Category Archives: Geek

My first article at TipMonkies!

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Yes, it’s up. It’s essentially a repost of my Foobar 2000 post from yesterday. It’s funny how writing for a quality, respected site like TipMonkies is different than writing for my own site. I don’t put a HUGE amount of time into the things I post here. I try to make them coherent, grammatically correct, spelled correctly, at least a little bit interesting, and that’s about it. I had to do a whole lot more for the TipMonkies post. Not sure what that means exactly or what my point really is.

Way back when, I used to write for The Adrenaline Vault. It’s kinda like that – except no free games.

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Fun Google Maps Hacklet – Label Links

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Found this on the Google Code Page. I haven’t seen it posted anywhere else yet and it was posted on Google on August 8 (maybe I missed it when it made the rounds already). From the Google API page:

“I traded some email with the Maps team and I saw something in a link they sent me that I wasn’t familiar with. To best explain this, first load this map from Berkeley to Google in a separate browser window. Note in the “End Address” section, the Google. Now load this map of Sydney and note the label inside the callout.

If you look at the urls, you’ll see a (text) argument appended to the url. This is a lightweight way of linking to Google maps without touching on the maps API. As you can see, you can arbitrary labels to your links like this chocolate shop or this restaurant. Have fun! ”

Cool – an easy way to add quick comments to a map. Here is my first quick attempt. My Alma Mater.

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Foobar 2000 – why it rocks

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Today I realized I had mentioned my favorite MP3-playing software Foobar 2000 a few times but never really said much about it. Foobar is a highly underappreciated MP3 player, IMHO. It’s not fancy like WinAmp, iTunes, and QCD – it doesn’t have a bunch of cool visualizations and skins and stuff. It plays music – MP3s, ogg, and all the others without the bloat.

Some key features (for me):

  1. It has configurable global keyboard shortcuts. While I am coding, if someone comes up to talk to me, I hit Ctrl+NumPad5 while still in my editor to pause it. I press the same key combo to start it back. If a song comes on I don’t want to hear, I can hit Ctrl+NumPad6 to go to the next song or Ctrl+NumPad3 to go to a random song. If a song comes on and I want to see the artist and trackname, I hit Ctrl-NumPad0 and a text bubble pops up near the Foobar system tray icon showing me the info. I don’t have to double-click the tray icon then find the button on the GUI to do any of this. Once you get used to the global keyboard controls, you’ll never go back. (Again, the exact keys are configurable).
  2. It has a very low memory footprint compared to other MP3-playing software. I can have hundreds of songs in the queue and when minimized it takes up about 2MB of memory. This is important to me because there are times when I am running two instances of WebLogic and one instance of JBoss all on a machine with 512 MB of RAM. I need that RAM for real work, so a 2MB MP3 player fits right in.
  3. It has an AudioScrobbler/Last.fm plugin so it can keep track of everything I listen to. Now that I have tried Audioscrobbler, I’m hooked…but that is fodder for another post.

Yes, Foobar looks rather plain and bland when compared to even a basic WinAmp install, but it really kicks the…uh…Alpaca’s ass. If you want a player that plays music and has no bloat, try Foobar 2000. If you want visualizations, tons of plugins, and lots of skins, try one of the other players mentioned above. I’m sticking with Foobar though.

Speaking of small MP3 players, I tried one I stumbled on today called Billy…. it claims it is fast and lightweight. The download was quite small (456kb) but it took up about 2.5MB of RAM when running (about the same as Foobar)….and no Audioscrobbler plugin and no global keyboard shortcuts. I uninstalled it shortly after installing it.

Foobar 2000
Billy

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