feet off the ground.
Anyone know what this poster is? Some kind of strange ad? An art project? Discordians at work?
While reading BoingBoing the other day, I happened across a post claiming wheat is addictive, responsible for many health problems, makes you fat, caused the Holocaust, etc.
Some of the claims are really out there. But let’s assume for a moment that there might be a grain of truth to his assertion that wheat is bad for us. Certainly at my last job I gained weight when I switched from yogurt for breakfast to the free bagels they were always giving us.
That’s where I start thinking he’s on to something — those bagels never once made me feel full. But the yogurt? Always. The bagels contained more calories than the yogurt and less nutrition. So why did I keep eating them? I’m not really sure. I tried switching to healthier breakfasts, but the temptation of bagels was difficult to resist.
The Experiment I decided to make a pact with myself: avoid wheat for 30 days and document the results.
Why 30 days? A short TED talk by Matt Cutts explores this simple concept: try something new for 30 days. It can be anything, from training for an athletic event to writing a novel. It can also involve removing something from your life — like wheat.
Additionally, the BoingBoing post specifically mentions that four weeks without wheat should be enough to convince yourself that wheat isn’t wonderful.
There were two main factors I was looking for in this experiment: weight and the more difficult to quantify general “feeling.” Theoretically lowering your blood sugar should cause both weight loss and lethargy. Giving up something as addictive as morphine shouldn’t be pleasant either. But there was also the possibility that I’d “feel” healthier if wheat is linked to inflammation and joint pain.
Here’s the ground I set for myself rules:
No wheat. This means no wheat-based breads, tortillas, beer, etc. The food selection process would be based on a combination of common sense and reading labels.
Try to maintain my caloric intake. I didn’t want to skew the results by intentionally “dieting” here. I decided to throw away flour tortillas and buy corn tortillas, get sugary (but fresh and in season) fruit for snacks, drink wine instead of hefeweizen, etc.
Continue existing exercise routine. of light-moderate cardio for 30-45 min/day.
Allow myself a one meal exception for the entire 30 days (a pizza event I already had planned.)
Results: First 10 Days Yesterday marks 10 days since I started the wheat-free experiment. I didn’t eat any wheat during this time; I also ate a lot more corn-based products than usual.
Here’s the results.
Weight: a bit tricky to judge. Even though my scale has wifi (what a strange world we live in!) I haven’t been as rigorous as I should have been at weighing myself at the same time every day. Still, I think there’s enough data to say with certainty that I haven’t gained any weight.
Feelings: just as predicted, I’ve been feeling really lethargic as one often would on a low-carb diet. Although unpleasant, it also gives me hope. After all, I’ve been going out of my way to NOT cut carbs; if my blood sugar is causing this reaction there must be another reason for it.
Addictiveness: every now and then I find myself craving a pizza or a sandwich, but once I remind myself that I can’t have it the feeling moves on to another food. So I’m having a little trouble buying into the idea that wheat is as addictive as morphine when I’m able to avoid it so easily.
So far, these results are marginally promising, but not very conclusive. I’m going to monitor my weight more thoroughly for the next 10 days and see if there’s any meaningful results.
The poster above is in Clarion Alley. It’s a reference to the now-defunct Games of Nonchalance, who had the same poster of the mysterious Eva Lucien in a tiny alley in Chinatown some years back.
Where Bombay Bazaar once stood on Valencia and 16th is now a big sheet of plywood with some psychedelic colorful posters. No word yet on what drugs go best with viewing these posters. If you happen to know that or anything about these, drop me a line.
