Free software activites: Kodi command line interface and album collage from last.fm

Over the last week I contributed to a (small) free software project and finished one of my own. They’re primarily useful for people running linux (although Mac users might be able to use them if they’re using bash for their shell), but I think they’re pretty neat.

I contributed to kodi-cli, a script that makes it easy and trivial to send JSON commands to an instance of Kodi (nee XMBC) that’s running on your LAN.  Before I came along, it already had some pretty spiffy features, like an “interactive mode” from the commandline and interactive volume controls.  I added the ability to use a config file with the script, library maintenance, and an advanced example where (with the use of zenity, jq, and youtube-dl), you can “cast” a playlist interactively to your Kodi.

As I write this, the last hasn’t been merged to the master branch at https://github.com/nawar/kodi-cli, though they’re pretty good about merges. If it hasn’t been merged yet, my branch is at https://github.com/uriel1998/kodi-cli.

Playing around with jq also gave me the solution to a problem I’d been having with another project. I liked the collage generator at https://tapmusic.net/ – enough so that I’d donated a bit of money to them – but I wanted something self-hosted, and that displayed the images the way I wanted them to.  Something where the images looked a little like this:

And so now I have! It’s pretty self-explanatory once you look at the script, and hopefully inspires others to tinker with it and make it appropriately fit their needs as well.  You can find that script at https://github.com/uriel1998/lastfm_chart_services