Similar to my post Use AppleScript to control Google Play Music All Access, here are instructions to use AppleScript to control Beats Music. It’s so much nicer to have global hotkeys to control music players. See the Use AppleScript to control Google Play Music All Access for some credit for how I figured this all out. Applying the same technique to Beats Music was a lot easier because the DOM element IDs aren’t obfuscated.

Start with the Ubuntu FreeNX instructions.

$ sudo apt-get install freenx-server
$ mkdir ~/src/nxagent
$ cd ~/src/nxagent
$ sudo apt-get build-dep nxagent
$ apt-get source nxagent
$ cd nxagent-*
$ curl -L https://tonyscelfo.com/dl/nx/Keystore.c.patch | patch -p1
$ curl -L https://tonyscelfo.com/dl/nx/Cursor.c.patch | patch -p1
$ dpkg-source --commit . cursor_warp_and_keyboard_binding_change
$ dpkg-buildpackage
$ cd ..
$ sudo dpkg -i nxagent_*.deb

Thanks to the Create global hotkeys to control Google Music playback post from June 23, 2011, I figured out how to control Google Play Music All Access via AppleScript. This is useful because I have a Griffin PowerMate which can be configured to launch AppleScript commands. Now I can pause/play music and skip to previous/next track my pushing or rotating the PowerMate. I had previously done this for the Mog OS X application and I wasn’t willing to switch to Google Play Music All Access because of the lack of global keyboard bindings. Now I have them.

This site is currently built using Jekyll, Twitter Bootstrap, PageSpeed and is hosted on App Engine. This is currently my favorite way to easily build and host fast and highly available websites.

All websites work by loading html files from a server. The fastest possible servers are ones that simply serve static html files instead of running code to dynamically generate the html at request time. Jekyll is a clever tool that precomputes static html files for a website. It uses Markdown as a templating language to simplify the process of writing valid html. When the jekyll build command is executed, it compiles a full set of html pages under a single output directory called _site/. You can serve directly out of the _site/ directory, rsync it to a remote server or even use GitHub’s free hosting of jekyll pages.

My first post to this blog was in 2005 about my 1989 Porsche 944 S2. It was a great car and I had a lot of fun with it, but I had to sell it in 2007 when a bearing in the torque tube failed. The repair costs were more than the value of the car, so I sold it to someone who had the time, equipment and space to fix it himself.

SSH keys can be used to share a single account to host a git or subversion repo. Putting the SSH keys into the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file will give users full access to the shared account. A better and safer way to share the account is to restrict access to only the commands needed for either git or svn.

For git, you can put the following at the beginning of each key line in the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file:

I use git at work and I think it’s a fantastic version control system. I’ve also been using it on some personal projects and I’ve written a post-receive hook that is very useful for managing simple web applications. Once configured, you can deploy to a staging server and/or a production server by simply running git-push. Skim down to Step 4 if you need an example to be convinced.

This script is great for a simple site with the following requirements:

Google applications are a lot more efficient when you use the keyboard shortcuts. For example, in Gmail you can hit r to reply, a to reply-all, f to forward, j to move to an older message, k to move to a newer message and there are many, many more.

I had been using keyboard shortcuts for years before I discovered that hitting ? brings up an overlay showing every keyboard shortcut for the application. Check it out and learn as many as you can.

FreeNX is great and I wrote this FreeNX post about it last month. Since then, I’ve realized that NoMachine offers their own NX server for free as “NoMachine Free Edition” with the limitation that you can only have two simultaneous users connected at a time.

If you are new to NX, I highly recommend reading my FreeNX post because it talks more about NX and it describes how to use xmodmap to fix key bindings when using an OS X client to connect to a linux server.