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.

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.

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.