Earthquake in Nothern California

Today at 10:40 a 4.3 magnitude earthquake hit Northern California.
I learned about this from twitscoop.com. Well not the details, just the initial fact.
Twitscoop crawls hundreds of tweets on twitter every minute and extracts the words which are mentionned more often than usual. It permanently updates the main screen:

The more a word is used in tweets the bigger the font is on twitscoop.
For more detailed statistics you can get the timeline graph which looks like this:

We can clearly see when it began: as it happened more and more people set their tweets with the word "earthquake".
Anyway, we hope everything is OK over there.

The Following gadget

I've just added a following widget to my blog.
You can see Friend Connect's new feature: the social-bar on the right side pane.
The feature is a bit like the news-feed on Facebook. Each reader can follow up other readers' activity. You can use your Google, Yahoo, Open-id or Blogger account.
You are invited to follow!

Boffin

I've read about Boffin of last.fm on webisztan.blog.hu - well, before clicking on that link you'd probably want to learn some Hungarian...
Boffin is a project on last.fm, currently available in its alpha version. It is based on a simple idea.
At the first use Boffin scans your computer searching for music and some metadata on the music. Then it reaches Last.fm/Audioscobbler's database and tries to categorize each song. It creates a cloud of labels.



Pick on one or more tags, click play and Boffin will play only songs of the specified categories.
The idea is cool, much better than shuffle of iTunes. It works on the local disk, but you get it just like a radio.
I downloaded the mac version. Honestly it was disappointing. Got an error during scanning, probably because of some file names in Hebrew (?). I permanently get an error on "cannot create playlist". Then I tried to rescan my computer and then it hasn't found anything...
I am also unclear on some of the labels like "wtf" or "acid jazz"...
Good idea, but still plenty of work to be done.

I backed up my blog

It was quite easy.
http://eitanschuler.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=1000 page lists the latest 1000 post feeds of my blog. Then I used the DownloadThemAll! Firefox add-on. Selected all feeds.
Meanwhile I did a mkdir /home/eitan/blog .
In DownloadThemAll I selected all posts.


And pressed "Start!" It created one html file for each post under /home/eitan/blog. You can directly tar and zip it as well.

Oh... this post is not included!

Command-Line-Fu

A friend of mine, Sina, found this: www.commandlinefu.com

Command-Line-Fu is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world.
Many interesting ideas. My pick is "rotate-a-video-file-by-90-degrees-cw".
mencoder -vf rotate=1 -ovc lavc -oac copy "$1" -o "$1"-rot.avi

שיחה באמצע היום

צהרי יום:
- הלו
- שלום, מדברת גבי, קצינת הקישור שלך
- שלום גבי
- אל תפחד, רק רציתי לוודא שהכתובת שלך שרשומה אצלנו נכונה, האם זה עדיין רחוב הציונות 5?
- לא, כבר לא.
- אוקיי תודה, רק רציתי לוודא, ביי!
- שלום....אהה ...רגע אולי את רוצה לדעת את הכתובת החדשה?
- זהו רק רצינו לוודא שהכתובת נכונה, שלום!
- לא, היא לא נכונה!
-אהה... לא?
- לא.
- מה אני חירשת?
- ...
- המ... אז מה הכתובת?
- ....

--א

Heads-up: visiting Spain in April

This is just a heads-up on my next trip. The destinations are Madrid and Barcelona. I start my trip with a family-visit in Budapest on the 8th April. The plan:

8th April morning flight from Tel Aviv to Budapest, Having Seder-night of Passover with my family.
9th April: taking a flight to Madrid, arriving in Madrid in the evening hours.
9-12th April: touring around Madrid, and maybe half day in the nearby ancient city of Toledo.
12th April: taking the fast AVE train to Barcelona.
12-16th April: touring around Barcelona.
16 April: flight back from Barcelona to Budapest.
16-18th April: continue family visit in Budapest.
18th April: midnight flight back to Israel.


View Larger Map

I don't take my macbook with me, but I'll try to update my blog from time to time with some stories and pictures.
Stay tuned!