Yeeeeears ago, I was in the middle of some late-night hacking session, hanging with friends on IRC, and I had shared my screen via VNC so they could watch/help. (ISTR I had found the UART port on some piece of embedded hardware and we were muddling our way through U-boot incantations or something.)
At some point, I tabbed over to Winamp to change the music, which everyone saw, and one of the crew was like "oh hey you have artist X on your playlist, do you like artist Y?", and I admitted that I had not heard of artist Y. Seconds later there was a DCC file transfer.
Artist Y fit the mood perfectly. This was great.
This evolved into spawning Winamp on a second box that could be separately VNC'd into, where anyone could upload and play music they thought was appropriate for the session, without interrupting the main console. And someone installed a Shoutcast server on it too, so everyone could listen.
After a little while this was our little Friday-night routine, regardless of whatever other hacking was happening. The collaborative deejay stage -- we popped a Notepad on the Winamp box to track who was playing and who was up next, though ephemeral chat remained on IRC -- defined a brief era of my internet experience.
Many years later, I ran across a Spotify plugin called Jqbx that did basically the same thing. It was short-lived, but there seem to be several work-alikes. Sadly the community disbanded, but now it's got me thinking...
Yeeeeears ago, I was in the middle of some late-night hacking session, hanging with friends on IRC, and I had shared my screen via VNC so they could watch/help. (ISTR I had found the UART port on some piece of embedded hardware and we were muddling our way through U-boot incantations or something.)
At some point, I tabbed over to Winamp to change the music, which everyone saw, and one of the crew was like "oh hey you have artist X on your playlist, do you like artist Y?", and I admitted that I had not heard of artist Y. Seconds later there was a DCC file transfer.
Artist Y fit the mood perfectly. This was great.
This evolved into spawning Winamp on a second box that could be separately VNC'd into, where anyone could upload and play music they thought was appropriate for the session, without interrupting the main console. And someone installed a Shoutcast server on it too, so everyone could listen.
After a little while this was our little Friday-night routine, regardless of whatever other hacking was happening. The collaborative deejay stage -- we popped a Notepad on the Winamp box to track who was playing and who was up next, though ephemeral chat remained on IRC -- defined a brief era of my internet experience.
Many years later, I ran across a Spotify plugin called Jqbx that did basically the same thing. It was short-lived, but there seem to be several work-alikes. Sadly the community disbanded, but now it's got me thinking...