Easy wallpaper slicing for N900

First, create a 3200x480 png file (For 4 desktops), and using ImageMagick slice it up:

convert wp.png -quiet -crop 800x wp_%d.png

Or you can use this template makefile when your working on your wallpaper:

BASEIMAGE=wp

all: $(BASEIMAGE)_0.png

$(BASEIMAGE)_0.png: $(BASEIMAGE).png
 convert $(BASEIMAGE).png -quiet -crop 800x  $(BASEIMAGE)_%d.png

Mainframe in your pocket

I just uploaded hercules, an S/390 emulator, to extras-devel. Now you can enjoy your favorite mainframe operating system on your N900, N810 and N800, be it an original mainframe OS or Linux.

Below an screen shot of Slack/390 install disk booting up.

One of those weekends

It was one those weekends when everything get fucked-up one way or another. Or actually it started on Friday, at about noon. First some background:
I run my own two servers for everything, mail (with spam and virus checking), vhosts, mysql and postgresql, cvs and git repos, storage and stuff you might need for your generic home server. Also some friends have their mail and vhosts running on my servers. So a lot of stuff.

And everything important stored on RAID-1 and RAID-5 of course to be on the safe side. RAID-5 as you might know can suffer from 1 disk failure quite nicely, but 1 disk only.

And guess what happened on Friday? Simultaneous failure of 2 out of 3 disks on my primary server. Mail server is fortunately ok! And as there was waay too much stuff to backup anywhere properly, the last full backup of my /home (and cvs+git repos) was from 2008. A total disaster as you might imagine.

But, thanks to git all my source repositories are cloned here and there. So in that way nothing important got lost. Also I had almost stopped using CVS in 2007-2008 so the cvs backups from that era is pretty much ok. (And I had also move everything to git so no problem with that.) Work stuff I have on my work laptop anyway, so nothing work related got lost.

Still, getting everything up and will take some time. And the best of all I can't even live at home properly right now as the apartment house I'm living in is having a pipe renovation that will be ready after Easter, more about that in another post maybe.

Anyway, what this means is that my Mapper and TA-Linux sites will be more or less down until I get everything sorted.

gst-dmtx 0.10.3

New release of gst-dmtx out now. Major change is that buffers are handled in a thread so the pipeline won't stall if "skip" propery is set larger than 0. Set "skip=0" to use the old behavior, for example when analyzing a one buffer only image.

Get it here: gst-dmtx-0.10.3.tar.gz.

mydicto 1.0.1

Finaly uploaded to extras builder, a very simple application to record speech. Uses the libdicto library to do the actual work.
For now it supports recording, playback (with seeking), removing and sharing of recordings in fixed 8Khz, 16-bit, mono format.

Upcoming versions will have:

• format selection support
• recording of phone calls
• diablo and gregale (N8x0/770) support

libdicto & mydicto

For some time now Mapper has had integrated support for taking dictations that then can be used for example in JOSM when editing maps. The dictation component was quite generic so I split it out and made it into a library and widget that can be used in other applications.

libdicto repo can be found here and release here. I just uploaded 1.0.6 to maemo extras builder.

As the widget is quite generic I also made a simple dictation app for the N900 (and soon for the N800/N810/770 too), called mydicto. As soon as libdicto is built I'll upload mydicto to the builder too.

mod-support for the Nokia N900

For good old old-school demo/scene/etc music on your N900, install mod-support. Now with proper metadata extraction so the media player will show you titles (and creates a fake artists/album so all your mods go nicely into one "Album" for easy separation from those silly mp3s :)
Latest version is waiting to get built, should be available soon in extras-testing. Please vote on it so it gets into proper extras.
(While at it, I upgraded the libmodplug package and built it with proper optimizations and optification)