We thrive on music here in This Old Clown House. I’m currently improving that experience by setting up a “radio station” using MusicPD. While we already have some music solutions in place, one of the goals is to remove our phones from the theater entirely when we are making dedicated time to explore and playfully move our bones. I’m delighted to discover that my partners have enthusiastically supported this, and we’ve been taking turns curating music for each other.
I’ve cobbled together a distraction-free “jukebox player” for the theater using an old chromebook. This was “liberated” so it could run a less awful operating system, and configured to boot directly into a minimal player interface. A great deal of inspiration was drawn from my friend Tinker’s writerdeckOS project.
For years I’ve made jokes about one of my characters, Rhino, being a radio DJ. We’ve named the stream after him, and I’ll likely record some silly station identification announcements once I get everything dialed in.
As part of testing, we randomized a large portion of our collection into a playlist and have it spinning 24x7. We tune in to enjoy it, and periodically one of us shouts, “WTF Rhino‽” when something particularly odd plays.
This has recently evolved into a bit of knowledge sharing as everyone in This Old Clown House is learning to use some basic command line tools to make playlists because it’s easier and more fun than poking at frustrating GUIs.
This also led me to upping my own computer touching game, and as a result I wrote my first completely horrible perl script. It does the job of keeping the playlist filled with interesting music when no else adds anything. Like all terribly written code, it’s being tested “in production”.
I enjoyed poking at perl, and I suspect I’ll do more with it in the future.