May 28 (4)

Connecting a Soundboard to Skype

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So I was procrastinating today… (you know where this is going)

Two things:
1. Soundboard - a device or a program that can play short audio clips sampled from pre-existing audio. This is usually a collection of clips from an actors voice. For instance, the kid in Home Alone used soundboards to play tricks on adults. A great collection of soundboards can be found at eBaums World or Soundboards.com.

2. Skype - a free internet telephony (VOIP) program which has recently made their SkypeOut service free until the end of this year (meaning that you can call US/Canada landlines without charge).

Combine #1 and #2 to call phones with skype and have fun surprising the victim with the soundboard. However, the problem is getting the soundboard to output to the input of Skype. To do this, open up the volume control and select the recording control (Options->Properties). Then after you call the person using Skype, you have to check the box under Wave Out Mix (or something similarly named) and make sure you drag the volume for it down or else the volume will be distorted and too loud. Remember, you have to check the Wave Out Mix after you make the call since Skype defaults to the Microphone checkbox. If you forget this step, the receiver on the other end won’t hear anything.

Have fun!

By Michael | Posted in Home | Comments (4)

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May 24 (4)

Been Busy

4 #

I will respond to comments and such. I’ve just been a bit busy these days to post anything non-trivial.

By Michael | Posted in Home, Update | Comments (4)
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Ma 1a Emergency Procedures

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A funny video by Lloyd House (of Caltech) about the notorious first term Ma 1a. TA descriptions are hilarious.

By Michael | Posted in Home, Update | Comments (0)

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May 20

Da Vinci Code Movie

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I went to a screening of Da Vinci Code (Caltech gave out free tickets). It was faithful to the book, mostly. Back in the day when I read the book, I thought it was awesome. But these days when I think back on it, it’s kind of cheap at times. Therefore, I say that it’s an okay movie. The producer/director and actors did a good job.

By Michael | Posted in Home | Comments (0)

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Hypothetical conversation with Girl

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Not that there are any girls at Caltech, but if there were any, here’s a hypothetical conversation. (This subtitle thing is a pretty fun way of wasting time!)

By Michael | Posted in Home, Update | Comments (0)

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Getting out of school early

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I’ve sent one of my agents to pass on a message.

By Michael | Posted in Home, Update | Comments (0)
May 11 (2)

Ditch Day!

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(Edit: Actually, this could be a fake ditch day. It seems legit, but I heard that there are usually a few false alarms just to screw with us.)
(Edit 2: IT WAS FAKE!! NOO!!)

(Edit 3: The REAL ditch day is tomorrow (05/18/06)!)

Ditch day is actually tomorrow! What is it you ask? According to Wikipedia:

There is also the annual Ditch Day, when seniors ditch school, leaving behind elaborately designed tasks and traps at the doors of their rooms to prevent underclassmen from entering. This has evolved to the point where many seniors spend months designing mechanical, electrical, and software obstacles in order to confound the underclassmen. Each group of seniors designs a “stack” to be solved by a handful of underclassmen. The faculty has been drawn into the event as well, and cancel all classes on Ditch Day so that the underclassmen can participate in what has become a highlight of the year.

The seniors are going to make us wake up at 7:30AM. I think I should get some sleep now.

By Michael | Posted in Home | Comments (2)

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1

Page Watch

1 #

Avery House is currently playing this game of assasin, and we have our stats posted on the team ranking page. Since his page gets updated to reflect kills/assasinations, one strategy to keep tabs on people is to save copies of this stats page over time to see who killed and who was eliminated at the same time.

So I wrote this quick script in python called pageWatch.py. Essentially, it polls a page every so often and if the page changed, then a quick HTML Diff will be used.

Now, how I find the time to write these things, I do not know. *Returns to math problem set*

By Michael | Posted in Development, Home | Comments (1)
May 9 (19)

Open Source Alternative to 3tunes

19 #

(UPDATE (05/17/06) : Pandora changed their site today to not display the song information in the title of the browser window. Therefore, this script does not work anymore. However, you could still retrieve the access* files from the temporary directory and use something like MusicBrainz to identify the files. Perhaps I will try to find a way to pull the information from the flash script)

Yesterday on digg, a curious program called 3tunes appeared which, to quote the site was a “time-shifting application for the website Pandora.com. It grabs the music information from the titlebar of Mozilla Firefox and then saves the music with the correct track information, in the format of %artist% - %title%.mp3″.

This was pretty cool stuff! However, the program didn’t work on my computer. I did some digging around (no pun intended), and found how the program operated. It copies the mp3 files that pandora buffers in the temp directory of the hard drive and renames it to the song artist and title which appears in the browser window title bar.

The problem with 3tunes is that it has the temporary path hard coded into the program (something like: C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Local Settings\Temp). However, I changed my temp directory to another path and so 3tunes fails.

I liked the concept of 3tunes though so having some time today, I decided to write an open source alternative to it in Python. The script doesn’t have a GUI, but it just sits in the background and saves the song that Pandora is playing to the current directory. The requirements are:

How to use:
Open up a browser window and make sure Pandora is running in that window. Also, do not open any more tabs in that window. Then just drop the pandoraRenamer.py script in a directory and double click to run the script (or in the command line: python pandoraRenamer.py). To exit the script, hit Control-C. The 128Kbps mp3 files will automatically be saved in the directory that pandoraRenamer.py is in.

Oh, and here’s the script: pandoraRenamer 0.1.0 (py - 4KB)

It’s released under the GPL so you can mess around with it! Digg if you find helpful?

By Michael | Posted in Development, Home | Comments (19)
May 7 (1)

I’m still sane!

1 #

Just a few minutes ago, I was stuck on this complicated integral problem. I was invoking symmetry to simplify the integral a bit. Since I wasn’t getting the right answer, I decided to do the full integral and I got the right answer! I was confounded: Did I just break symmetry? What’s going on here?! I thought I went insane.

Of course, I forgot to take into account an extra dimension so I couldn’t use symmetry. Therefore, I am still sane. Also, symmetry still exists.

By Michael | Posted in Home | Comments (1)

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