Monthly Archives: August 2013

HabitRPG, chain mail GTD

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The last couple of days have been quite productive, mostly to a new kind of motivation, that came in form of achievements on a gamified GTD task manager. I’m talking about HabitRPG, a website/Chrome addon/Android app that rewards your character with gold coins and experience points at every completed task. I’ve rushed in and inserted most of my “expected” tasks, which can be categorized as Habits, Dailies and ToDos.

It can be a little confusing (and sometimes even buggy) at first, but there’s planty of help around a small but vibrant community. I’ll keep using it, it’s been a nice experience so far and I think it only gets better. 🙂

Playing with some ChromeCast alternative

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It’s no news that I’ve put together quite some time ago a spare desktop to use as media center. No wonder also that it runs XBMCbuntu quite smoothly. 🙂 It’s also VERY nice to be able to control the whole media experience through any browser or Android device that’s in the same network, so I can put it to play media without even looking at it.

The last couple of weeks (after ChromeCast launch), I saw many many applications attemping to integrate with (despite the unstable API) and even completely emulate it! So, since I don’t have access to one of these HDMI-dongle wonders, I’ve decided to put LeapCast to work and emulate my own ChromeCast setup! 🙂

First of all, it needs a Linux setup that runs google-chrome, which the current XBMCbuntu… doesn’t. In fact, even if a simple call to update-manager (and a bit of patience) did the trick, I still had plenty of NVidia driver madness to control after the reboot (so, if you’re not up to trouble, install an up-to-date Ubuntu and XBMC from it).

Installed LeapCast and Chrome, created a simple shell script to be able to log and called it from a nifty system function at ~/.xbmc/userdata/autoexec.py. Worked like a charm (despite calling LeapCast with –fullscreen, it’s not using it all. Perhaps the X calls are a bit odd from XBMC…) and the device advertised itself once I opened the Youtube app at my Nexus phone. 🙂

Usual xbmc

XBMC and Youtube app

XBMC and Youtube videoOf course XBMC has its own Youtube addon, which works wonders and I love it very much, this results in even less exercise. 😀 Ready to become the couch zombie we all aspire to!