Ever wondered what other people were saying about the TV show your watching? No… well I didn’t either until I came across this post on digitaltip.com.au about twitter back chat on live events and TV shows.

It got me thinking, it could be pretty interesting seeing what people said about various TV shows. Hell, it could even make some shows worth watching (unfortunately for channel 10 it’s still not enough to get me to watch So You Think you Can Dance…).

Anyway, after a bit of mucking around with Python, MythTV, and the Twitter I put together Twitter Box, a program which displays tweets people post about the show your watching on MythTV!

It works by searching for tweets containing the title of the show you’re currently watching in your local area. If your show is popular enough to have it’s own hash tag you can configure TwitterBox to use the hash tag instead of the title.

Download it from here: twitter_box_0.2.tar.gz

UPDATE 2 27/Jul/2008: Given up on twitter feed, there is just too much delay. Moved to using a custom script to monitor for service interruptions. You should have noticed improved performance over the last week or so.

UPDATE 18/Jun/2008: Have been noticing some delays with twitterfeed posting updates from Cityrail. I’m investigating it and will try to get to the bottom of it soon.

In the spirit of the Sydney Traffic Twitter bot, I’ve hacked together a Cityrail Service Interruption Twitter bot.

Unfortunately Cityrail don’t provide RSS feed for their Service interruption page. So I’ve utilised the neat services of page2rss.com, pipes.yahoo.com, to build a RSS feed for the updates, and finally twitterfeed.com a custom python script to post it on Twitter.

So if you want to keep on top of any Cityrail Service interruptions follow https://twitter.com/sydtrainservice.

Cityrail Service Interruption Twitter App.

Ah my blog how I’ve missed you.

It’s been a long time between updates, but I stumbled across some classic geek humor at xkcd while I “working” on my thesis, and felt the need to share it.

Who doesn’t love a good unix joke.

Just a quick post letting you guys know that road maps appear to has shown up on google maps! Finally we have an alternative to the sometimes buggy whereis.com.au
Here is a link to the street maps of the Sydney CBD

Directions don’t seem to be working at the moment, but hopefully that will come soon!

I had a look over at the Google Blog and noticed this article about an update to the Google Maps/Local/Earth Imagery.

It looks like our friends at google have update their Sydney Imagery again!!
From my quick look at the updates, it appears the north shore is now covered, all the way upto Warriewood Beach on the coast. As well as the more obvious complete city coverage.
Now you can see the Sydney Opera House in all it’s glory!

Now I have to waste another few days looking for radom landmarks around Sydney!

Asterisk is in fact a Linux Based PBX. It’s an amazing little piece of open source software!

It allows you to set up a telephone exchange that can do just about everything you ever wanted. It does voice mail, can email you voice mail to you, have internal extensions, and I’ve even heard talk that it might be possible to hook it into Skype. There is even cheap hardware available (FXO Hardware @ $20 on ebay) to hook it up to you existing telephone line, to receive and make calls on the real telephone network.

The real power of Asterisk is it’s ability to be used for VoIP. I’ve done with with my new VoIP line that was given to me for free when I signed up for iiNet’s Broadband 2 ADSL. This is a VoIP account that connects to the normal telephone network giving me a proper telephone number. It simple sends its data to the normal telephone network over the internet rather than over normal copper telephone line. It offers cheaper call rates on the whole, but of most importance to me was the 10c untimed calles to all Australian Capital Cities. Much better than those nasty timed calls!! I also get free iiNet to iiNet phone calls.
If there are two people with VoIP phones / Asterisk servers, you can set it up so that the call goes entirely over the internet, giving you completely FREE call!!

Another thing I’ve been able to do with Asterisk is give Ruby a landline telephone line. Before now she didn’t have access to a telephone line and had to use her mobile for everything. We set up a SIP softphone on her computer which connects to my Asterisk PBX server over her Unwired internet connection, and allows her to dial out and receive calls using my VoIP line.

VoIP calls are obviously subject to your internet connection speeds and usage. You pretty well have to have a Broadband connection, and also recommend a router that offer QoS. This will allow you to give priority to the VoIP information over other data usages, and help maintain your call quality.

At the moment I’m running on old hardward so don’t actually have QoS. Call quality has generally been very good, but I make sure I pause any downloads to make sure the data gets through ASAP.

If your looking into cheaper calls VoIP is certainly the way to go! Let me know if you guys find any other fancy stuff you can do with VoIP as I know you will!!

Hope you all had a great new years!! We have a great night down at balls head!Here are a few small pics from my Camera Phone. I’ll post the bigger ones up eventually!

I was checking out Gmail’s fancy new web clips feature today. It’s basically a tiny RSS feed viewer that displays one “headline” at a time. It’s actually quite a nice feature actually.

Anyway I was reading my email and noticed I had a new entry in my spam folder and went to check it wasn’t legitimate mail. Having confirmed the inevitable, that the mail was indeed spam, I noticed the Webclips bar in the spam folder was different? Instead of my customized selection of RSS feed it has recipies for SPAM!

Who knew you could make Spam Fajitas! =]

Finally after a 2 week wait! My Internet is back! Now with iiNet.
As i’m on an iiNet exchange I’m getting pretty nice speeds on my ADSL1 modem.
Currently my sync speeds are Upstream 800000 Downstream 7168000. Which is pretty good considering my crappy cabling etc.

It took me ages to get connected firstly due to a ADSL/Telstra line fault, then secondly due to a faulty phone at my place.

But it’s finally back up now, so there is some downloading to be had!! =]

PS. Merry Christmas and Have a Happy New Year!!

For all of you who thinks RSS is shite =P
Introducting the rsstroom reader – toilet paper printer!