Posts about Entertainment

The machines are behind a firewall and running on a read-only overlay filesystem for resiliency, so I had the machines periodically pull the event images from the website, and I can change out the images on the website any time.

This was all done with desktop autostart scripts and cron for quite some time, but eventually, we needed more control.

We wanted to have different sets of images and to be able to choose them. For a show, we may want to only show the logo, while other times might call for all the normal advertisements.

The machines have no keyboards or mice, so they needed to be controlled by a web browser. I also don’t know if they’ll start up on the same IP addresses, so I needed a bit of Javascript in a static place to have the browser search and find running slide servers.

The service on each machine now runs as a babashka script that starts upon automatic login. It pulls new images from the website and from a Google Drive, periodically refreshes them, and starts Eye of Mate (eom) to run the slide show.

The babashka script also starts a small web server on http-kit to let us to choose image sets and to trigger a refresh of the images. http-kit is provided by default in babashka.

The SRCC website is a static site built with Hugo, so I add all the events to it via an image or 2 and some YAML. It’s hard to train another normal person to do this stuff, so the responsibility fell exclusively on me. I scripted it up with some bash, but that’s still only accessible to me.

Finally, I’ve been coding all Clojure code for the past couple weeks, and I’ve started playing with Gemini CLI to see what it can do with some Clojure code.

I now have a web form available to allow others to create events for the website, and it interacts with git for publishing to the Hugo site.

The service is deployed on my normal Linux servers as a container run by podman kube play and systemd quadlet.

I can direct Gemini to make changes or add features, and I review the code, ask for corrections or just make updates myself. It’s kind of like pair programming with someone who’s really good at Googling answers and jumping to some (mostly) useful conclusions. Having the AI agent has helped maintain some momentum and saved me jumping down some deep rabbit holes before I needed. I’m asking it for small changes and iterating, not trying to get it to do everything in one shot.

Gemini’s CLI interface makes it easy to switch to another project directory and let it try some stuff on lots of my projects recently.

I had also played with Claude CLI for a day, but Gemini’s free tier is proving capable enough for me so far.

I made the transition, and I love Podcast Addict. Listening to podcasts is easily my #1 pastime, so it’s important that I found the perfect software.

I have a good bit of music I had acquired and ripped in the late 90s and had purchased from Amazon later. That all lives in a directory on my big computer. I never play anything from there, and it just sits there for safe keeping.

I continued to purchase DRM-free MP3 files from Amazon Music, and I eventually embraced their "free" streaming with Amazon Prime. I could add available music to my collection for free, and then stream it along with the stuff I bought, so it’s nice and blended. This allowed me to easily toss a new album or artist into rotation, and if I really want, I might purchase it to keep.

The Prime streaming service had some limitations with some music I wanted to sample being unavailable, and sometimes, I’d notice some of the free music disappeared from my collection. I decided to pay the little bit for the Unlimited Music plan, and that made almost everything available. I notice very few cases of music becoming unavailable, so now I don’t bother buying downloadable MP3s except in rare cases where I want to be able to use a song on another device outside the Amazon Music client.

I don’t really use the stations at all on Amazon Music. I don’t feel the need to hear large numbers of new songs all the time, so I have a smaller curated list of podcasts and DJs where I discover new music to add to my collection at Amazon:

I had uploaded all my music to Google Play Music years ago, but there had always been news of the service’s eventual demise. It’s finally migrated recently over to YouTube Music, and they seem to have reintroduced the ability to upload my own music. I’ve paid for YouTube Premium, so I have YouTube Music as well, and this could be a nice alternative. I have a few albums uploaded there which I can’t find on Amazon. I don’t think I can buy music there, though, and I’ve already purchased a good bit of (DRM-free) music on Amazon.