Camera Whore
ross@flashheart ~/Pictures/Photos/Incoming/guadec $ du; ls | wc -l 692M . 292
Daniel "Camera Whore" Stone stole my camera and wouldn't give it back. Two things to note: 1) I predict Daniel will have an EOS 350D within the month, and 2) when at GUADEC, bring a battery charger and twice as much CF as you think you'd need, just in case. Daniel was only stopped due to the battery dying.
I should blog more about GUADEC but in my usual style I'll leave it until
I can't recall anything. Instead I'll just mention my favourite quote of
the week: GUADEC has been homo-erotic and informative. But mostly
homo-erotic
. Thanks, if I recall correctly, to Fiona. Personally, I
have no
idea what she is talking
about.
GUADEC
At GUADEC, in the courtyard just outside the main entrance. I'm just out of my talk which went surprisingly well: I was pretty nervous but I don't think I stuttered or ummed enough to be annoying. The projector was a pain in the arse though, Emmanuele's projector in the warm up weeked worked at 1400x1050, yet this one only only supported 640x480:
Who needs more than 640x480 when you have 12560Hz!
The presentation being scaled down so much meant a little last minute hacking to reduce the font sizes, and some images didn't fit at all so they had to be viewed in Inkscape. Ah well.
For the curious/bored the slides are available online: Taming The
Beast: Porting Evolution Data Server To DBus. They are are
sequence of PNGs Update: The presentation is a
PDF, bested viewed in Evince in Presentation mode (press F5), produced by
the most excellent Opt, so sadly you
don't get to see the gorgeous fades. The source
is also available online for the cool people running Opt.
GStreamer Bounty
I'm willing to start a bounty for someone to fix/port/implement the required pieces of GStreamer so that Sound Juicer can rip a whole CD, fully tagged (all tags SJ writes must be correctly encoded), to MPEG4 AAC (as used natively by iTunes). A requirement is that a music player that support MPEG4 files can see the tags without any extra work: the primary test for this will be importing the ripped files into iTunes.
I think there are many people out there who would like this to happen, so I want to arrange a group bounty. Bounty County looked promising but I have to specify how much the bounty is up front, I can't just let the fund grow as people donate what they can. The Bounties section on Launchpad has the same limitation. Does anyone know a reputable site for managing donations like this, or should I just get register a new email address on PayPal and get people to donate there?
Also to gauge how much interest there is in this, can anyone who would consider donating leave a comment?
NP: Vertigo, Groove Armada
Clutter 0.1
It's getting late, I'm starting to think I'm getting RSI, and I need a coffee, so instead of saying how great Clutter is I'll just link to what Matthew said already.
Go Clutter!
NP: Foolish Games, Jewel
VGA Out on T40p
Dear Lazyway...
Next week I'm giving a presentation at GUADEC and would like to avoid embarrassing last-minute configuring of X by setting up VGA out on my laptop before I leave. This is harder than it sounds as I don't actually own any monitors any more.
If anyone out there has the VGA port working on a Thinkpad T40p (or similar) in clone mode, with GL acceleration, hopefully with automatic down-scaling to 1024x768, then can you please mail me your xorg.conf. I have S-video out sort-of working but it's not downscaling the image and I've lost GL acceleration, which is a great pain.
Note: any comments about how I'm evil for using a non-free driver will be ignored.
NP: Ágætis Byrjun, Sigur Rós
Wanted: GStreamer Knowledge
This afternoon I discovered that the FAAC and FAAD encoders have been ported to GStreamer 0.10, so I hastily installed gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse and started writing a profile so that I could encode straight to AAC files from Sound Juicer, for my iPod. This is where the world would rejoice, if it were so simple.
My first worry was that the faac element doesn't implement the tagging interface, so I may have AAC data but there is no track information. I then noticed that file wasn't identifying the files as AAC, but as just data. Starting to panic, I dived into #gstreamer and discovered some bad news. By setting an option on the encoder (outputformat=1) I get AAC data that is recognised, and Xine will play it, but it's not wrapped in a Quicktime container so can't be tagged and probably won't play on an iPod.
This is my challenge. If someone can write enough of a Qt muxer that supports tagging so that straight from Sound Juicer I can create .m4a files that play on my iPod without any hassle, I'll give you a free Sound Juicer t-shirt and my eternal gratitude. Anyone interested?
NP: Remembranza, Murcof. Yes, again, it's great.
Three Things I Love
- Espresso shots in a glass of ice-cold milk. Quick and easy coffee boost and cooling drink in one.
- Remembranza, by Murcof (Fernando Corona). Similar technically to his first album Martes but less electronic. The soundscape is far smoother whilst remaining as sparse, and the album feels a lot more relaxed. Fernando is a magician.
- Benchmarks that say before: 6.5s and then after: 3.3s. Yay for rewrites!
- Update for new nautilus-cd-burner API (William Jon McCann)
NP: Remembranza, Murcof
Sound Juicer "We Could Have Been Strangers If We Tried" 2.15.3
Sound Juicer "We Could Have Been Strangers If We Tried" 2.15.3 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Still very little progress...
World Fame
Some people may have heard that my sister's partner, Elliot, started working a new shopping channel last month called Deal TV. It's only on Sky so we can't get it, but my sister took a picture and mailed it to me last night. Ladies and gentlemen, I present the early career of a future media superstar.
NP: Black Diamond, Angie Stone
Summertime!
Summer finally arrived in England last week, after a pretty miserable and wet spring. Annoyingly it arrived a few days late as we were hoping that it would be glorious whilst we were in Paris, but alas it was only good for the last two days.
Of course summer means sitting outside with glasses of cold drinks and lazying around. We did a bit of that over the weekend but it was a little too sticky then, as today is much fresher I dug around the pit of doom that is our garden and built some of the (to be replaced very soon) garden furniture.
Lovely. However as the sun makes its way up the shadows to work in get smaller and smaller, we really need to get a sunshade.
NP: Lounge stream, Digitally Imported Radio
Leather Case for 770
Anyone who reads Planet Maemo would have noticed Nokia 770 En Español blog about a leather case for the 770. The case seems like a good idea: it holds credit cards, MMC cards and so on, and folds open to let you use the 770. However, without any PIM apps on the 770 (such as an addressbook, calendar, syncing to your desktop) treating it like a filofax seems a little strange.
Did I say no PIM apps? The 2006 release includes Contacts, and OpenedHand has plans. Full PIM capabilities on the 770 coming soon!
Maemo 2.0 Beta Released
I'll keep this short as I'm rather busy... Maemo 2.0 beta has been released, along with Internet Tablet OS 2006 beta. More information is available at the Maemo site. This release has had huge amounts of love and it's far more polished than the 2005 release, but sadly the beta release is missing the VOIP functionality.
Update: seems I was wrong, the SDK may be missing the VOIP software, but the Internet Tablet image is fully featured.
Domke Camera Inserts
Quick question to the Interweb: does anyone out there have a Domke camera bag or inserts, specifically the Adjustable Insert? I have some questions about it and other Domke inserts. If you do, please email me.
NP: Worldwide Underground, Erykah Badu
Flickr Uploading
On a whim I gave up with my personal web gallery implementation and switched to Flickr. Now, uploading is fun. I could use the web-based upload form, but as I can't DnD from Nautilus into a text field that is dull, and whilst copy/paste works that is also dull. I can email images but I can't send lots at once (they have a 12M limit per email), and have to remove the signature and GPG signing for every message. Also dull. I'll get a billion people shouting "use F-Spot", which I tried, but it doesn't want to import some of my photos, and it doesn't work with my photo storage either, so that isn't an option for now.
Thus, I'm considering writing a small Nautilus extension in Python, so that in the context menu of every image there is a Upload to Flickr option. I'd prefer not to re-invent the wheel so does anyone else has written a simple GNOMEy uploading tool for Flickr? Thanks!
Back
Last week Vicky and myself went to Paris for a brief holiday (Tuesday to Saturday). The weather wasn't as great as we were hoping for the beginning of June, but at least it didn't rain too hard. Paris was nicer than expected, but I'll blog about that more when I've sorted the photos.
NP: Motion, The Cinematic Orchestra
