Dont like the music your laptop is playing? Smack it!

Dont like the music your laptop is playing? Smack it! 00:30 Thursday the 3rd of August 2006 2 Comments

After playing with smack.py and enjoying thumping my laptop to switch desktops, I began thinking of other uses for the smacking interface. One finally hit me. Depending on my mood I sometimes play music on my Thinkpad while I work , however if I get bored, or annoyed by a song I have 2 choices. Be irritated, or break my flow while I maximize XMMS and move on in my playlist.

It just seems so perfect, dont like the music? Smack the screen and move on! So I adapted the original smack.py script and here you are, xmms-smack.py. Once its running, if you thump your thinkpad XMMS will move on to the next song on your playlist. xmms-smack.py requires that you have HDAPS on your Thinkpad, and you have PyXMMS ("sudo apt-get install python-xmms" on debian/ubuntu) installed as well as Python. To start it just run "python xmms-smack.py".

While I was at it I decided to make future smack based scripts a little easier to get up and running. I created the smacker class. To create a left/right based smacker just extend the Smacker class like so.

class TestSmack(Smacker):

    """an example smacker implementation"""

    def on_left(self):
        print "left"

    def on_right(self):
        print "right"

I may adapt Smacker to also handle forward/back tilting and anything else thats handy as the need arises. If anyone wants to try it before I do, Ill be happy to take their patches.

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Comments

Hi, I'm atm trying to compile several kernels with HDAPS (struggling with this freeze from 2.6.24 on) and stumbled upon this entry about xmms-smack.py - but how do I get it from the repository, i. e., which username/password to use?

Claudius 18:13 Friday the 4th of August 2006

Whoops, the link to that code was never fixed after an old server crash, it should be back up and running now.

Sean O'Donnell 18:14 Friday the 4th of August 2006