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I was going to whip up a python script to sync music to my mass-storage phone, but since I am using Songbird on all my platforms, the little extra effort to make a Songbird sync plugin will pay off big for me, and also be useful to lots of others.

the spec

Works with: USB mass storage devices
Options:

• select connected device (persist selection?)
• select disk usage setting (min free space or total usage?)
• select playlists (these are songbird playlists, and may be ie mp3 blogs or rss feeds)

Behavior on sync:

• remove oldest items
• add newest items (so that disk usage is balanced among playlists or just so that newest items are available?)
• optional renaming to maintain original playlist order (ie sequence-based naming)

Wish I had seen this in August after OSCON, but it really strikes a chord. I’ve been a Drupal dev for a long time, and have recently been focusing on the newer “agile frameworks” in Python and Ruby, and I’ve found the same shortcoming: there is no component architecture, at least not on the level of Drupal with its myriad callback hooks and “monkey patching” facilities. I’ve been ruminating on the idea of following the Drupal architecture to build a similar framework on top of WSGI.

I hate the boxes of paper records I have to lug around.

Some of the types of documents in my life:

• Records of:
  • Financial transactions
  • Taxes
  • Contracts
  • Business cards
  • Academic certificates
• Papers I’ve written
  • Math
  • Creative writing

My goal is to put all my documents (paper and digital) into a single cross-referenced document management system with flexible metadata. Eric Blue recommends SCAN. From what I see, it looks simple and highly useful! I may start using this system and then convert to something else (probably a custom system based on RDF). I just purchased a nice scanner, so I’m going to implement this right away!

This fits into a larger goal of creating a unified model of all the entities I interact with, across all media.

Paper → Image → PDF → SCAN metadata store

I ♥ Panels (it does the simple layout on this blog, but it’s capable of much more advanced usage).

Most school networks provide users a personal network folder mounted as a Windows network drive and accessible from any campus workstation. This is primarily meant as a document folder, but executable programs can be stored here too. I have several useful programs in my network folder, but the most useful by far is jEdit. The same copy runs on both Windows and Mac workstations, with the same plugins and configuration options.

To use jEdit in a network environment, just make sure that your jEdit user settings directory is stored on in your network folder by launching jEdit with

“jedit.jar -settings=P:/ath/to/your/folder/.jedit”

via an application shortcut in windows, or a shell script on Mac/Linux (jEdit is an executable jar). Enjoy!