#!/bin/lukegb

It looks like Google Play Music Manager really likes to look at eth0’s MAC address, even if you have other, perfectly valid, network interfaces on your machine.

You’ll know if you have this problem because Google Play Music Manager will spit the following error:

For those who can’t read, and/or searchbots, that says:

Login failed
Could not identify your computer.

To work around this, I did the following (my motherboard’s Ethernet card is borked, and I use a Ralink wireless card which appears at ra0):

modprobe dummy
ip link set name eth0 dev dummy0
ifconfig eth0 hw ether DEADBEEFCAFE

For this fix to work, you must change DEADBEEFCAFE to your own unique MAC address and you must not have an actual eth0 - if you still get this problem with an actual eth0, then contact Google. This blog post isn’t for you. This doesn’t mean change it to one on one of your other network interfaces. If you’re stuck, this list could help.

Enjoy!

You’ll either need to add this to a script which starts on boot, or on login - at least before Play Music Manager, or use this fix (not for Arch):

Put the following in /etc/network/interfaces

iface eth0 inet static
    hwaddress MA:C0:0A:DD:RE:SS

And the following in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

SUBSYSTEM=="net", KERNEL=="dummy0", NAME="eth0"

GrooveMote is, if you will, a virtual DJ. It allows users (primarily those on my TeamSpeak server) to queue up songs to be played over MuseBot, and brings the enjoyment of group listening, powered by Grooveshark.

So: how does it work?

Here are the current components of GrooveMote:

• gondor.io hosted web frontend - stores all the playback data in a Postgres database
  • Django
  • Standard desktop frontend powered by Dojo and Dijits
  • Mobile frontend powered by jQuery Mobile
  • Login is done via Google Accounts (OpenID, locked to Google only) for ease of login (one click login)
• node.js server, running a custom script, with socket.io. Communicates with the gondor.io backend via specific URLs and communicates with the TeamSpeak server via ServerQuery to provide bot functionality.
• Windows VPS (fstservers.com) running Virtual Audio Cable, TeamSpeak 3 Client and Chrome (with a special Chrome extension which uses socket.io to check the playback queue)

Users get 30 votes and 30 queueups every 2 hours. This enables them to, alone, queue up 10 songs from the search bar.

Search —(1 queueup)—> Vote queue —(3 votes by any users)—> Playback queue

You can vote for your song (in the vote queue) 3 times, or you can vote for it not at all, or any amount in between. It’s up to you. Other users can vote on the songs you’ve added to the vote queue, and when it gets 3 votes, it’ll go into the playback queue.

Songs are pulled off the top of the playback queue by the Windows VPS and played. Upon completion, socket.io tells node.js the song has completed, which pings Django to remove it from the playback queue. Then the next song is returned from Django, to node.js, back to the VPS.

In TeamSpeak, the bot allows the following commands:

• !skip (you can vote to skip the currently playing song. 3 votes by users in the “GrooveMote” group on TeamSpeak will skip the song)
• !unskip (this removes the vote to skip you’ve made)
• !cockblock (administrators only - prevents the !skip command from being used until !cockblock is used again)

If the playback queue is empty and nothing has played for 60 seconds, then Groovemote defaults to a “default playlist”… which is filled with various versions of Nyan Cat, to encourage people to add things to the queue, and quickly!

System Details:

• Motherboard: P5KPL-AM EPU
• Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD 4600
• USB Mouse / PS/2 Keyboard
• Wireless Card: RT3290

Installed OS X with http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=182225 guide (note: it’s in Italian, so here’s my translation):

1. Burn the Snow Leopard image to a DVD, or do what I did and dd it directly to a USB HDD.
2. Download the ZIP package he links, and copy it to a USB key
3. Open the ZIP package, look in the BootCD folder and burn the non-modded kernel boot CD image.
4. Reboot using the boot CD.
5. Select the USB HDD.
6. I used “Graphics Mode”=”1024x768x32@60”
7. Install!
8. Reboot!
9. For my ATI card, I had to use -x -s to boot into SL.
10. Once booted, remove the ATI*.kexts from /System/Library/Extensions/ (move them somewhere else) and then reboot.
11. You should now be able to boot without any options.
12. If you’re using my wifi card, you’ll need to download the SL Combo Update (to 10.6.8) on a different device. Otherwise, use System Update.
13. If you’re using my wifi card, install the RT2860 package obtained from Realtek’s website.
14. Follow the post install stuff on the Italian guide.