I discovered Audioscrobbler today while looking for a way to publish songs I listen to throughout the day. Previously, I used iTunes and published this info to my database, however, since I don’t really use Windows at home at all, I needed to find another solution. With Audioscrobbler, I simply install a plugin for my favorite player (be it winAMP, BMP, XMMS, Rhythmbox, foobar, whatever), login to last.fm and hit play. Audioscrobbler basically logs the listening habits of it’s users (among other things) and then provides an nice text/xml/rss feed for me to incorporate into my site. The offer a bunch of ways to integrate the info on you site, but this is the most flexible.

<p>The other half of getting the recent tracklist is a WordPress plugin;<a href="http://blog.tijs.org/archives/2005/11/01/lastfm-recent-tracks-wordpress-plugin/">last.fm recent tracks</a>. It&#8217;s a fairly simple <span class="caps">PHP</span> script that parses the <span class="caps">RSS</span> feed coming from my last.fm account.</p>


<p>One of these days, I&#8217;m going to write something great&#8230; just&#8230; not today.</p>

So, I’ve been using my new linux box for a while now at home and I’ve been using Windows for about 3 years at work. One of the biggest hurdles for me coming from the Mac platform is applications. I can pretty much get by with just about any text editor for my developments needs and I’m learning The Gimp slowly but surely. For other stuff (email, web browsing, newsgroups, office stuff, etc) I’ve found suitable replacements.

<p>But there is one thing I seriously miss that is just not available on linux: <a href="http://www.barebones.com">BBEdit</a>. I used this application for about 7 years. It is by far <b>the</b> best text editor I&#8217;ve used out of all the ones I&#8217;ve tried since I started writing code. Sure, there are others out there that are really good text editors and they all work just as well, however, there was a certain comfort I had with BBEdit.  It just worked really well for me.</p>


<p>I&#8217;ve known for a while now that <a href="http://www.apple.com">Apple</a> was due to use Intel chips in their future machines and that there&#8217;s a group of folks dedicated to <a href="http://www.osx86project.org">porting <span class="caps">OS X</span> over to x86</a>. That&#8217;s exciting new to me. Could I possibly be reunited with my favorite text app once again? Who knows. According to the osx86 project site, the current hardware I have is not <a href="http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/HCL_10.4.3">totally supported out-of-box</a>, but it looks like it could be a possibility down the road.</p>


<p>It would be nice to be able to use BBEdit in linux and/or Windows (I don&#8217;t suppose BareBones is willing to port it over to either platform). It would certainly be nice to run <span class="caps">OS X</span> on my new machine. I suppose I could try to install <span class="caps">OS X</span> on my current setup, but I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;m ready for that kind of headache just yet.</p>