I hardly ever find an entire album amazing. Most of the times it’s just some songs. But this album is an exception on that. (Adept and Alesana have similiar albums too)

Besides the album being kick-ass, I also wanna try this Spotify playbutton, even though it’s pretty useless. But maybe it works for ‘conversion’.

To go along nicely with my previous Shoutcast tip, here is another one.

If you, like me, use the ’7.html’ trick to get some quick stats about your stream broadcast but are getting some inconsistencies with parsing the comma-seperated input you get, try this:

$data = preg_split("/[,]+/", $string, 7);

A possible outcome would be this:

Array ( [0] => 1 [1] => 1 [2] => 1 [3] => 1000 [4] => 1 [5] => 192 [6] => "Woe, Is Me - Hell, or High Water" )

If you were to ‘explode()‘ this string, you’d get the artist in 2 nodes and with this songtitle you’d get that one in 2 nodes as well.

The preg_split function has the nice ability to add a limit parameter, thus saying “Split this string on commas, but only do it for the first 7″ and this will guarantee that your artist and songtitle are stuck together on the last index.

Pretty semantic title huh? But that’s basically what this is all about.

If you have a Shoutcast host that is set to private, only people/IPs in the RIP list (Reserved IP) can access your stream. A lot of free Shoutcast server providers do this, to make it a bit less profitable to freeride their services.

Let’s have a quick look at the code and then analyze it to understand what it’s doing.

< ?php
	$ip = explode('.', $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
 
	$username = 'admin';
	$password = 'password';
	$host = 'myshoutcastserver.com';
	$port = 8080;
 
	$url = sprintf('http://%s:%d/admin.cgi?mode=ripip&ip1=%d&ip2=%d&ip3=%d&ip4=%d',
		$host, $port, $ip[0], $ip[1], $ip[2], $ip[3]
	);
 
	$context = stream_context_create(array(
		'http' => array(
			'method' => 'GET',
			'user_agent'  => $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],
			'header'  => array(
				"Authorization: Basic " . base64_encode("$username:$password"),
				'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*\/*;q=0.8'
			)
		)
	));
	file_get_contents($url, false, $context);
?>

First we get the IP address of the visitor, we explode() it on the dots to get 4 seperate numbers, together forming a valid IP address.
Then we set up an URL that will look like this: http://myshoutcastserver.com:8080/admin.cgi?mode=ripip&ip1=127&ip2=0&ip3=0&ip4=1

This URL will submit (GET) a form that adds the IP to the RIP list. See why we had to seperate the IP on the dots? ‘Why’ you ask, well because this is somewhat of a hack. We fill the form through GET parameters.

Of course the admin.cgi page is behind a password protected bit. This is however a simple Basic Authorization, so we create a stream context and add Basic Authorization.

Shoutcast Servers arean’t completely dumb, only a little. But they’re smart enough to notice ‘robots’. So we also add some headers to make it believe we are a real browser and that we would like to accept normal HTML back. We don’t really need anything back at all, so that’s why you don’t have to do anything with the data you get back from file_get_contents.

Just running the command, with the context stream and the pimped out URL is enough to add an IP to the Reserved IP List in Shoutcast. You’re done!

Gleetch.com is a really small application that lets you tweet your newly learned skills and your unlocked achievements from Glitch.com

Now you might be wondering what Glitch.com is, but that’s a totally different blogpost. But for now you can just read their information. If even that is too much; Glitch.com is a web-based Flash game that lets you wander in a fantasy world called Ur.

Gleetch.com intro page

On Gleetch.com you can sign in with your Glitch account, they have an offical Glitch API. If it’s your first time you are asked to allow our Twitter app to get access to your Twitter account, if all is well, you will get to see your settings page. Here you can set your messages and enable or disable pictures.

All skills and achievements come with pictures, so we will send them along as well, using Twitters ‘own’ photoservice.

Gleetch.com settings page

The application will then keep checking your stats and post it to Twitter, if you unlocked something good! This is how your Tweet will look like..

The default text contains the hashtag #Glitch. So to see Gleetch in action, look at the Tweets with the #Glitch hashtag.

Gleetch.com is operational, but I wouldn’t want to call it finished. As you can see designing layouts still isn’t my best skill and we might expand the service with tweets related to your in-game wealth or location.
But the people like it and more people use this than my other service Longer Tweets: Get some! So that’s a nice incentive for me!

P.s. Glitch.com is momentarily in beta, I still got 3 keys, so if you’re interested, let me know!

Friday, september 16th, my girlfriend and I want to Leeuwarden, to the Leeuwarden Air Base (IATA: LHW, ICAO: EHLW).
Every year the Royal Netherlands Air Force (RNLAF) organises a static- and airshow.

Let me tell you this, it’s really hard to film and photograph fast flying airplanes!

Tillybot is a utility bot on Twitter. You can give her commands and she’ll reply to them.

At the moment she can fetch the weather, compare Last.fm users, geocode your address to latitude and longitude coordinates and fight against other people on Twitter! #fight

Robots have always fascinated me and my first robot-like thing must have been Lego and later ‘Technical’ Lego, with little engines and train rails. Skip ahead a few years and then there’s IRC, I was using mIRC to get onto servers and communicating with the ‘bots’ such as NickServ.

So it didn’t take long before I started to make my own IRC bots. I wasn’t good with all that shell stuff, so I just opened 2 clients, one where I would run my bot and one where I would test it.

Now skip ahead again and I’m having a lot of fun with API’s, one of which is obviously Twitter. Now I had the idea for a while, but a couple weeks ago I ‘discovered’ the “entities” in the results that Twitter gives you. They parse hashtags for you, time to get started!

So I created a ‘utility bot’, I wanted to call her uTilly, but it was already taken, so then the name Tillybot was created. Luckily the .com was available as well ;)

If you’re wondering what a utility bot is, it’s basically like a utility knife; one entity with a lot of functions.

At the moment Tilly only replies to commands/hashtags, but I intend to make her a bit more ‘human’, so you could have ‘real’ conversations. For now the commands work fine.

At the time of writing she knows the following commands:

• #bmi – Will calculate your Body Mass Index
• #fight – Will ‘fight’ another person on Twitter
• #followme – Will make her follow your Twitter account
• #geo – Turns addresses/locations into geo coordinates
• #lastfm – Compares two Last.fm users
• #weather – Gives you the weather for the provided location

Most of these commands require ‘parameters’ so for a complete list and explanation just check our her website: http://www.tillybot.com

Tillybot.com

This is only just the beginning and there’s still a lot of things to make/do. So if you know any cool commands or know a neat API that Tilly should use as well, let me know in the comments!

P.s. If you want to fight me tell her this: @Tillybot #fight #gerbenjacobs

This post is the fifth part of a series named “New York”, in which I talk about my trip to New York city in the first week of May 2011. These posts will be loaded with pictures, I took 1050 that week!

This post will be slightly different, as I’ll just show pictures and write hardly anything.

View all posts about New York 2011 or read all about day 4!

Tuesday, May 3rd

Alright, so like I said, this post will be different from the others as it will have more pictures than text. For 2 reasons: a) I don’t feel like writing much and b) we only did 3 ‘things’ so not much explanation needed. I’ll try to annotate the photos to give a little exta information if possibile.

Today was another normal weekday and once again New York was less touristy, we liked it!

We had planned to go to the USS Intrepid, which now is a museum, but we first, by accident really, came past the “Engine 54, ladder 4, battalion 9″ firehouse.

Engine 54, Ladder 4 - memorial

Engine 54, Ladder 4 - memorial plaque

We then entered the museum, with another metal detector!

USS Intrepid road sign

Plane below deck

The 'tower' on the USS Intrepid

AH-1 Cobra

"Huey"

Radar plane

AH-1 Cobra and Huey from another angle

"Blue Angels" stuntplane

AH-1J Sea Cobra

Fighter jet, not sure what type

AH-1J Sea Cobra cockpit

Sea Cobra in semi-profile

Old MIG?

Radio from 1941

More old radiostuff, however this looks somewhat less older

After this ‘museum’, which my little sisters didn’t enjoy as much as I did, we went for a boattour around NYC, we opted for the 3-hour one which circles the entire island. One of the best ideas this entire week and if you find yourself in NYC, make sure you do this. You get to see a lot! *TIP*

Some of the following photos have a lot of ‘heads’ in them, my apologies.

The NY skyline in my sisters maillot ;)

The Dutch flag waving proudly at the pier

Golf court thing?

Big tugboat

Blachhawk overhead

And if the Blackhawk wasn’t enough, somewhat later we saw this!

Old houses

Biggest clock in the world..

Old fort or stronghold kind of building

The Staten Island ferry, which is quite big but also free of charge

Atop the Brooklyn Bridge

Manhattan bridge

Helicopter landing, people already waiting to board

Brooklyn Bridge pier

Roosevelt Island cablecar

Queensboro bridge, one of the prettiest NYC bridges

By now, we’re entering the little ‘river’ that embraces the north east side of the Manhattan borough, which really, is a great place. A lot of ‘old’ things, but it’s these things that really have character and it allowed for some nice photographs.

The History Channel building and logo

Closest we got to the Yankee Stadium

Beautiful swing bridge; Macombs Dam Bridge

Old aquaduct

Loose lips, sink ships

Some may call it a bad photograph, others call it abstract.

The George Washington Bridge and Jeffrey Hook's Light

Or.. "The Little Red Lighthouse"

And finally back at home, at Times Square, my sisters were having fun with the giant Forever 21 tv-screen/interactive billboard.

My sisters found themselves in the spotlight

I kinda like webservices that allow you to create longer tweets, because really, sometimes you just need them a tad bit longer.

There are (only) a few options out there, but the main ones I know are tweetlonger.com and deck.ly, the latter only open to Tweetdeck users. The deck.ly tweet page looks like a web 2.0 ERP business-aligned software page and tweetlonger.com’s tweet page, accompanied by the tl.gd  domain, is just.. well judge for yourself.

Both show the Twitter username and a photo (which you quite have to search for on tl.gd) and that’s it. “Come on!” I thought “I haven’t spend ages on my Twitter design for nothing”.

Well, I didn’t really think that, but it was something along thoses lines and basically:  ”Why is there no longer tweet service that incorporated my Twitter page design?”

So I created “Longer Tweets, Get Some!” or commonly known as http://lt.gs.

It’s really simple, you sign in with Twitter (give the app access if it’s the first time you use it) and then you’re ready to go! Breaking the 140-character limit since 2011! Sure, be a rebel, why not!

When your tweet is posted and people follow the short url back, they’ll find something similar to this.

A screenshot of how a tweet on lt.gs would look like.

Some people have already commented on the layout, which they consider ugly, so I’m having artsy people look at it. I’m not really a designer ..

This post is the fourth part of a series named “New York”, in which I talk about my trip to New York city in the first week of May 2011. These posts will be loaded with pictures, I took 1050 that week!

View all posts about New York 2011

or read all about day 3!

Monday, May 2nd

This was the first normal weekday that we spent in New York and it was noticable, all the weekend-people had left. Of course it’s never not busy in New York, but it was relatively ‘quiet’. Or “Deir aar not muts piepel” as @HencosMening would say.

Looking west onto the Hudson river

We were all quite tired, because we kind of pushed our limits on saturday and sunday. Doing a lot of stuff in one day. This day, and the ones ahead, were slightly less hectic, but still packed and with all the things we done, we still didn’t see everything.. not even everything that we wanted to see.

So when we woke up, the TV’s went on (of course), and Osama was all over the news; he was dead. So we went outside to get breakfast and all the newspapers were headlining it.

Got him!

Wall Street Journal playing safe: "Reported dead"

They “nailed the bastard” according to the New York Post, and people had been gathering at Times Square and Ground Zero, in fact, they were at Firehouse Ten, where we were just the day before.

We went to the Subway (the sandwich shop, not the transportation one) and I had to teach my parents the entire concept, eventhough we have quite a lot of Subway’s ourself in the Netherlands. My dad just gave up and pointed to some egg muffin. The picture showed two different kinds and he thought he’d get both. Which he didn’t, so he ordered another one. The rest of us did get a real sub though.

Just drop the letters through a giant 'chute'

After all of that, we went to the first ‘attraction’ of that day: the Empire State Building.

Of course more metaldetectors and waiting in line for one of the elevators to get down. Which they’d stuff with people. Maxing it out! Also, you don’t know the meaning of the word ‘fast’ unless you been in these elevators.

When we got up there I instantly recognized the guarding rail, because you see it in so many photos, I just never knew they belonged to the ESB.

The view is absolutely amazing! And it beats the view from Top Of The Rock by a magnitude of.. let’s say.. 3.73!

Also the fact that there’s no glass, just a fence with holes big enough for camera’s to go through, makes it the perfect candidate for aerial photographs. There’s not much else to say about this, so here are just some photo’s:

If you happen to fly by and wanna kno where you at..

Tiny people eating tiny sandwiches and drinking from tiny cups.

Some trees. Just chillin'

How much does this remind you of GTA?

When we took the turbo jet-engine elevator back down we went to a McDonalds, so that meant free wi-fi. Checked in to some of the places I went, twitpic’d and instant messaged with my girlfriend back in the Netherlands. I ordered the “Frozen strawberry lemonade”, which is just really a slushie/Slush Puppie.

Art deco?

We then started walking to the MoMa. Or (better?) known as The Museum of Modern Art. We were all rather optimistic about this visit, especially my mother, but it was false hope.

Airplane on ESBs eye-height

The “Contemporary Art” section was, as weird as this may sound, enraging me. It made no sense, there was nothing to ‘see’ and it felt like it was really meaningless. But maybe that’s just me. I really liked the other galleries, the one with photos, the digital age gallery and the typography gallery, where I intensively searched for ‘Comic Sans’, but to no avail.

By the time the chairs were growing out of the walls, the rest of the family was starting to get bored. Thinking back, it was really a bad choice to go to this museum, we should have gone for a history museum or the National Museum of the American Indian.

Harley parked on the street

For reasons I can not remember anymore, we went to our hotel to get some rest? Drink? Choco krispies?

So when we left the hotel again, we walked underneath the Ed Sullivan theater and to find ourselves in the middle of .. Hollywood?

What we saw was a giant crossbow, a man in a black jumpsuit and camera’s. So I took out my camera too, and made some shots.

Turns out this black suited man’s name is Brian Miser or as he likes to call himself: The Human Fuse. The fact that the entire parade was parked in 53th street was no coincidence either, it was of course next to the Ed Sullivan theatre where they film The Late Show with David Letterman.

So that was quite a wake up call.. sort of.

Clean shoes at Grand Central

We then went for dinner and we chose the Planet Hollywood venue right on the Square. Well, let me tell you, this was one of the best, if not *the* best, restaurant we been to. If you strongly disagree, then I guess we made the wrong choices before.

The ambiance in this place is great, movies, props, special lightning, interior, music. They had it all.

The food was great, really big plates and the only time I had the slight feeling that “Everything is bigger in America”. Also, first time we encountered re-fills, which is totally uncommon to us; but great nonetheless :D

Why go to MOMA when you got streetart?

We actually somewhat planned to eat near Times Square, because for the evening our plan was to take the tour bus and do the night tour. The bus was quite late and we were there waiting for quite some time. First in line, so that’s nice. My little sister and I went to sit up front.. Our tour guide: someone they fished from the Apollo theatre. If Bill Cosby and Robert DeNiro would have a baby, it would look like our tour guide, except 55 years younger.

Not sure what this is.. funny with the branches though

Most of the photos turned out really crappy, because taking photos in pitch dark and while sitting atop a moving bus.. well.. do your math.

Futuristic buildings look even more futuristic at night.

It was a great tour and nice to see New York at night without having to drive or walk through the traffic yourself.

Being on a poster, like a boss.

Here are some more night pictures, but these are quite ‘horrible’. However, they *will* give you a slight impression of what it was like.

NYC at night

What my moms Canon manages to do..

Edited version of NYC at night

South Street Seaport at night

Update july 25th, 2011: ifttt.com implented the Last.fm channel and triggers.

I’ve already suggested to the guys over at ifttt.com to add the Last.fm API to their channel for us to interect with (and they’re working on it!). However, untill they actually make this, here’s a quick tip (or lifehack) on how to achieve somewhat of a Last.fm channel.

One of the default If This Then That channels is RSS. On your last.fm page you can see your recent tracks but also loved tracks and similar options, these come with a RSS feed; thus you could interact with it.

Your “Favorite Tracks” URL would be something like this: http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/user/theonewithout/lovedtracks.rss
Where you would want to switch my username (theonewithout) with yours.

Now you can add an action for it. I’m obsessed with twitter, so my action is set to “Post a tweet”.

The ‘command’ looks like this:

I just added "{{EntryTitle}}" to my Last.fm favourites! {{EntryUrl}}

So in the end, our task looks like this:

From (Last.fm) RSS to Twitter

And our tweet like this:

The end result: A tweet

Hope this blogpost can you help you figure out cool stuff!

P.s. All available Last.fm feeds can be found here: http://www.last.fm/api/feeds