I use a headless xbox running xbmc4xbox to play music on my outdoor speakers. I developed a stripped-down web interface that works well on mobile phone browsers. The idea is to be able to browse your music, add it to the current playlist, and control playback and volume. That is about it.

This interface does not work with newer versions of xbmc. It supports older versions that will run on the original xbox hardware. The simplified interfaces discussed on the wiki (like ppcdefault.asp) seem to have gone missing.  This interface fills the gap for me.

To install and use this interface simply extract the contents of the zip file into the main xbmc directory, then access via web browser at: http://xbox_ip/tunes.asp

Clicking the green arrow adds folders or songs to the current playlist where they can be played with the play button. Although the current playlist can be viewed and cleared, its management is a bit quirky.  For example, stopping playback and clearing the playlist does not seem to remove all the items.  When new songs are added and played, playback starts with a song from the old playlist before proceeding to the new songs.  This is a feature of the original web interface, so it is beyond me to debug.

Enjoy.

Printing addresses labels for a list of people or organizations from a database is a pretty common task.  Often the users doing the printing are not technical and using a variety operating systems and software tools.  Therefore, a good goal for a solution is to provide all the pieces without relying on anything pre-existing on the user's computer.  This goal rules out using Word to do a mail merge which is a pain anyway.  Another useful goal is to provide some flexibility so more tech saavy users can create new or modify existing label templates.

There are some web-based label printing solutions available.  These don't require the installation of software, but saving and sharing the label templates is complicated and getting to data into these solutions is non-trivial or impossible.

General Solution

The approach I settled on uses Avery DesignPro client software which is available for free for Windows and OSX.  DesignPro supports laying out and printing labels on any of the gazillion labels Avery sells.  DesignPro will pull data from dbase (.dbf) files or an ODBC source.

Creating PDF Files

On Windows there are many free programs available to create PDF files simply by printing to a virtual printer.  One of the original free ones is PDFCreator.  Installing this free program creates a printer called PDFCreator on your machine.  To create a PDF file, simply print your document using the PDFCreator printer.  Once the file is printed, PDFCreator will ask for the name of the new PDF file.

Note that a lot of fax machines save faxes electronically as TIFF (.tif) files.  This approach works for converting TIFF files to PDF.

Also note that Microsoft's built-in TIFF viewer is garbage (at least on XP).  I recommend IrfanView for viewing and simple file manipulations on Windows.  When printing TIFF files from IrfanView, be sure to select "All Pages" and not just "Current Page" in the print dialog.

Steps to create PDF files on Windows:

• Download and install PDFCreator
• Open the document or file to convert to PDF.
• Print the document or file (being sure to print all pages) and select the PDFCreator printer for output.
• When prompted by PDFCreator, specify the filename of the new PDF file.

Combining PDF Files

There are also free programs for combining, splitting, and reordering PDF files.  PDF Split and Merge (pdfsam) performs a number of useful functions and runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

To combine several PDF files into one file using pdfsam, follow the steps below:

• Download and install pdfsam
• Start pdfsam from the Start Menu
• Select Merge/Extract from the list of Plugins on the left side of the program. If Extract/Merge is not visible, click the plus (+) symbol beside Plugins folder to expand it.
• Expand the window, so all the options are visible (as shown in image below).
• Click Add to select files to combine.
• Specify an Output Destination File which will be result of combining the PDF files.
• Click the Run button.
• When the progress bar indicates 100% is complete, open your new combined PDF file and make sure it is correct.

The example image below shows the settings for combining files c:\temp\File1.pdf and c:\temp\File2.pdf into a single file named C:\temp\CombinedFile.pdf.

RokG2Slideshow is a extension of the RokSlideshow Joomla module that can pull the slideshow images from a Gallery2 installation as shown to the right.

All the original RokSlideshow functionality is preserved with new options for pulling images from a Gallery2 installation.  There are several different ways to integrate Gallery2 and Joomla.  This module is independent of the integration method (currently) and uses direct access to the Gallery2 installation to retrieve the photos.

In addition to enabling the Gallery2 integration,

• specify the physical path to the Gallery2 installation on the server
• specify the URL to access to the gallery via your website
• select the type of images to retrieve from Gallery2 (random, recent, viewed, daily, weekly, monthly)
• specify the number of image to retrieve and include include in the slideshow
• optionally specify the Gallery2 album that you would like to limit the photos to
• specify whether a URL should be associated with the image (none, album, image)
• optionally specify a special URL to use to reach the gallery embedded in Joomla.  For example, gallery integrated with JFusion would have an embedded URL like: index.php?option=com_jfusion&Itemid=19

History

RokSlideshow is a Joomla! module was originally inspired by Slideshow by Aeron Glemann but rewritten from scratch by Olmo Maldonado. Since then it has been updated and modified by Djamil Legato. Most recently Aaron Nauman added the Gallery2 integration and packaged the module as RokG2Slideshow.

Download

Changelog

1.2 - 24-Feb-2010 mtense
# Added support for multiple modules on a single page

1.1 - 17-Feb-2010 mtense
+ Added support for adding URLs to Gallery2 images
+ Added support for URLs to include embedding info for integrations like JFusion

1.0 - 30-Jan-2010 mtense
+ Added Gallery2 support for RokSlideshow 4.1