Uncategorized – phikappa

TomatoTomatoe – a lightweight pomodoro timer for Windows with worklog.

Posted on 2013-12-052021-08-18 by pksan

Today, a little utility for your productivity needs – TomatoTomatoe, a little pomodoro timer for Windows. Check out the pomodoro technique – it’s a nifty lifehack!

The program sits in your system tray and allows you to launch a 20 minute pomodoro, which will count down in a little always-on-top window. At the end, it’ll ask you to describe and rate your pomodoro and write your notes together with the date and start/end time to a csv in a location of your choice (it’ll save your choice). So after a couple of weeks, you’ll be able to import your data into Excel and run the most amazing stats.

Let me know your thoughts! — DOWNLOAD TomatoTomatoe

Generating naturally-sounding electronic instruments

Posted on 2009-02-28 by pksan

As i was drifting off to sleep, my thoughts wandered to the topic of eletronically generated instrumental sounds. Think of a violin. Now, think of a soundwave that has (nearly) the same properties as a note played by that instrument. What sound will you “prefer”, i.e. what sound sounds more “natural”?

Do people tend to prefer real instruments over eletronically played versions? Why? What is the difference?

It could be that the subtle difference in the timbre (or the perception thereof) of the sound generated by the resonance of the body of the violin has a different shape than that generated by speakers. Or is the way the shape of the soundwave generated by the violin differs by small yet perceptible details from the eletronically generated one? Has the natural sound of a violin random influences such as the casual vibration of atoms that make up the string, influences that are beyond a trivial imitation by lines of program code and yet noticeable enought? Or is the difference only perceived when the listener know about the different origins of one same sound?

I will investigate this when i wake up.

Bloatware rebellion: JamFM.de again

Posted on 2009-01-09 by pksan

In the third instalment of my war on bloatware series, the first and only enemy of hassle-free streaming pleasure returns. After being defeated the first time around, JamFM.de has risen up again. As you probably won’t have noticed, jamfm.php on phikappa.eu has stopped working – it can’t extract the token anymore. Why? The reason is simple. The address where the flash player is located has changed. I replaced it in the script and everything in good order again. [Edit, one minute later] You’d think! But no, seems as JamFM’s own player cannot find the mp3 file anymore. Booo! We’ll switch to Windows Media, then.

(Outdated) Please find the new version where the old one was: http://phikappa.eu/jamfm.php (this does not work, but may at some point in the future

You can display an URL to paste to VLC or your mms:// capable player of choice here:

http://phikappa.eu/jamfm_asx.php

[Edit] Please find a script at http://phikappa.eu/jamfm/jamfm_wm.php that generates an .asx you can directly open with your Windows Media Audio-capable player of choice from the browser.

[Edit 2] Well, somebody already discovered the same “sikkrit” things on the nacamar server i did… so the next steps i’d have done just became redundant. Have fun with http://www.project-fx.de/tiscali/

Update: Circumventing bloatware – the jamfm.de web stream

Posted on 2008-11-25 by pksan

Here we are.

By going to http://phikappa.eu/jamfm.php you will be promted to save a *.pls file (or it will download automatically, depending on your browser settings).

You can open this pls file in your audio player of choice and it will start streaming the 96 kbps MP3 stream. 🙂

Even if you stop the playback and then get start it again, it should work – however, if you get an 401 error or a password request, just generate a new pls again.

Free the streams – against bloatware.

Here’s the source code: jamfm.php code as a ZIP file.