Moving Furniture Back In
Since we moved back in on December 1st, we had been using our master bedroom as the kids playroom and the room where Berkeley and Eliana were sleeping at night (on Eliana's mattress). Kristy and I have been sleeping on the Murphy bed in Kristy's office and Olivia has been sleeping in her own room.

Well... those days are behind us now.

We have started to move our furniture back into the rooms on the second floor. Eliana's room is 99% restored. The major furniture items in her room are back in place. We just need to rehang some pictures and other minor stuff. But it is pretty much back into the same state it was before this entire attic conversion process started. Well, we did add crown molding to her room... so that's a plus.

We also started to move our furniture back into the master bedroom. We moved all of the toys to Olivia's room to make space. We'll continue work on our master bedroom tomorrow. The goal is to actually sleep in our bed in our master bedroom again... something we haven't done for the past 4 months.

After we moved much of the furniture out of Berkeley's room. We were able to set up Berkeley's bed and night stands at least. Berkeley fell asleep in Eliana's bed tonight, but he'll wake up in his own bed tomorrow morning. I think he will be pleasantly surprised. He has been asking us when he can sleep on his own bed for the past four weeks. There is still much to do, but we are making slow and steady progress.

Streaming with Amarok and Nullsoft's SHOUTcast Server
I continue to fiddle with amarok, my new desktop computer music player. When I showed my wife the "Now Playing" feature I added to my blog last week, she immediately asked how she could "listen in" - I didn't have an answer for her. That is... until today!

I found and downloaded a script plug-in called Amarok Shouter that I installed on top of my Ubuntu desktop. After running a few commands and modifying one file to get the shouter plug-in running (hat tip: the amarok shouter plug-in message boards), I was able to start up a shoutcast stream of my music on my computer and broadcast it out on the LAN. It was pretty cool to set a playlist on my desktop, and then load up the stream in iTunes on the MacBook in the other room. The song came streaming over just fine complete with artist and title information for each song.

I can have as many listeners to my stream on my LAN as I want (my home network is 100Mbps), but my Internet provider (Comcast) limits my outbound bandwidth quite significantly. Since I work from home, I can't have all my outbound bandwidth gobbled up by stream listeners. Enter the Nullsoft SHOUTcast Server (or Distributed Network Audio Server). Running the SHOUTcast Server on a computer outside my home network, I can (in theory) relay my desktop stream and have as many listeners as I want (well... within reason) without ever having more than one listener gobbling up my precious outbound bandwidth here at home. The SHOUTcast Server opens a connection to my desktop computer here at home, listens to my desktop stream, and then relays the stream out to any person on the Internet who cares to listen.

Well... that's the theory anyway. But my on-paper solution didn't quite work out of the box with the Amarok Shouter plug-in. But, I'm happy to report that after some tweaking I was able to get it to work. For any other Amarok Shouter user out there, here is what I did.

First, set up the Amarok Shouter stream using the "Configure" capability of the Amarok Script Manager. Add one stream and accept the default mount point "amarok".

Close out the GUI interface, launch a command line terminal, and cd to the "~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/scripts-data/" directory. There should be a shouterrc file... find it and open it. In this file, find the mount point for the amarok stream ("mount = amarok") and remove the mount point name, leaving it blank. The shouterrc file should now look something like this:

[Server]
desc1 =
desc2 =
url = http://rus.berrett.org/
max_clients = 12
icy_interval = 16384
publish = 1
chunk_size = 524288
dl_throttle = 20
port = 8000
buf_size = 4096

[amarok]
name = Live Stream From Rus Berrett's Desktop Computer
mount =
random = 0
stream_type = 0
stream_type0_arg =
repeat_tr = 0
genre = Mixed
stream_type1_arg =
stream_type2_arg = ~
stream_type3_arg = ~
repeat_pl = 1