Four Island

Recently, I've (OMG. Seriously, that was a coincidence) been thinking about starting KFM again. I know I've said this many times, but I know some people actually really like it. I think I should re-start, but I'll have to get over the procrastination.

The thing is, I want to showcase KFM here on Four Island and I was thinking of having Wednesday's blog post be a KFM post and Saturday's weekly post include a KFM comic as well. The only problem is that there are already about 70 KFM comics that have been seen on the Internet before (Smackjeeves), so with the above standards, it would take about 35 weeks to get all of the currently existing KFM comics onto this blog.

If you KFM readers are OK with, I guess I could start again. The delay could even be useful, I could be writing new comics while the first season of KFM goes up. I'm sorry about the bad job I've been doing with KFM, but I'm a lazy lazy girl. Sorry about that.

If you still like KFM, and you would love for it to go back up, comment on this post! And remember to send all of your fanmail to fanmail@fourisland.com so Kirby can read it! Fanmail left anywhere else may not be noticed, so make sure it goes to fanmail@fourisland.com!

24 Ways is an interesting.... thing edgeofmyseat.com does every year, during the 24 days before Christmas. It's a nice way to enjoy the waiting period with fun, interesting articles on web design. The best thing, I think, about 24 Ways is that all of the articles are about great, interesting things and are long. Yes, fun, long articles. Yay.

I don't know, I'M TRYING HERE! GAH, of all the reviews I write on Four Island, I really need to find more adjectives to use....

Anyways.... I'm failing at this review. GAH. I better just wrap it up then:

24 Ways is a great blog about web design that is fun. Yes. Go there. Now.

And if the Four Island posting thing works out correctly, this post'll have been posted on the first day of 24 Ways 2008.

GAH! Not another question post! This one was inspired by a recent post, Silly Spam Bots!, when trying to decide on the tags it should be categorized under.

So, this time, I would like to know: Which posts of mine fall under the tag "random" and under the tag "articles"?

Recently, I (oh POOP!) have been using the "random" tag quite a lot simply because I haven't been able to think of another tag to use. Please look over some recent posts and comment whether or not you think that the tag(s) used for them were appropriate, or if not, what tags you'd rather have.

Anyways, if you haven't seen it, last question post was Recently, I..... Remember, feel free to comment your answers! Please?

SIDENOTE: Oh dear, this post is listed as Draft #23.

While I did write this post four months ago, and this post was written within the last week, I loooove Pingbacks.

One day, a few weeks ago (read: four months ago), I was reading an article about blogging on I Help You Blog. A link on this article led me to Freelanch Switch, where I found a great article about how to get the most out of your memory stick. On this article, I found a link to a wonderful mini-suite called Tiny USB Office.

Tiny USB Office offers all you could want in a portable office at 2.5 megabytes! Some of the most interesting things it carries are a Notepad replacement (with more features than Notepad itself), an MSN client, a web-server file-sharer, an FTP client, a secure file shredder, a vector-image editor and more!

Try Tiny USB Office out. It's great. You won't regret it. Promise.

Look, it's another stupid question post! YA----huh?

Anyway, as noted in a recent's post, I start way too many posts with the phrase "Recently, I....". And look, it's even made it into today's post title! GAH!

So, basically, what I'm asking for is, does anyone know of some more phrases I can use here instead of a sentence beginning with "Recently, I...."? Yes, I know, I am the laziest, but that phrase has taken over my mind! No! Get out of there! That's Fourie's house! Ouch! Don't touch me there!

Well, that's today's question post! Remember, if you haven't seen it, the last one was Twitter != tumblr. Thank you, and good 12 o'clock.

OK, you may have noticed the new Four Island layout. Yes, I thought you did. I got tired of Layout 4 and decided Four Island needed something new. But I was too hasty with it.

In my haste to put up a new layout, I forgot a few necessary things such as affiliate links and the Quotes subsection links. And Fouripedia isn't integrated correctly. Also, the development site was having difficulties with the automatic posting feature, so I disabled the pending queue, and thus forgot to re-enable it. That's why there wasn't a post yesterday.

I am going to re-enable the posting queue as soon as I finish typing this post. I'll also attempt to fix the many problems people seem to have with the new layout. Once layout 6 has entered a stable phase, I'll announce it like I usually do.

In the mean time, if anyone has any suggestions or problems with the new layout, feel free to comment on this post or reply to TimTam's Fourm topic, New Layout in Fourscore Improvement. I welcome any suggestions because I dislike Four Island not being as functional as it used to be.

....well, I guess Games won. And no one at ALL voted for TV! Oh well, I can't control the outcome of the polls, BUT I CAN CONTROL YOUR MIND. Just kidding.

Movies - 2 vote(s)! Music - 6 vote(s)! TV - 0 vote(s)! Games - 8 vote(s)!

So, did everyone enjoy VisitorGrid week? I didn't think the blogging posts on it were that good, but I liked the MPD one. Readers? What do you thing? You know I like comments! AND PINGBACKS!!!! YAY.

I'd put other stuff here, but I'm already planning to put it in other posts, so you'll just have to wait :)

This post is the sixth and final day of VisitorGrid Week. For more information, read the post linked to right there.

This week seems to have gone pretty well. I'm going to end it off with a yummy tutorial. This time it's about MPD, the Music Player Daemon. MPD is a program you can use to play music from your computer without any interface, which is why it is usable even on the command line. MPD usually interacts with a client, which range from MPC, a command line client to GMPC, a GNOME-based graphical client. There are quite a few clients, however, that allow you to interact with MPD wirelessly, via some type of remote control.

I browsed through these and found none that I could to immediately without running out to the store and buying some type of accessory. But, then I found mousempc, a bare-bones client controlled by a mouse. That's right, that includes wireless mice. And, I just happen to have a wireless mouse lying about.

First, I'll tell you how to install MPD, then I'll tell you how to setup mousempc. MPD is easily installed, due to the amount of distributations it's been ported and packaged to, but mousempc is quite a challenge.

Ok, installing MPD. MPD can be found in most Linux distribution's packaging system under the name "mpd". So, for instance, on Debian/Ubuntu, you'd run this command to install MPD:

sudo apt-get install mpd

That wasn't too difficult, was it? The only other thing you really have to do is to import your music into MPD's library.

On Debian, this library resides at /var/lib/mpd/music/ by default. You can find the location of your library in your /etc/mpd.conf MPD configuration file under the name "music_directory". Copy your songs into that folder. Note that you may need root privileges to access that folder, so add sudo to the front of each cp command you run.

After copying in your files, you need to have MPD re-create it's database. You can do this by running the commands:

sudo mpd --create-db
sudo /etc/init.d/mpd restart

The first command re-creates the database and the second restarts MPD. Note that the second command may be different depending on your distribution.

Well, there you have it. Your music files are safe and snug in MPD's database. Now you need to install mousempc. This, as I said before, is the difficult part.

1. Begin by downloading the Makefile and mousempc.c from its Subversion repository.
2. You need GCC (the GNU C Compiler) to compile mousempc, but it's normally pre-installed on most Linux systems. In case it isn't, however, try installing it with your packaging system using the package name "gcc"
3. You also require Make to parse the Makefile. Same post-text as above applies.
4. Finally, you require a small package called runit.
5. Run the following commands:

make
mkdir ~/mousempc
cp mousempc ~/mousempc/
cd ~/mousempc
mkdir env log
cat > run << EOF
<\$EVENTFILE exec chpst -u mousempc -e ./env ./mousempc
EOF
chmod a+x run
> env/MPD_HOST
> env/MPD_PORT
OLD_UMASK=$(umask)
umask 077
> env/MPD_PASSWORD
umask $OLD_UMASK
cat > repeat << EOF
./run
./repeat
EOF
chmod a+x repeat

1. The last thing you need to do is find out which event device your mouse is. Enter this line into the top of the run file created in the previous step:

EVENTFILE=/dev/input/event2

Then, run run:

sudo ./run

Try right clicking with your wireless mouse. If nothing happens, try /dev/input/event3 in run. If that fails as well, /dev/input/event4 and so on. 7. When you find the correct device, all you need to do to start mousempc is run repeat:

sudo ./repeat

There are two problems you can have with this. One is that, after running repeat, you get some error about not having enough permissions to do whatever. This is resolved by looking in the /etc/mpd.conf file mentioned earlier, finding the value entitled "password", and placing that into the MPD_PASSWORD file inside of the env folder.

The other problem you can have is that after a while, mousempc stops working. This may be due to the fact that your wireless mouse reciever may have changed event devices. If this happens, simply retry going through /dev/input/event2 and so on.

Finally, that long tutorial is over! Well, I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial, and I hope you've enjoyed VisitorGrid week!

This post is the fifth day of VisitorGrid Week. For more information, read the post linked to right there.

Continuing along with the blogging theme, now that you know why you should blog and you have a blog, I'm going to make a little reward-type-thing.

You must write a post on you blog relating to the number four. Not just any post, not a spam post, a good post. No wait, a great post. If you do, post a link to it in this post's comments, I'll look over it, and if it's good, I'll pingback it.

So, there are the terms. You write a good post relating to the number four, I'll pingback your blog, providing you with more traffic. I'll generally post the Pingbacks on Saturday along with the weekly poll.

So, like the idea? Well, good. Now get blogging. This offer does not expire.

This post is the fourth day of VisitorGrid Week. For more information, read the post linked to right there.

Now that you know why you should blog, here's a handy tutorial on how to start a blog just in case you decide that blogging interests you.

The first thing you need are some ideas. Like, for instance, what are you going to name your blog? Or, what's it going to be about? Your life? Blogging?

Once you've handled that stage, you need a host. There are many free blogging hosts on the internet (myself included, I'm already hosting two), so this one isn't difficult. We'll assume that you're using Wordpress.com, a hosting service that runs off of the popular Wordpress blogging software. It's fairly easy to create an account on Wordpress.com. It has a large "Sign up" button on the home page, and the forms are easy to navigate.

Now that you have a blog, you should write an introduction post. Explain what your blog is there for, why people should read it. This, and some more self-promoting information should also be inserted into an "About" page.

Finally, you need to come up with a blogging schedule. How often are you going to blog? Are you going to do special things on certain days of the week? Think about this, because when people start to enjoy your blog, want to keep reading some good content, they'll be disappointed when you fail to post.