After sitting on the project for a few months, I’ve just released the next version of Spotijack on GitHub, as well as the application’s source code. This is the first public version of Spotijack because I’ve spent a while contemplating whether the project is OK to release.

Spotijack is a utility for the Mac that automates the process of recording music playing in Spotify with Audio Hijack Pro. Whenever the song changes in Spotify, Spotijack tells Audio Hijack Pro to split the recording and update the new recording’s metadata. Obviously the program enables piracy which I do not support, and this is why I’ve sat on it for so long.

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Oh, and make sure your stuff is on a surge protector.

Normally I’m a stickler when it comes to electrical safety, probably because my Granddad was an electrician and taught me about it. The other night though, in a lapse of consciousness, I plugged my laptop’s charger into a power strip that was still switched on at the mains. Or, should I say, started to plug in the charger because as the plug went in, the air between it and the power strip ignited in a decent explosion.

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Besides the project page, I haven’t written about julius on this blog before so here’s a quick overview. julius is a stupidly simple command line tool for encrypting and decrypting text using the Caesar Cipher. It’s designed to play nicely with Unix redirections so you can use it to easily encrypt/decrypt the output of commands.

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I’ve spent the past week working on a new design for this site which should be live right now. The site wasn’t in desperate need for a redesign to begin with but I wanted to try out some new tools and figured a redesign was the best way to do it.

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It seems there’s a bug when upgrading Lubuntu to version 14.04 that causes the network manager applet to disappear from the system tray. I’ve experienced the problem on two separate installations so I’m going to guess this is a widespread problem.

The fix is easy. Just open a terminal session and run this command:

echo "nm-applet" >> ~/.config/lxsession/Lubuntu/autostart

All the command does is add nm-applet to your LXDE autostart file. If you logout and log back in, the network manager applet should be running.