Tutorial Part I: How to play Internet radio on your PocketPC

I have been searching for a way to play internet radio on my Windows Pocket PC for sometime now. After trying out some of the popular commercial players like Resco Pocket Radio, Pocket Tunes, Kinoma player etc.), I have finally settled on a free software called GSPlayer (short for Green Software Player). The problem with GSPlayer though, is that it does not have any documentation. It took me a lot of trial and error and scouring through multiple user forums to finally figure a way to efficiently listen to internet radio stations. The two that helped a little were Bloggerbase and mobilitySite.

I have created this blog to help simplify this for you. There are three steps to it

1. Installing GSPlayer on your Pocket PC
2. Getting the Internet Radio Stations of your choice from the web
3. Creating a playlist of these radio stations on your GSPlayer

1. Installing GSPlayer on your Pocket PC

Installing GSPlayer on your PocketPC is the easiest of the three steps. Here is the Link to get the latest Player. The zip file is available to download (separate for touch-screen and non-touchscreen windows mobiles) and contains both a .CAB file that can be installed directly to your PPC and an .EXE file that you can use to install through your desktop and ActiveSync.

2. Getting the Internet Radio Stations from the web

There are multiple ways to do this. You can either get the exact URL of the radio stream from the publisher or download the playlist (.pls extension). I have tried the following two sites

• PDA Tuner - Requires you to subscribe to their site for full access. It has PDA friendly version of their site and some of the streams will play through native Windows Media Player on your PPC
• ShoutCast - Does not require registration and seem to have a bigger collection of free radio stations. Though, I could not find a PDA friendly version of the site and found the desktop version very cumbersome to select and navigate through various genres.

For GSPlayer, the following steps describe how to import an internet radio astation from ShoutCast. The GSPlayer should have been already installed on your PPC with appropriate 'Options' (to be covered in Part-II of the tutorial).

1. Step 1- Go to ShoutCast from your PocketPC browser.
2. Step 2- Browse the genre or search to narrow down on the station you want to listen to
3. Step 3- Click on the 'Tune In' button
4. Step 4- A new browser window will open with the default, in-browser ShoutCast player at the top left in this window. Based on your browser, the ShoutCast player may not be visible in your PPC. Opera or IE will not show the player but you should be able to see it in SkyFire browser. Regardless of your browser, you should be able to see the option to "Listen in Winamp or OtherPlayer" below the ShoutCast player place. Click on that button
5. Step 5- In the new browser window that opens, select the second option, "Play in your Default Media Player" and click on "Save".
6. Step 6 - Go back to the station you wanted to play. Now clicking on the 'Tune In' button will download a .pls file that should play in your GSPlayer by default.

3. Creating a playlist of radio stations on your GSPlayer

I will cover this in part II of this tutorial; in a separate blog.

I'm painting Again

It's been a while since I painted; more than 2 years, in fact. What has been keeping me from it was the inertia and finding the time and the mood. 

Four things got me out of my inertia, 

- I had woved not to browse the net for a week (i'd begun to realize my compulsive habit to keep checking news sites)

- I sprained my back on Thursday and had been bedridden over most of the weekend. 

-  A beautiful gift of a pencil set, that I spent 2 hours in bed, sharpening (there were 120 colored pencils in the set)

- A set of books, I had borrowed from the library. One 'Painting beautiful skin tones with color & light' in oil, pastel and watercolor - by Chris Saper' really got me itching to try my hands at a portrait again. 

It's a portrait of my kid brother making a face. Medium - colored pencils and oil pastels on paper.  

It's not as good as I had like it to be. I messed up the left eyebrow, left side of his chin and the values are patched up..  but it's a start and I'm happy to have started.. 

My first digital Painting

It's been a long time since I have picked up paint and brush in the real life (and the way things are going right, it may be a while before I manage to do so.). I have been spending more and more time on my laptop; work, personal erronds, news, keeping in touch with friends and for most of my spare-time activities.
Lately, I have been spending a lot of time looking for an alternative to Windows Vista for my next laptop upgrade. After getting excited about Max, I have ruled it out as it is definitely not for me (that's another blog I need to write, why Mac wouldn't work for me). Anyways, I liked Ubuntu (Linux) and these days I spend a lot of time finding Linux alternatives to various softwares, I have gotten used to. I have discovered GIMP and InkScape in the process. I have really been impressed with InkScape and what it's capable of. So here it is; my first digital art using InkScape.

And since you wouldn't believe I painted it from scratch, I will upload a video of how I painted it. :)