Clueless Wonder

So I’m going to be changing jobs next week. As part of the switch, part of my workweek I’m going to be in an environment where I won’t be able to have my iPhone or iPod with me. That is unfortunate as probably 50% or more of my day is spent listening to different podcasts while I work.

I found PulpTunes by searching on Google. It seemed to solve all of my problems! Then I realized that there are some features that won’t work for me, namely you cannot set the port to be less than 1080. That is a non-starter for me as my work has almost every non-standard port blocked. I needed a way to make it use port 80, which is the standard port for web pages.

After searching the forums, I found that the mod_proxy module for Apache would do internal port forwarding for me. For a quick and easy install of Apache on my Mac I turned to the free MAMP install. It’s far and away the quickest, cleanest way to get Apache running quickly on a Mac. After Apache was installed, I needed to ensure that the proxy modules were loaded by ensuring that the following lines were in my conf file:

LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_connect_module modules/mod_proxy_connect.so
LoadModule proxy_ftp_module modules/mod_proxy_ftp.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so

I then needed to add the following lines at the end of my conf file to pick the port and alias to forward. In this case, the default port of 15000 for PulpTunes and using the same name for the folder alias.


ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPass /pulptunes http://localhost:15000
ProxyPassReverse /pulptunes http://localhost:15000


After this, I restarted Apache to invoke the new settings. Next up was ensuring that port 80 was being forwarded to the internal network ip address of the machine I was serving from. To also clean things up a bit, I used the free Dock Dodger program to remove PulpTunes from my dock, only showing in my taskbar.

Now I can access all my my music from just about any internet connected machine! There’s a user account feature in PulpTunes so that I don’t get just anybody using up my bandwidth, I can access my playlists, and even rate the songs. It’s a great solution and I suggest you try it.

This weekend some friends and I will be attending ShamrockFEST, which is a big indoor/outdoor music/drinking festival held near St. Patricks’ day every year here in DC. We’ve all signed up for the VIP passes as you might actually get a chance to sit down, there are more covered areas (weather won’t be the best) and it includes all your beer for the day as well. It’s also going to be a birthday celebration so it’s going to be a fun party regardless. If you’re going to be attending as well, let me know so we can meet up.

Sunday night, Stephanie and I went to see a concert at Merriwether Post Pavillion. It was my first time seeing a show there and the venue overall is quite nice. Parking was free and close-by, and the venue was huge. We did make the mistake of showing up only about 20 minutes before the concert started when we had lawn seating. So we squeezed into a very small spot near the back. You couldn’t actually see the performers on stage but there were a few giant screens we could see the action on.

The headliner was Kenny Chesney, with Sugarland and Pat Green opening. Overall it was a very good show. My only real complaint was that for the first two acts, the music and vocals were far too low compared to the bass and it was hard to make out the words during some of the songs. The sound folks seemed to fix that by the end but you would have thought it would have been taken care of during sound checks earlier in the day. Here are some blurry pictures that I took with my phone during the concert:

It’s hard taking a picture of yourself with a phone!

Pat Green on stage.

The sea of people.

Here’s a little video from the dance last weekend.