I found myself always wanting to trade albums with others. However, this can become time consuming and difficult to arrange. A solution I found was to use Google’s Gmail as a server to hold albums and others could download them. An application has been developed to facilitate easy file transfer, called Gspace. This post is meant to be a guide on joining the Musictide community that has been established on Gspace. It will outline the software installations needed, how to receive emails when others upload albums, and how to send emails once you have uploaded an album.

Get Gspace running:

Step 1) Get firefox: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

Step 2) Get Gspace: http://www.getgspace.com/

Step 3) Make sure everything is installed and updated etc. If you click on the “tools” drop-down in firefox, there should be an item called “Gspace” in that menu.

Step 4) Login. Go to http://www.gmail.com/
Ask the person who referred you for the login and password.

Step 5) Use Gspace. Click Tools>Gspace. Wait a few seconds and it should log you on. You should see a bunch of files and folders appear on the right. These are all of the files hosted by gmail. On the left is your computer. Use the arrows in the middle to move files from your computer to Gspace or from Gspace to your computer.

Adding Yourself to the “Upload Updates” email List:

This is a list of Gspace users. It is used to notify everyone when an album has been uploaded.

Step 1) Go to Gmail

Step 2) Click “Contacts” on the left.

Step 3) Click “Upload Update” in the first pane.

Step 4) Click the “+ person” icon above the pane.

Step 5) Add your info to the right pane. (Include email address and alias at the least)

Uploading an Album:

Step 1) Find the folder. You can navigate the folders in the left pane of Gspace, or click “Browse” above this pane.

Step 2) Prepare for upload. Select the folder in the left pane (your computer). Make sure you are in the root Gspace directory (the one with all of the folders)

Step 3) Begin the transfer. Click the Right Arrow between the two panes. You can see the status of each file as it uploads in the bottom pane.

Step 4) Contact the masses. Once all files have successfully uploaded, go to the normal Gmail page (if you’ve followed these directions, there should be a tab open in firefox with the normal Gmail page).

Step 5) Find the list. Click “Contacts” on the left of the page. Click “Upload Update” in the left pane. Click “select:All” at the bottom of the middle pane. Finally, click “Email” in the right pane.

Step 6) Compose the Email. It’s suggested that you put:

• Name of folder on Gspace (usually album title)
• Name of artist
• Your name/alias
• Possibly some info about the artist/album.

This might sound complicated, but you’ll get the hang of it very quickly.

I dont know how many of you have been following this, but there’s a new movement in town to get away from BPA-containing plastics. BPA (bisphenol-a) is an estrogen-look-alike, at least as far as your body’s biochemistry is concerned, and can leach from plastics.

Manufacturers like Nalgene have tried to spin the news in their favor for a long time, but Canada just recently declared BPA “toxic to human health.” It is also heavily regulated, if not outlawed, in Europe. Now, it’ll probably be a long time before the US takes any action on it, but BPA-free water bottles are starting to pop up all over the net. However, the effects of BPA are most damaging when you’re still developing, meaning for most of us the “damage is already done” so-to-speak, but I’d hazard a guess that going BPA-free when you can wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

The fact is, all of the old water bottles we use going camping could be harmful to our bodies. I’d like to think that perhaps we get all pissy at the end of the trip due to all the estrogen-like BPA in our systems. I went to a seminar last summer which featured the head-honcho BPA researcher in the United States, and he stated that we’re essentially moderating the masculinity of males in our society with all the BPA we ingest and absorb. In fact, modern sperm counts are something on the order of half of what they were before BPA plastics were mainstream, and in-the-wild animals are less masculine as well due to run-off containing BPA. It’s not a good situation, and in light of the lack of government to move on this issue, you can vote with your wallet.

I wouldn’t leave you all hanging without a way to solve the problem, so here are a few tips:

Switch from your old water bottles to ones specifically mentioning BPA or bisphenol-a free.

I like Camelbak’s line of BPA-water bottles. I’ll be buying a Tritan Better Bottle for hiking and a Podium Squirt Bottle for my bike. The Tritan has the additional added benefit of a “squeeze and squirt” mouthpiece, so we’ll see how this works in the backcountry.

If anyone wants to get in on my REI order to save on shipping, gimme a comment!

With summer sitting out on the front porch, soon we’ll be able to put in some more time for the website. I’ll be re-doing most of the forum’s buttons (some look very “yuck”). I’ll also probably try to get the blog’s comments chunked and legible. With any luck, Justin will be able to get the “updates” bar in the forum working. Oh what a wonderful world that would be. Perhaps wp-united will help solve the problem. 

 

For the time being, I’d like to say that I think the redesign was a huge success. Everything looks great, and I learned a whole lot. Justin’s functions work great, and the updates bar is mega-pimp. I hope everyone likes the look and feel of the new site. It is way more user-friendly than ye olde electronox.net. I’d encourage people to keep the ideas coming so we can keep the site fresh and customized to our needs.

Codenamed Hardy Heron, Ubuntu 8.04 final will be released in the next two weeks from Canonical. I highly recommend everyone download the final live-cd image when it’s released (or the beta now if you’re feeling particularly apt).

In case you haven’t heard, Ubuntu can be trialed without making a new partition – it runs from a native Windows partition without deleting or modifying your old operating system. You simply reboot and the Windows bootloader will show a “Ubuntu” boot option next to your Windows O/S. While I’m not sure how this feature (named “Wubi” by the way), is worse (or better) than a native install on your typical linux partition, it does offer a best-of-both-worlds scenario for the weekend gamer and the weekday warrior.

With the latest improvements in convenient installation, the quickest integration of cutting-edge features any modern O/S has ever provided, and the prospects of learning about linux, there’s no reason not to install Ubuntu at this point.  There’s something to this free, opensource movement, and you’d be hurting yourself by not at least peeking in to see what it is all about.

Hello to those of you who have installed the electronox.net portal. The portals have been inactive since the re-design due to some revolutions in our site structure. You should now be receiving photo and blog updates. Forum updates should be coming soon. 

 

Edit: the windows portal is having some troubles, but in the mean time, be aware that you can get electronox.net updates on iGoogle. Just click here.

Out of necessity and a fair bit a curiosity, I created this script to import our old Cutenews database into Wordpress using the Wordpress Extended RSS file format.

***BEFORE YOU START: MAKE A COPY OF YOUR CUTENEWS FOLDER AND RUN THIS SCRIPT ON THE COPY OR BE READY TO RESTORE FROM A BACKUP***

First, change your date format in Cutenews to “Y-m-d H:i:s” in the Options, System Configuration, News menu. The time format for comments should also be “Y-m-d H:i:s”.

Make sure:

• “Show comments when showing full story” is set to Yes.
• “Full story in pop-up” is set to no.
• “Show full story when showing comments” should be set to Yes.
• Disable all character limits.

Now, make a copy of your Cutenews database file (./cutenews/data/news.txt) to your desktop, open up the file in a plain text editor (my favorite is Notepad2), and strip it down to a comma separated list of the 10-digit id numbers (e.g. 1099442233, 123002233, etc.).

Next, open up  wp_export.php on your desktop with a plain text editor, and copy your comma separated values from the file you just recently edited in the brackets between $id_array = array ( and ). You need to delete the old values in this file and fill it with your own.

Finally, upload your modified wp_export.php and the other files in the .zip to your Cutenews directory.

Now run the script by typing it into your browser (e.g. http://mysite.com/cutenews/wp_export.php). Save the output (the source) as an .xml file and import this file in wordpress like you would a Wordpress export file.

Future versions of the script will automate the $id_array creation process. I just didn’t have time yet.

Download Cutenews to wordpress

The redesign is up and running. It appears that the biggest desire is to have a place to view new content for people without portals. That’ll be the next line of business after the blogs are taken care of.