Make Banshee Recognize Your Mass Storage Device As A DAP

I have this cool phone, music phone, from Nokia. It goes by the name N91. It’s a great phone. 4 gigs of Memory, on a HDD, and arround 5 MB internal phone memory (even though the HDD isn’t detachable 🙂 ). Every time that I want to add new music to it I have to do it manually. Connect the phone to the computer, use Nautilus to transfer songs, if they are Ogg manually convert them to MP3 and so on…

As Banshee is the player I use, which has great DAP support, I wanted it to see my phone as a DAP (well it should, it’s a music phone). There were two ways:

1. Teach HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) that the phone is a DAP; very hard — humans are smarter: so is Banshee
2. Create a .is_audio_player file inside the root directory of the Mass Storage Device — my phone.

Then you need to add a few lines into the file:

audio_folders=My Music/
folder_depth=2
output_formats=audio/mpeg,audio/mp3,audio/x-aac

Now you can start Banshee and sync up the phone. Great!

P.S. This works with the newest Rhythmbox too!

I.Listen.Tofu

Tofu is the name of my newest project! It’s a super-duper voice recording application, based on GStreamer, written in Python and the GUI, which still hasn’t been written, in GTK. It’s supposed to represent Voice Candy for Gnome, but we’ll see how much of that will be done.

You can think of Tofu as Cheese for your Voice! 

Much of the codebase, for recording and playing has been written. I just need to upload it to Google Code. Speaking of code, the code isn’t really clean right now. It’s been two days since I started writing! I try to use as much as I can from the Python writing convention, thus having unclean code!

What’s up with the name!?

Well I’ve been thinking a lot and Tofu seemed the best. I wanted to call it Gofu, but that sucks. I even thought of calling it Schwa (as the wovel), but it’s just too weird a name of. 🙂 … what a sentence …

And basically it truly represents Cheese for your Voice.

Some Things…

Oh… It has been a while since my last post. Mainly because of my extreme business with school and other responsibilites. But, see how good of a person I am, I found time to post just for You!

Things that happened:

• Started school, first year in RJK High
• Studied
• Made new friends
• Spent SFD 2007 really great!
• Got a new 100GB internet connection, for a good price, FINALLY!
• Bought myself a Wireless Router, yippee

Idea:

I somehow got an idea that my favorite Music Player, Banshee, should support Videos.

Eat Cheese In A Photo Booth

Have you ever tried eating Cheese inside a Photo Booth? I sure haven’t, but a guy named Daniel has and he’s so good at it!

Remember the guy Daniel I mentioned in the sentence before this one. Well he’s one truly amazing guy! Writing an application named Cheese is a very hard job, but he’s making it easy, very easy indeed!

If I could give him the Nobel prize for the application he has written, be sure I’ll!

Cheese is the coolest application ever known to man, it can take your picture from a web cam and turn it into something marvelous, into a super duper photo that you can share with your friends and family! It even can shoot a video!!! Basically this application, Cheese, speaks GTK, uses GStreamer for viewing and I don’t know if it listens GStreamer too. Here are some quick photos I took with it, too bad I couldn’t use my built-in webcam to do it, rather I had to borrow a USB web cam from my sister.

Say ‘Cheese’ Everyone!

 

 

 

More on my Flickr photos page.

Why Python?

I’m currently working on a small widget for Screenlets that posts to the Tumblr service. My first impressions are that it’s very hard to write a screenlet, and very inefficient. Why?

• the screenlet has to be written in Python
• there is no documentation on how to write a screenlet, not even API documentation
• everything has to be SVG oriented
• there are many useless things you’d have to do

These points are really bugging me. Why couldn’t the Linux community just develop a widget engine that works with HTML, JavaScript, CSS and PNG/SVG? Why are they making everything Python-oriented. That freaks the hell out of me! And yet they don’t even give you an API documentation.

Back to the Python ramblings. Haven’t the developers learned something from Yahoo! and Apple? That it is far better to use more common techniques for writing a widget, say JavaScript and HTML with CSS. That is the same way that Yahoo! and Apple do it! If the widget is in Python, things get a bit more complicated. And again, without documentation it’s nothing! Writing a widget in Python is a BIG PAIN IN THE ASS!

That’s why I decided not to write a widget, yet an Application, or a Gnome Panel Applet because I’d spend more time on writing a widget, than an Application with many features.

Thank you for reading,
Stojance Dimitrovski

Joy with Sticks

Some time ago, maybe two years I bought a Joystick. Logitech Freedom 2.4 Cordless Joystick. But I guess I bought it at the wrong moment. Why? …

At that time the Free Software revolution was taking over me, and I stopped my gamer career and went with another — programming. So after some time, the Joystick was put in a cabinet and forgotten with time… until…

This year I started flying school (which is coming to an end today due to missunderstandings with my father and the chief of the Skopje Air Club anyways) and I wanted to see how I’m doing on the sym. Downloaded Flight Gear, and just said. Ah, let’s see how does my joystick work under Linux. So I got the wireless dongle and plugged it in the USB port. The light came on…

The immediate response of mine was to run dmesg in the terminal to see whether the Kernel is having troubles with the joystick. The output was AMAZING! Linux just recognized my joystick, initiated the driver and loaded everything else.

I started Flight Gear and the rest went on…

I must say that I had some problems with the calibration of the joystick, because this one has like 5 axes and I’ve got no idea which is which.

But I’m still amazed at how well this worked under Linux!

Mugshot and Banshee

Mugshot is a kind of social service by Red Hat which is very super duper in connecting you with other cool social services on the web like: Last.fm, Facebook, AIM, Google Reader, connecting your blog and all sorts of stuff like that and sharing them with a group or the people in your network. I love it so much that I’m practically addicted to it!

There is one cool feature in Mugshot called “Music Radar”. It works through Last.fm or through Rhythmbox via the Mugshot desktop client. As most of you know I use Banshee for music organization and listening to the organized music. The Mugshot client doesn’t support Banshee yet. The Mugshot team say that they are working on that but I don’t see any improvements.

I remember I read on a blog that in Foresight, my favorite no-use distro, the Mugshot client supports Music Radar reporting through Banshee and that the problem with me is due to the un-updated Mugshot packages in Ubuntu.

Recently I’m being bugged more and more about this feature, so I am thinking of writhing my own plugin for Banshee to utilize the functionality. I don’t think this is a good idea but I have no choice. Wish me luck! (if I ever make it, I’m a bit lazy these days)

Epiphany or Firefox

For those of you who don’t know, Epiphany is the GNOME default web browser built on top of the Gecko rendering engine.

The question presented in the title is old as far as I know of the exsistance of the GNOME project. Epiphany in recent years has been improved so much that it became my default browser. Yes, as a big fan of Firefox it’s unbelievable of what I just stated, but it’s true.

Why?

Well, Epiphany is integrated far better than Firefox in the Gnome desktop. It uses much less disk and RAM memory space and it renders the pages a lot better. Yes, even though Firefox and Epiphany use the same rendering engine, Gecko, they render pages a bit different.

Firefox is too bloated and over-functioned for me. Things in Firefox are hard to find and the gazillion extensions available for it make it even more difficult! Yes, I know that there are some really cool extensions for Firefox but I can live without them. But there is one extension/feature that I can not live without. That is del.icio.us. But Epiphany has great del.icio.us support through an extension called ‘o so ironically: Epilicious.

Well I made it pretty clear by far why I’m using Epiphany as my default browser. There is just one issue that is bugging me to the core of my mind and back!

Gecko has support for inline spell checking. And, that is in Epiphany. But the problem is that it isn’t functional. It just highlights the words that aren’t correct and if you right-click them you see no suggestions. Err… you see nothing. Oh! I just got an idea! I’ll file a bug!

Anyway for a true Epiphany in browsing use Epiphany! It really is worth it!

Superiority in speaking

Vala is the new superior programing language similar to C# made for the GNOME desktop, mainly for easier programming of libraries and simple GNOME-oriented programs. Vala is also a compiler that turns the Vala (C# 3 like) code into C code and then compiles the C code.

It may sound confusing and silly at first, but it’s really powerful! Having this tool simplifies things much more. Imagine you needing to write a huge, and very needed, library in C for something very important and your knowledge of C is scarce, and/or not good. What will you do? Spend three times the time needed to write the library into bug fixing and stupid syntax mistakes other than concentrating on something more useful or productive. Well, with Vala you can write a library far easier and faster than you’d in C. Because C# is much simpler than C, you can do it much faster and then let the Vala parser recode your library (or even program) to C making it faster to run than on a VM like Mono or some other .Net thing.

Vala is so great. As I know C# well enough I wanted to give it a try. And I did and I must admit that it’s far better than making a program in C# and then running it on top of Mono. Even though it still doesn’t offer the power of Mono, it is a good project with a great goal.

Notebook or Laptop?

Yay! I have a laptop… er… notebook.

This “AMC Visio” (not in the USA, it’s only a different casing but it’s a Toshiba inside) laptop was my fathers’ but he didn’t use it much. Actually he didn’t use it at all. He kept complaining that the touchpad was too stupid for him, aka was too sensitive. So, one day I sat him down and asked if I could get the laptop for myself and install Linux on it. He agreed and here I am.

I’m just loving it! Everything works like it’s supposed to except for three things:

1. The graphics card – ATI Mobility Radeon X700 – doesn’t have a good ‘nough driver to run compositing – Beryl, Compiz, Compiz Fusion. The open radeon driver doesn’t play well with the widescreen… it messes the resolution
2. Xorg in many systems (including Ubuntu and Fedora) doesn’t recognize the panel so I have to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf manually
3. The built-in webcam (BisonCam, NB Pro #2) doesn’t have a driver for Linux so it’s useless

The best-working part of it is the wireless. It uses a driver with great support for WPA, WEP and all those stuff… it works great in NetworkManager. The sound system on the laptop has SRS wow and it sounds great on Linux! I’m running GNOME, DUH! Gnome rulez!

About that Xorg issue…

That seems to be a very nasty bug on many laptops that use/don’t use the ATI Mobility Radeon X700 so here is how to fix it.

After Xorg starts the screen is blank. — the issue

When Xorg starts, press [CTRL]+[ALT]+[F1] to switch to Console 1. Then if you aren’t on a live cd please log in and then follow the rest of the instructions, if you are on a live cd || you already logged in type the following:

sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

You’ll see nano, the GNU editor. Now move down with the arrow keys until you reach

Section “Device”

Now, insert the following line after the EndSection part of the Section “Device”

Option “MonitorLayout” “LVDS, AUTO”

Now press [CTRL]+[O] to save your changes, and then [CTRL]+[X] to close nano.
Now you can restart Xorg with:

sudo killall Xorg

The end.