What’s playing now on BBC 6music?

I don’t know how to add a link to the Amazon MP3 store for a given song. If I did then I would add that to http://philwilson.org/6music/ and its purpose of letting me easily find out what song is currently playing and then buying it, would be complete.

As it is, it is merely a useful tool to be able to tell, pulling data from last.fm and twitter, what the current track being played on 6music is, and which show is playing it.

The BBC are the ones pushing the “now playing” data to last.fm but the name of the show comes from a robot built by Nigel Crawley. At no point does my code look at any of the BBC sites or services directly.

If only I could get the link to Amazon working then my sofa-based listening and purchasing experience would be complete.

The new model of buying music

My phone runs an app that idenitifies the song that is currently playing on the radio and an app to then buy and download that song, or the album it’s from. The two are seamlessly linked.

I am probably late to this, but listening to 6music whilst I have both Shazam and the Amazon mp3 store available to me means that, wherever I am, provided there’s not too much background noise, downloading a song that’s playing is about five presses of a touchscreen away.

This is not a good thing for my bank account but a bloody brilliant thing for those record execs looking to buy a new boat.

How to push to two servers at once with git

As I said this time last year, I dislike the idea of people using a decentralised version control system to centralise their code.

This means that some of my code sits in Bazaar on my server, some in Git on my server, and some in github. I’m not keen on this situation, and given that github does have a large amount of mindshare, and that launchpad is really quite horrible to use, I want to be able to “git push” to both my server and github at the same time.

It turns out this is quite easy; and everything below (with a few very minor modifications) comes from “Setting up a new remote git repository” by Tim Lucas and Aristotle Pagaltzis‘ answer on this Stackoverflow question.

So, given that I have a working github repo, and a local checkout:

Set up the new bare repo on the server:

$ ssh myserver.com
$ mkdir /var/git/myapp.git
$ cd /var/git/myapp.git
$ git --bare init
Initialized empty Git repository in /var/git/myapp.git
$ exit

Add the remote repository to your existing local git repo and push:

$ cd ~/code/myapp
$ git remote add myserver ssh://myserver.com/var/git/myapp.git
$ git push myserver master

You have now associated the remote repo with your local repo under the name “myserver”. Now open up ~/code/myapp/.git/config and:

put something like this:

[remote "public"]
    url = git@github.com:username/myapp.git
    url = ssh://myserver.com/var/git/myapp.git

Now you can say “git push public” to push to both repos at once.

and that’s it! Every time you push you will be making sure that your code lives on both your server and on github. Adds links to both in your README and the job is complete.

Android apps I have paid for

Droidbox pro (a dropbox client that came out months before the official one, and still seems better)

Jewellust (a bejeweled clone)

BeyondPod (a podcatcher. I have stopped using this since I realised it was trashing filenames)

Reddit is fun (because the author deserved my $1)

Other than BeyondPod, I recommend these paid-for apps. BeyondPod may have fixed my bug, I haven’t checked.

The other 50 or so apps I have are free. I am very much hoping that froyo (android 2.2) comes to the motorola milestone so that I can install apps to the sd card – I keep running out of internal memory!