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CherryMusic is a open source music streaming server that can play your personal music collection on almost any device with a web browser. It is written in python and is very light weight.

CherryMusic can be installed on Raspberry PI to create a personal web based music station that can be used on any device of our choice and be central repository of all the music you like.

So, below is the list of what we need to build our own personal music streaming server

1. Raspberry PI

2. PiBang Linux Server (Any Linux distro will do, I prefer Pi Bang based on Raspbian)

3. CherryMusic – Download it from here

Burn PiBang Server to SD card and boot your RPi.

Update Linux on RPI and install prerequisites for CherryMusic Server

apt-get update && apt-get -y upgrade && apt-get install -y imagemagick vorbis-tools lame flac python-mutagen

Use wget and download the latest CherryMusic Master branch from GitHub and unzip the master.zip

Make a folder on your RPi and upload your music collection. I have it on /music folder

mkdir /music

now cd to unzipped CherryMusic folder and run below command to setup CherryMusic

python cherrymusic --setup --port 8080

It will ask to download cherrypy, key in y and press enter to continue with installation

Now point your browser to http://rpi-ipaddress and you will be presented with the below setup screen.

Key in /music/ (or any other folder that has your music collection) in the Media base directory, leave the rest as defaults and click on Save Configuration and start CherryMusic

Wait for the Setup to complete, it would take few seconds

Once the setup is complete you will be greeted with the below login screen.

I have admin as default username and password. Login and enjoy your music on all your devices. You can even port forward or NAT your RPi and listen to your collection anywhere as long as you are connected to internet.

I was able to play music simultaneously on 4 different devices on my home wifi with no issue

1. Windows 8.1

2. Blackberry

3. Android

4. Acer Iconia Tablet

Reference-

1. http://www.fomori.org/cherrymusic/Setup%20Guide.html

2. https://github.com/devsnd/cherrymusic/tree/master

3. http://raspberrypihelp.net/tutorials/44-raspberry-pi-cherrymusic-music-streaming

Mark Richard Shuttleworth, entrepreneur, founder of Canonical Ubuntu, the famous Open Source Linux Distribution and second self funded space tourist and first from Africa has recently announced Ubuntu for Phone, with a vision of building ONE OS to run on all devices ranging from Smartphone, PCs, Televisions, Tablets to super computers and cloud.

As per the announcement by Mark, phones based on Ubuntu for Phone should be available in the market somewhere during last quarter of 2013 or first quarter of 2014

For long have been using and suggesting CamStudio, an open source and free screen capturing and recording software for Windows machines. A recent project of mine needed more features than what CamStudio could offer and there I was bingle(ing) (using Bing and Google) the web, when I stumbled upon ActivePresenter from Atomi Systems.

ActivePresenter is a feature rich screen recording software than help in creating interactive screencasts and SCORM-compliant e-learning content.

Few of the many features of the ActivePresenter are

1. Obviously Capture and Record (Images and Full motion video)

2. Annotation

3. Audio/Video Editing with options like pan/zoom

4. Exporting to high quality video formats including AVI, WebM etc

5. Transition Effects

6. Narration, Spotlight, Blur, cursor path etc.

If you have installed Windows Server 2012 Roles and Features using PowerShell or remote server admin tools or new multi server manager console, you will see that the management tools are missing from the server on which you just have enabled the role or feature. This is because Microsoft has provided more granular control on what is installed on the Windows Server 2012. As an administrator we have choice to include or not to include management tools while installing the Roles and Features we choose.

Below is a comic illustrating the same.

Source:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/servermanager/archive/2012/08/13/the-case-of-the-missing-role-and-feature-management-tools.aspx

Reference:

More on Installing Roles and Features here

The latest release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Long Term Support) code named Precise Pangolin from Canonical has many new features as in with any new release improving stability and speed. The interesting addition that will excite Microsoft shops and fans is built in support for Hyper-V eliminating the need to install Microsoft Linux Integration Components inside Ubuntu 12.04 when deployed as a VM

As you can see in the above screenshots the kernel version is 3.2 which has Hyper-V IC modules and detects all Hyper-V synthetic devices like NIC, SCSI storage, has mouse integration and supports multiple vCPUs out of the box.

Hope to see other Linux distributions do the same soon.

Useful links

Click here to know more about Ubuntu new release and download links

Ubuntu home page

Click here to download 32 bit Desktop ISO image (701 MB)

Click here to download 64 bit Desktop ISO image (698 MB)

Click here for my earlier post on Linux IC and Hyper-V

Click here to know more about Pangolin

If you are like me using Windows computer daily and keep moving your hand between keyboard and mouse, Run box in Windows Start menu can be used to speed up access to a whole variety of functions.

Here are 30 commands that are very useful for time saving while using Windows computer. These commands not only help you get the work done faster, but also more efficiently instead of clicking through tons of windows and options.

All these commands can also be used from good old command prompt or brand new PowerShell

1. Add or Remove Programs – appwiz.cpl