Life Journal

If you're interested in reading my reflections on the Life Journal Bible readings, check out Ian's Life Journal blog.

Thursday, 16 May 2013

Android script for moving RSSdemon podcasts to MortPlayer

I have an Android phone and use RSSdemon to download the podcasts I listen to. However, during playback of long podcasts, e.g. BBC Global News, if something interrupts the playback, e.g. an alarm goes off or Waze says “Turn right”, it will often lose its place and restart playing the podcast from the beginning!

Another app, MortPlayer Audio Books, does a very good job of keeping track of where you are in the podcast in spite of interruptions. However, MortPlayer does not download podcasts for you — you have to manually download the podcasts and put them in MortPlayer's directory.

At first, I thought to make MortPlayer look in RSSdemon's directory. However, RSSdemon stores the podcasts without the .mp3 extension, so MortPlayer does not recognize the files as audio files.

For this reason, I wrote this shell script which would move the files from the RSSdemon directory into the MortPlayer directory, and add the .mp3 extension. I can then tell MortPlayer to rescan and the new podcasts would be available.


#!/system/bin/sh

P_RSSDEMON=/storage/sdcard0/com.meecel.feedreader.RssDemonAd/cache/Podcast
P_MORTPLAYER=/storage/sdcard0/Music/Podcasts/RSS

P_DEST=$P_MORTPLAYER/`date +'%y%m%d'`

mkdir -p $P_DEST

cd $P_RSSDEMON

for i in * ; do mv $i $P_DEST/$i.mp3 ; done



You will need a script player app like SL4a to run the script. Change the P_RSSDEMON and P_MORTPLAYER directories to match your phone's directory structure. In particular, your phone might use sdcard or sdcard1 instead of sdcard0 as my phone does.

Thursday, 14 February 2013

CNY photos from great-grandma's house

My cousin Yew Lynn sent me these photos she took of Joni and Hannah at my grandmother's house during our Chinese New Year visit (the reason the name for the album says "great-grandma" is because my grandma is my children's great-grandma.)
First, a cute photo of them in the house.
Then later, they had the opportunity to play with snap/pop firecrackers outside the house.
The snap-pop firecrackers left a big colourful mess on the floor....
... which Joni and Hannah helped sweep up! (Now, if we can convince them to do the housecleaning when they're older... ^‿^

Tuesday, 29 January 2013

Family Portrait

I've been posting a lot of photos of the children, but not many of us... partly it doesn't matter so much since we don't change in appearance so much as adults, but for those of you who haven't seen us for years, here's a recent family portrait, thanks to a photo session arranged by Juliane's brother Joshua.

Saturday, 12 January 2013

2 lions invade children's playground!

Two ferocious Chinese lions invade the children's playground at the Giant Supermarket in Kinrara! ☺

Actually, this was a lion dance for a Chinese/Taoist blessing for the business.

Joni, Hannah and their friend Alyssa had fun that day. This video was taken by Alyssa's mother.

Thursday, 27 December 2012

Joni's Christmas Drawing

I had to work on 26th December (had to teach a tutorial -- in fact, I had to teach on Monday, Wednesday and Friday Christmas week...) so Juliane brought Joni & Hannah to join me for lunch. After lunch, Joni (5) & Hannah (3½) drew on the white board in my office. Hannah drew a rainbow and Joni drew this:

Monday, 17 December 2012

Joni & Hannah's Christmas celebration

We finally put up our Christmas tree! Joni & Hannah helped decorate the lower branches ^‿^
We had our Christmas celebration at Community Baptist Church, Puchong, on 16/12/12 and Joni & Hannah had such a great time dancing to "Go Tell It On The Mountain"

Joni & Hannah also sang "Happy Birthday, Jesus" with several other young girls:

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