Podcasts in Rhythmbox

I mentioned this work a couple of times in the past. It's in Fedora Rawhide, although without the browser plugin. A screencast (as is now the tradition) speaks a thousand words.


For the people using other distros, you'll need the latest devel version of Totem, and the big patch in bugzilla.

Update: Blogger seems to have broken GIF files uploading. Don't open it in EOG. Download it, and open it in your browser. Next time, I'll upload in a format that Blogger actually accepts...

Of old age and diseases

Old age...

After doing my ankle about 6 weeks ago (trying to be all youthful rollerblading in Hyde Park), I thought I'd knackered my back on Tuesday. Turns out it was probably a knock, or a bit of muscle tenderness as it seems to have died down on its own after 2 days. When is science giving me new body parts then?

I also did my birthday dinner in London, in advance, with Mr. Burtonini, and he's feeling the old age just as well as I am: he didn't know the young band I got him a mixtape of, despite them being in the Guardian's guide 6 months ago. And it's all MP3s on there, no crummy DRM'ed audio formats.

...and diseases

Thanks to the Italian man mentioned above and his lovely (and young!) wife, I caught Ninja Gaidenitis. The game is hard as hell, but sometimes I'm a dumbass, which makes the adventure parts a bit trickier. I remember when it was just a bad Shinobi on the SMS.


I'm at level 3 after a week of play, in contrast to the great, but too easy, Ratchet and Clank which I finished in 4 days (that's not continuous gameplay by the way).

Update: My local team beats your new-age web-based communist/capitalist idea of a football team's butt.

Theft

Now you just need his mother's maiden name for some old-fashioned ID theft. Thanks Danny!

New Totem feature(s)

Totem got a few new features recently, courtesy of new contributors (which is a nice thing to see).

The first one to get committed was the tracker-powered video search sidebar, by Javier Goday. Unfortunately, I don't have any nice screenshots as tracker seems to want to index everything but my videos directory.

The other one is a long standing feature request, with the patch provided by Kamil Pawlowski, adding a menu item to select a text subtitle for video files. This means you can get subtitles for your legally downloaded video files, with the typos free of charge.


Update: Everybody loves screenshots. Here's one for the video search feature:

Ross is stripey!

Lapo will be happy, Ross is using his stripey icon theme!

And captured for posterity.

libgweather split

Federico was lying. Took me 25 minutes as the SVN logs can attest ;)

Shame SVN can't copy across repos, we'd have been able to carry the logs as well (yeah, I guess I should have asked...).

Le Tango PS3 theme

The nice people at ps3-themes.org have updated their copy of the Tango theme to link to this blog, and credit me properly (thanks Jason).

I'm not too fussed about being credited as it's mostly work by the Tango artists (special mention to Jakub and Ulisse for the Sony hardware related icons) appearing (took me 2 evenings to do, still), but rather the fact that people don't get the whole story going to a resource website like that one.

No updates, no copyright information, no links to sources.

FYI, the source code is:

• Under the GPL for icons copied from gnome-icon-theme-extras and gnome-icon-theme, as well as the background derived from gnome-backgrounds
  
• Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License for the icons copied from tango-icon-theme and tango-icon-theme-extras
• Composite icons are under the most restrictive license of the icons used as sources
• The left-over icons are under whichever license Sony released their sample theme (unused in the final theme)

Feel free to ask for more information about specific icons. I'll also make sure to include this information in future releases (ie. when I know how to replace the missing icons).

g_thread_cancel?

Richard, Matthias, no need to speculate. Just search for cancel in the gthread bugs. Redirect comments to the mailing-list posts mentioned in the bugzilla. Easy.

(I did ask that question a number of years ago for Totem)
(Matthias, I sent a mail to Richard months ago telling him his blog sucks for not allowing anonymous comments)

Making rhult happy

This morning, I committed support for MacOS X's icns icon format to GTK+, including support for the new 512x512 format from Leopard. This is useful for applications that want to port from MacOS X to GTK+, such as Handbrake, or Transmission.

gnapplet support

Thanks to Zaheer, who provided me with a Nokia 3650 some time ago, I've added support for gnapplet for the phones that handle it. This means better support for extended functionality, as the AT interface is severely limited on a number of those phones.

gnome-bluetooth kill kill

Last week, I did more work on the Bluetooth device selector, to avoid some of the problems we saw with the one in gnome-bluetooth (mainly the "I work with loads of nerds and there's 500 Bluetooth devices in the vicinity" use case). The patch is available on the bluez-devel mailing-list.

It looks pretty good, but would require some work before it's something bluez-gnome can export as public API.


Anyone fancying some cut'n'paste fest for gnome-phone-manager?

Poor Fonz

Talk about fallen icons. Vicky reminded me that I saw a poster for panto Peter Pan yesterday.

HOLLYWOOD LEGEND HENRY WINKLER STARS IN WOKING’S PANTOMIME ADVENTURE PETER PAN

You could also go check out Starsky in Bromley.

Being a stars's wicked, innit?

Tango PS3 Theme

Sony recently released a tool that goes along with the 2.00 firmware for the PS3, allowing users to create and set themes. Despite the original application being written in Python (you can see that by not passing any arguments to the application, and seeing that they forgot to check for the length of the ARGV before trying to poke at it), the converter to their home-grown image format (GIM) isn't written in that language. A wine install and a couple of DLLs later, I can run the tool on the sample theme.

It's been done before on the PSP. So here's my take on the Tango icon theme for the PS3:



Kudos to the Tango artists for their nice looking icons, and particularly Jakub who provided me with some icons that weren't readily available. Sources are here. It's still missing a few icons, can't say the theme format is well documented...

New gnome-phone-manager and Telepathy

I just released a new tarball of gnome-phone-manager, version 0.40. New in this version is the Telepathy backend. It's still a work-in-progress. But it allows you to send and receive messages from any number of phones.

Here's a little screencast:



There are obviously a number of bugs, including the fact that none of the contacts from your phone show up in the buddy list, so you can't send new messages. Try using gnome-phone-manager itself for now, but the future lies here.

PS: Get your distros to update gnome-phone-manager. Fedora has the latest versions in rawhide and Fedora 8. Some distros *cough*buntu*cough* still ship ancient versions.

Ross is offically evil

Bastien so owns this now

Just because I committed a few patches.

30 Days of Night, 29 Days Of Plot Holes

Went to watch 30 Day Of Night, and it's so bad that it needs to be mentioned as such. People looked very pissed off coming out of the cinema, and multiple mentions of the word shite were heard. A DVD of that film is, in fact, shit-in-a-box. If you have to go watch it, ingest large amounts of recreational drugs, and laugh when it looks most inappropriate.

The pedant in me found that in the "You wants to win £100" sketch, on the Peter Serafinowicz Show, the answer to "Which city is the capital of France" question was wrong. Vichy was the capital of France during most of the second world war, even more so during the London bomb raids. Still a great show.

Watch O News.

Dear lazyweb

Do you know where I put the charger for my piece of crap Motorola phone? I'm pretty sure it's not under the pile of bills on my desk, and I can't find it in my cables drawer (but I found out I have a spare Nokia charger, a DKU2 cable and a USB-powered hoover).

Update: I found it in the cable shoebox in my bedroom, after looking through my cable plastic box. Did I ever mention I hate cables?

Films list is back

Rather than pollute and bore people with films list in my blog (I'd rather do that with useless trivia, and self-deprecation), I thought I'd use IMDb's My Movies feature.

The hardest part was getting all the films from a variety of sources into the database, without having to click through all of them. Here comes the Mechanizer (in US English in the text). Given a list of @imdb_ids:

my $mech = new WWW::Mechanize;
$mech->get( "http://www.imdb.com/register/login" );
$mech->success or die "Can't get the login page";

$mech->submit_form(
  form_number => 2,
  fields => {
     login => 'email@test.com',
     password    => "mypassword",
  },
);

my $id;
foreach $id (@imdb_ids) {
  print "Adding $id\n";
  $mech->get ("http://www.imdb.com/rg/title-lhs/mymovies/mymovies/list?pending&add=$id");
}

I used my old code from film-gallery.pl code to grab the IDs from blogs, and various types of files. HTH.

Dear Corey

So, there were questions a couple of years ago, but right now, I'd like Corey to get in a train wreck.

Will you please stop looking like me!


Anyway, my last DVD release went well, thanks.

Ross was right

It didn't take too long before people took offense from an idiot at the BBC saying there were 400 to 600 Linux users accessing BBC sites in the UK.

Interviews

After the Bluetooth interview a couple of weeks ago, another one popped up about codeina/Codec Buddy, starring my good friend Thomas.

In other news, I want to stab Nokia and Sony Ericsson (I stabbed Motorola a long time ago) for their inexistant proprietary protocols specs, and their sub-par AT protocol implementations. Look at the recent commits in gnome-phone-manager for proofs.

Update: I forgot to mention the interviews were the work of Jon Roberts. The interviews make a very good read if you're interested in what's new in Fedora 8.