Stream Music to iPhone from Home Computer

As a replacement to the now defunct SimplifyMedia, I have been using, and highly recommend audiogalaxy to stream any mp3 or .m4a (DRM free) to my smart phone.  This app can run on the iPhone/ iPad/iPodTouch or any Android device.  The server application (running on the computer with your music files) can be installed on any Windows or  Mac OS X 10.5 or greater machine.

Here’s a quick run down for comparison.

Audiogalaxy Pros:

• Quickly loads large library (15k songs) on iPhone – tested on 3G
• Has a web interface that allows you to play your library on an internet connected PC/MAC/Linux box
• Allows you you shuffle entire library
• Low processor footprint on server
• Works over 3g or WiFi
• Free!

Audiogalaxy Cons:

• Does not buffer more than one song, so there is a delay between the songs
• No support for .flac or .ogg
• I couldn’t import my iTunes playlists

Minor Gripes:

• Can’t scrobble to last.fm
• No way to add friends or share library

That’s it!  Overall, I find audiogalaxy to be the best software that streams your home music library to your smart phone.

Audiogalaxy Web Interface

Reddit’s Front Page: A Look at Traffic, Stats and Bandwidth

GA informing me of a *slight* traffic increase

Recently I was lucky enough to have a link I submitted to reddit (comment page) make it to the site’s front page. While my link was originally posted to the sub-reddit  r/programming, it quickly gained popularity and was on the main page for nearly 24 hours.

Here’s a look at the raw access log, I’ve included the entire month to show how drastic the increase (and subsequent decrease) in traffic was.  The link was submitted on May 24th.   The image itself was just over 171 KB, quite a bit of bandwidth was used, fortunately, my host allows 500GB transfer per month.

Here we can see the numbers leading up to the surge

And the corresponding numbers (of the peak day) from Google Analytics which line up very well.

And now, a closer look at the redditors themselves:

Browsers Used

No surprise: Firefox is the preferred browser among the tech crowd.  More interesting in my opinion is Chrome beating out IE almost 4 to 1.

Operating Systems:

OS

Bonus – a few of the sites that picked up the link shortly after it appeared on Reddit’s frontpage:

Those are the numbers that were most interesting to me.  Did I leave anything out?  Leave me a comment and I will add it if possible, thanks.

Firefox Clear History Not Working – version 3.5.7

There must be a bug in Firefox 3.5.7 that is keeping it from clearing you recent history. I was able to clear this data using CCleaner (mac users can do the same with Clean App). Just make sure to close down Firefox before running CCleaner.  Then double check that the checkboxes in the ‘Application’ tab are set as follows:

Useful Shortcuts For Firefox

Here is a quick list of shortcuts that I commonly use to speed up my browsing experience.  Most of these shortcuts should work on other modern browsers such as Opera and Chrome, however I haven’t tested them all yet. Feedback is most certainly appreciated.

1. Middle clicking (scroll wheel) a link will open it in a new tab.  It will also close a tab.  Holding ctrl while middle clicking will open it in the foreground
2. F6 highlights the address bar.  Ctrl + l does the same but it also will select all the text (if only a portion of the url is highlighted)
3. Ctrl+t to open a new tab with the focus on the address bar.
4. “/” opens quick find.
5. Ctrl+u to view the page’s source.
6. Ctrl+[tab] to switch between tabs, also holding shift reverses the direction.
7. Ctrl+0 to reset text to the default size.
8. Ctrl+[shift]+t re-opens most recently closed tab.
9. ctrl+w closes current tab