It would be a serious step forwards (IMHO), if twitter allowed you to convert sections of a tweet to a link in much the same way as one does in HTML so we can avoid this, but anyway, I’ve digressed, people might complain it would make it too “complicated”, rant over, back on track.

As the subject of this post suggests this is just a random little code snippet I put together today to help me hold onto my links, make them a little more searchable and use the real link not a shortened version by posting them to delicious when I tweet them. It almost certainly exists elsewhere, but this is my take on it and doesn’t rely on me using a particular browser and having a plug-in installed on all the machines I use it on which the otherwise excellent tweecious would do.
Requirements

• PHP5 webserver
• SimplePie Rss parser (I’m using version 1.1.3 nothing has changed since which would break this, AFAIK)
• CRONtab or similar to make it automatic, you can always just load the page up in a browser window if you don’t have CRON on your server or use webcron.

What it does

• Any link you post on twitter is resolved to its original address, title grabbed off the original site and posted onto your delicious account with your tweet in the description and any tags you want.
• Links will only be posted once, so if a link is automatically posted and you then delete it from delicious then its not going to reappear the next time the script is run.
• You can optionally blacklist domains or sections of domains which you don’t want to be saved, for instance I tweeted a link to a programme on BBC iPlayer, there’s no point me saving it as iPlayer only stores stuff for a couple of weeks
• You can also prevent a tweet which has a specific hashtag from being posted, I use the tag “#ns” which will prompt the script to ignore the rest

To use it, just upload twittodel.php from the zip file below (or copy and paste the below source) to your webserver, add simplepie.inc and any other bits it needs, make a cache folder according to whatever you’ve set the CACHE_DIR option to (as a default it wants a folder called ‘cache’.

Download: twittodel.zip

As I say, it was put together fairly quickly so is not guaranteed to be perfect but anyway. Comments/improvements/criticism welcome. It might see the addition of Zemanta style automatic tagging like tweecious, I’ll update this post if it does.

// Author: Duncan Barnes (www.barnesdmd.co.uk)
// Updated: 16/08/09
// License: Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/)
 
//-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
//You'll need to enter your delicious credentials and a few other details here to make this work
//I've left in a few details as examples
 
 
//Delicious username
define('DELICIOUS_USERNAME','yourusernamehere'); 
//Delicious password
define('DELICIOUS_PASSWORD','yourpasswordhere'); 
//Tag/s to add to the delicious entry
define('DELICIOUS_TAGS','from_twitter'); 
//Your twitter account timeline rss feed
define('TWITTER_RSS','http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/6752222.rss'); 
//You can put a hash tag here which you might want to use to prevent tweets being posted to delicious
define('TWITTER_OMIT','#ns'); 
//You can put bits of addresses in here which you don't want to be posted, separate with a comma, e.g 'bbc.co.uk/iplayer', no urls which have this in them would be posted
define('ADDRESS_OMIT','bbc.co.uk/iplayer,bbc.co.uk/programmes');
//Directory where this script can store cached data
define('CACHE_DIR','cache/');
//Max number of tweets to process each time the script is run, adjust based on how often you tweet and how often you run the cron controlling this script 
define('MAX_TWEETS',6); 
 
//-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
 
//Bit of quick error checking
if (!class_exists('SimplePie')){if(file_exists('simplepie.inc')){require_once 'simplepie.inc';}else{echo 'Simplepie not found, check simplepie.inc is in the same directory as this script!';exit();}}
$feed = new SimplePie(TWITTER_RSS,CACHE_DIR,3600) or die('Could not declare Simplepie, you might want to check your TWITTER_RSS and CACHE_DIR settings and also that you have any additional files which SimplePie wants.');
$curl_handle = curl_init() or die('Could not initiate curl, please check its enabled on your server!');
 
//Fetching our cache of previous things we've saved to delicious, means:
// a)we're not repeating a push to delicious 
// b) If you delete an auto created entry from delicious it won't be recreated the next time this is run!
// The script will still continue if there's a problem here, we're not going to worry about it too much as this might be the first run
if(file_exists(CACHE_DIR.'delicious.data')){$deliciouscache = unserialize(file_get_contents(CACHE_DIR.'delicious.data'));}else{$deliciouscache = array();}
 
//For ease of use, the ADDRESS_OMIT option is a constant, however we want its contents as an array for ease of processing so we'll covert it now
$address_omit = explode(',',ADDRESS_OMIT);
@array_walk($address_omit, 'trim_value');
 
//Lets do it
$i=0;
foreach ($feed->get_items() as $item){
	if($i==MAX_TWEETS){break;} //Stoppping if we've reached the limit
	$tweet = $item->get_title();
	//Checking the tweet isnt already in our cache or contains our omit string, we use an md5 of the tweet as it saves us doing any further lookups
	if(in_array(md5($tweet),$deliciouscache) || strstr($tweet, TWITTER_OMIT)){$i++;continue;}
	if(!$page = getUrl($tweet)){$i++;continue;} //We've failed to get the target url, on to the next...
	if(!domain_check($page['url'])){$i++;continue;} //Checking the resolved url isn't in our list of urls we don't want to know about (ADDRESS_OMIT option)
	// At this point we should have an array ($page) containing the title and the url provided by the getUrl function
	// so lets go ahead and try and add to Delicious account
	$url = urlencode($page['url']);
	$title = urlencode($page['title']);
	$tweetenc = urlencode($tweet);
	$tag = urlencode(DELICIOUS_TAGS);
	curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://'.DELICIOUS_USERNAME.':'.DELICIOUS_PASSWORD."@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/add?url=$url&description=$title&extended=$tweetenc&tags=$tag");
	curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 10);
	curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 0);
	if($result = curl_exec($curl_handle)){
		array_unshift($deliciouscache, md5($tweet));
		if(count($deliciouscache) > MAX_TWEETS){ //One in one out, stopping the cache file growing exponentially
			array_pop($deliciouscache);
		}
	}
	$i++;
}
//Writing our cache back to file ready for the next run
if($res = fopen(CACHE_DIR.'delicious.data','w')){fwrite($res,serialize($deliciouscache));}
curl_close($curl_handle);
//Done
 
//Helper functions
function domain_check($url){global $address_omit;if(is_array($address_omit)){foreach($address_omit as $address){if(!empty($address) && strstr($url, $address)){return false;}}}return true;}
function trim_value(&$value){$value = trim($value);} //Used to trim the $domain_omit array
function getUrl($tweet){
	global $curl_handle;
	if(!$tweet){return false;}
    preg_match('/http:\/\/\S*?/U', $tweet, $result);
	curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, $result[0]);
	curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 10);
	curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
	curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);    // follow redirects (in the case of shortened urls)
	if(!$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle)){return false;}
	$info = curl_getinfo($curl_handle);
	if($info['http_code'] !== 200){return false;} //If the page is gone then cancel
	// match the title of the page at the url
	preg_match( "/<title>(.*)<\/title>/s", $buffer, $match );
	$title = preg_replace('/&lt;\/?(title)[^&gt;]*&gt;/iU', '', $match[1]);
	return array('title'=>$title,'url'=>$info['url']);
}

When I visited Cape Town last year I took what was then my new phone (HTC TyTn II) which thoughtfully includes an inbuilt GPS. Pairing this with an early version of LEM’s TrackMe logging application and I felt fairly well prepared to geotag all my pictures on my return. The trip itself went well and the phone managed to log most days movements (at 2 minute intervals) without the battery giving up (phone part switched off), giving me an acceptable accuracy to tag the pictures by matching up the nearest position fix with the timestamp on the photos.

However after this I decided that although the phone did the job ok, I ‘d rather not have the constant worry of the battery running flat and bought a Royaltek RBT-2300 gps logger off ebay. Its a basic little unit, the software is a little lacking but it was cheap and it does the job admirably while at the same time using nokia phone batteries meaning that if I have need I can get a second battery for it.

It came with only a car charger which isn’t great but I’ve found that its quite happy running off 5v so made an adapter cable in work so it can be charged from my standard travel usb charger.

So after experiementation, and some scares with software causing data corruption on the photos (always do backups!), my process seems to go something along these lines when returning with fresh pictures:

• Copy photo’s to computer, leaving originals on SD card as a backup
• Use Phil Harveys ExifTool to set common meta data on each picture, so thats author, copyright and a basic description of the occasion if the photo’s were all taken on one occasion, this is stored as EXIF and IPTC tags.
• Extract tracklogs from the Royaltek logger using their software.
• Convert this to the GPX file format using GPSBabel (I tend to use the version with the user interface for this, beats remembering command line options).
• Geotag all pictures with GPicSync (this also produces a Google Earth KML file)
• Done!

This may seem like quite a long drawn out painful way of doing this, in actual fact it takes me about 5 minutes each time. There are other commercial bits of software which may be able to shorten some/all of this, in fact I’ve contemplated buying Downloader Pro which I hear good things about for a while.  The software used above however is all free/open source and does 99% of the process, I tend to use InfranView for image rotation.

My approach to photography now is pretty much to store as much information as possible about the photo’s and never to delete any no matter how bad you think they are at the time (storage is cheap),  there are software packages which can store more information, the only problem half the time is that its more data stored in a separate database which you then rely on to keep track of your pictures.

This method ensures that the data gathered is all stored in a standard format. Its also great when uploading to Zooomr or Flickr, thats when the meta data comes into its own when you see the photo sharing site build the page around it, including a map, author information and the description already filled in among others.

Its a workflow which has done me well for the last few years, hopefully in 10-15 years time it’ll make it worthwhile to remember where that picture was taken…

Spotify’s tagline is ‘Everyone loves music’, the interface is a media player with an iTunes feel to it so nice and familiar and easy to pick up for most people. Built in collaboration with most of the big record labels, it has a vast library of music streamed from the Internet (around 160kbps according to the TorrentFreak article), apart from some of the more indie stuff it seems to do quite well at finding anything your after.

Its not a complete collection of the worlds music by any means but its growing, the only random things I can’t find so far are the Metallica S&M recording from the live set in San Fransisco (I was listening to it in the car this morning so it sprung to mind as something to search for), and anything by 2manyDJ’s.

Music starts playing as soon as you click on it (I’m on almost exclusive use of a 100mbps pipe at the moment so it might not be quite as fast on a normal connection!) and its easy to find more tracks by an artist, find what compilations they appear on etc. Reviews and Biographies are gathered from a range of sources including Wikipedia and All Music.

Of course the main advantage of Spotify is that a) its free! (some unobtrusive adverts) b) it would appear to be the first credible, legal and usable music service to emerge. The guys behind it seem to be taking tips quite happily from the beta community, Last.Fm integration is there and it would seem that more will follow.

Of course, the disadvantages of the system at the moment are no connection with portable devices, according to TorrentFreak this might come in the future. Of course with  better connected media devices including phones (iPhone, G1 etc) and improved data plans we might end up with a situation where we can just stream whatever music we want and don’t bother keeping it ourselves.

There’s a little introduction video here: https://www.spotify.com/en/about/press/concept-video/

(and no I still havn’t had a chance to sort out the template issues on this site!)

Little things like ‘paste and go’ which allows you to paste a web address into the address bar and opera will go to it without you hitting enter (really minor I know). And then others like the ability to select text on the screen and run a search for it or open it as a web address (hold shift while doing this to open in a new tab) from the right click context menu.

Anyway, Opera 10.0 Alpha has just been released and even as a long term Opera user I’m impressed with the speed, instant spell check and everything else.

The Opera desktop blog has all the  details, its still an alpha but well worth taking a look. If you moving from Internet Explorer it may be quite a change but its worth it.

(And yes, this blog is still, still undergoing a redesign so still looks a little rough around the edges!)

The latest version of Google Maps for Mobile includes an option that was already available in Google Maps: directions for public transportation. Google’s coverage has been continuously expanded in the past months to many US states, Japan, Austria, Switzerland, important cities from Canada, Italy, France, UK and Australia. Google Maps is one of the applications that is very useful when you are on the go and this new feature is a good alternative to the existing driving directions.

Very cool, slightly frustrating bits at the moment include:

• Its not available for Windows Mobile devices like my HTC TyTnII (Kaiser) yet, I’ll try and be patient!
• I thought about writing an app to do this myself about the time I got my TyTnII using London transport data, unfortunatly TFL don’t make a lot of the required data publically obtainable to construct such a system, hence I gave up rather quickly. Frustrating at the time beacuse of TFL’s limited mobile device support.

Glad to see Google have been thinking this one through, looking forward to seeing how well it works…

Tonight I saw Ian’s post mentioning he was considering changing to Virgin Media beacuse of the advertised fast fibre optic connection and was reminded of my annoyance over the claims.

It turns out that BSkyB, Talk Talk and a few less idle members of the public did make a complaint. The below two stories cover the situation quite well with ThinkBroadband also carrying quite a few user comments on its page. Essentially Virgin Media as many have probably seen have been advertising fibre optic internet connections direct to the home, the fibre is actually only to one of the street boxes, its copper/steel/aluminium after that. A Virgin Media engineer I was speaking to recently, who works on the core fibre network around London said that it could be anything from 500 to a 1000 households sharing the connection!

• http://informitv.com/articles/2008/02/06/virginmediacleared/
• http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/3391-asa-rules-on-virgin-fibre-optic-broadband-claims.html

Amazingly, the ASA quashed the claims, essentially deeming the copper portion of the network insignificant. By the same logic, as ThinkBroadband have pointed out, BT etc could now make the same claim as from the telephone exchange upwards, the ADSL network is fibre.

Wish the ASA had taken a stand with this and the ‘Unlimited’ claims (There’s a nice little piece about this on one of the BBC blogs), hardly surprising so many people are confused about Broadband.

Update (13/04/08): Of course in addition to the above truth twisting, a worrying blow for net neutrality comes with Virgin Media’s CEO Neil Berkett branding it “a load of bollocks”. Crude and worrying words, glad I’m not with them and supporting his point of view any more.

We got a letter from them in the mail today saying, ‘Sorry to hear your leaving, how about sleeping on it?’, this is accompanied by the type of mask you get on night flights. Be nice if they quit with all the marketing gimmiks and actually delivered on the fibre to the home claim!

1. File server
2. Bittorrent capable
3. Low power consumption (as low as possible)
4. Secure external access

One of the embedded linux boxes I had my eye on before was the Bubba, it had its upsides including Debian as a base OS which made it pretty flexible. However, I already had a 500Gb SATA drive sitting around and the Bubba is IDE only.

A little look around and I found the Synology website and a fantastic list of compact low power devices, add to this their forums which include a dedicated section on modding their products and I was pretty much sold on buying something from them. Certainly for me, a company who are willing to openly encourage modifications and further development of their product range is a big attraction.

I chose the DS107+ in the end, only a single internal drive but with an eSATA port and 3 USB2.0 ports, 500mhz processor, 128mb RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, a selection of third party bootstraps, several glowing reviews and the aforementioned forum/wiki it looked like the perfect solution.

I’ve been playing around with it for a week now and am very pleased, its quiet, plays well with Xbox Media Centre and while including an array of useful web apps is flexible enough to let me replace them where necessary.

I’ve replaced the included bittorrent client (rTorrent based) with Transmission/Clutch and set up a few CRON jobs and shell scripts to control it and its running very well. The main reason for doing this is that the included one whilst having a handy desktop download redirector application is based on an old version of rTorrent and doesn’t seed very much (not in the spirit of things really!). The OS is BusyBox linux which is not at the time of writing totally open on the 107, annoying but currently not a big issue.

One other point to add, while putting the drive in I noticed the motherboard headers for a second SATA drive as well. It looks like the DS107 and DS207 products share the same board. Not something which I’m concerned with now, and it would without a doubt void the warranty, but if needed in the future I have a feeling it would take the firmware for the 207 to give me a mirrored RAID.

Here’s a couple of the reviews I found helpful:

• Pro-Clockers
• Xbit Labs

Typically when I’m at my desk I have my main computer and my laptop next to it on a dock, with dual monitor on the desktop already I have a fair amount of real estate to work from (albeit not in quite the same league as Stefan Didak!). I might typically have two instances of Opera running, one on the laptop and one on the second desktop screen, using the primary screen as my working area and the other two as reference windows, the key point however is that I prefer to use the laptop in remote control mode so that I can take advantage of its processor and resources while the main computers working on other things.

Anyway, heres the point of the post (finally I know): in this sort of set-up I’ve found its useful at times to be able to “transfer” tabs, between the browser windows on the two machines and it took me a while to work out how, to be honest its really thanks to an Opera Watch post about opening tabs in firefox and ie that I got an idea for a slightly bodged but workable solution. I thought I’d share it below in case anyone else finds it useful, its nothing revolutionary but its useful all the same.

Requirements/how to:

• Two networked computers running Opera (obviously)
• For this to work both ways you will need the PsExec.exe file copied into the “c:\Windows\System32″ folder, you can the PsTools package from the sysinternals website, check against point 2 on this forum thread that everything is ready to go.
• Download this batch file (zipped), extract and open it and change all the parts marked <ike this> to the appropriate values, note that the remote computers username should be the same as the one you logon as otherwise it’ll open a fresh opera window instead of using the existing one. Save the batch file to “c:\Windows\System32″
• Drag the below Opera button to any opera panel, click and it should work!

Things to note, you will get a console window opening for a second on the source computer, without compiling everything into a binary there’s little way of totally hiding the action, also, the above button is set to also remove the tab from the source computer.

But anyway, aside from these points, the question is, are the media industries as a collective gradually responding better to consumer desires and the internet in general as a result of piracy? The rapid rise in piracy of music, films and television has left the industry models looking increasingly dated and almost ridiculous, indeed, if it could be charted it would correlate quite well with broadband uptake. They were left with choices, embrace, fight or ignore it, as we’ve seen, they’ve steadily fought it and probably thought after Napster that they could go back to sleep again.

In the last couple of years we’ve seen numerous press releases by the RIAA and MPAA citing the massive sales losses they’ve sustained as a result of piracy, the press has reported on numerous cases against kids, the elderly and mothers across America and elsewhere, in dubious attempts to deter the masses. Apple introduced iTunes and its worked fairly well with some debate, but that wasn’t the industries idea, that was Apple, and many of the other major online music stores have been third parties approaching the music industry not them reaching out to the consumer. The same sort of scenario has been playing out for video content with the same issues, indeed the upcoming pirate bay case, is seeing the founders gaining steady international notoriety as thieves and the worst of criminals in one light and justified and innocent in another.

Only really in the last year are we seeing perhaps the start of serious attempts at DRM free, decent (ish) quality music and video from the industry and this is encouraged in many ways by piracy (catering for the users so they don’t pirate the material). Its argued so much more now that piracy is slowly forcing the industry to respond better to the consumer, that piracy is a positive driving force for change and that it will eventually lead to a better solution.

Perhaps arguing that the end necessarily justifies the means is not an argument to start, but I do think its valid, the cost to the ISP’s who already have looming demand induced upgrade costs as well as the time and effort for the government to pass through legislation for this ultimatly means it will accomplish little. Others such as Michael Arrington have suggested that you make money from associated products and live events as opposed to the music but I’m far more inclined to agree with the general principles of Paul Glazowski’s rebuttal and in particular the “linear chicken and egg” analogy he makes in his first comment on his post, its unfortunate however to read in the comments a lack of understanding of the items value as opposed to its distribution costs.

As with most people I know, if I like music I’ll buy it, aside from anything else, I still prefer having a physical copy (maybe I’m getting old). I’m not advocating illegal downloads as such, however, piracy is giving the media industries a good kick down the path of progress.

Anyway, rant over. I must say for a free and from nothing attempt, Pointui is pretty good, its slick for the most part, its let down at the moment on two (significant) counts (imo):

• a) when you want to do anything as it then opens that application in the standard windows mobile shell.
• b) Its not customizable and has no real settings which can be changed for user preference

I havn’t mentioned any of the bugs beacuse its in beta and this is to be expected and I’m sure the features and flexibility will be expanded in due time.

Of course these guys arent the only one creating nicer interfaces for Windows Mobile, HTC for one have for a while been supplying plugins and apps to extend Windows Mobiles functionality although it seems to be a bit of a lottery sometimes as to which ones are installed on your device (down to network whims most of the time it seems). They’re not as slick and iPhone like as Pointui for the most part but they provide added functionality with most of them being finger compatible. There’s a fairly comprehensive list of HTC apps on the XDA Developers site.

The one thing I keep wondering is when Microsoft will catch up, not to mention whether they are always going to be playing catch up with Apple, HTC and the mass of individual enterprising developers around the world.

Windows Mobile 6 was for the most part a let down and not much of a change over version 5, it still has the abomination that is Pocket IE (not a big deal thanks to Opera Mobile), still uses buttons which require a stylus and still looks like all they did was attempt to shrink down the desktop windows interface without any new thought put into it.

Small changes are promised in the upcoming 6.1 and therafter but I for one am not holding out much hope of them making any significant advances. Dont get me wrong, in many ways Windows Mobile is fantastic, as I said before, the plethora of 3rd party applications mean you have a tool for any job and if not then Visual Basic isn’t hard to pick up and develop it yourself .

But they could do better and with 79,000 employees at Microsoft (Source: Wikipedia) its hard in some ways to see why all the interesting things are always coming from small players.