I was listening to LugRadio earlier on and the discussion about Open Source and participation by everyone. It got me thinking back to my idea for a book on open source contribution and how to get involved. Now I’m thinking about some thing both smaller and larger in scale.

How about a contributors pack? To help give something back to those considering contributing to your project. I envisage having a leaflet, which would take on the form of a generic template, stylable to your project which hold information about every aspect of the project that needs help. For example documentation, packaging, coding, bug fixing, advocacy etc.

The contributors pack could be online, or even include some paper pamphlets on request, printable via lulu for example. It would contain information about processes such as MOTU, and detail the tools people use for tasks, and where to get them, how to file a bug correctly. The possibilities are endless. I know it took me a long time to learn some processes, and the thing is, I was taking up valuable people’s time when if the right resources were available I could have just read them online, or in a leaflet. Each team in a project could have their own leaflet with contact information, processes, etc.

If you think this idea has merit, I urge you to comment here.

On another note, thanks Lugradio. Maybe my place isn’t so much a doer, as a proposer of ideas. That one’s for you Bacon.

I had a though the other day. A thought that if I had the time I’d code myself. I was thinking about the Nokia N800/N810. It has a camera. Ok it doesn’t have the speediest processor, but it’s not bad. My thought is this. Can we hook up some rudimentary hand gesture processing to the camera to provide simple media player functions. Moving your hand/finger up an down for volume control, moving left and right for track change? Please get in contact, I think this is possible and will be a lot of fun.

I’m one of the lucky ones, who has recently received a shiny new N810. However, I wanted to write a quick post about the relative merits of each.

N800 N810 No of memory slots 2 (sd/mmc) 1(mini-sd/micro-sd)

Hardware keyboard No Yes

Memory 256Mb 2Gb

Camera 360° Fixed

GPS No Yes

Overall, though there are some aspects of the N810 that I wish they had stuck to on the N800, I’m so pleased with the N810. Maemo-mapper is great with the GPS. Great work Nokia, and the whole of the maemo team, keep it up.

I just wanted to share the knowledge that as long as you are running the same OS on both, OS2008, restoring from an N800 to an N810 works great.

Introduction
Hi, I’m writing this tutorial largely because last time I tried to perform this procedure it was a heck of a lot more complicated. This time it seems to be much simpler, but seeing as my last howto made it into the IRC channel list as a decent howto, I thought it about time I updated it. I wanted to put together a nice clean easy to follow tutorial for getting Scratchbox working to compile and test software for the Nokia N800. Firstly a few disclaimers, this tutorial is right, as of today. Also it is designed for the N800, it may work with the N770/N810, I am not sure. It was also designed for Ubuntu Gutsy, so, I can’t guarantee it’ll work on everyone’s system.

Now, I love my N800. Everybody will tell you so, but I’m a little frustrated at the moment. I want the ability to transfer files to and from it over the network, but how best to do it I wonder. It’s a tricky idea. Do I go with a synchronised option, and use svn, which is available on the N800. Or do I go with a less managed option and have a system where I can just dump files off of and onto my Nokia. Either way, at the moment, unless I’m very much mistaken and I may very well be, there isn’t anything that really meets this. There is Grsync and unison, but neither of these are really what I want.

So…..Since I’ve been playing round with webdav the last few days, I figured a webdav system may be cool. Just to drag and drop the occasional file. Like a network file server. So…..cadaver is a great command line tool for accessing webdav and it’s already available on Maemo. My idea….wrap a python/other GUI around it and have nice tree like structures to move files too and from the system. All those in favour…..say EYE!

Or if you have a better idea. Let me know. WebDAV seems to be a good idea, as it’s web based and the whole idea of the N800 is to be an internet tablet.

But what do I know :p

As I posted a while back, there was a serious problem with the Nokia N800 and some flash cards. So much so, that I was getting rather frustrated. I managed to get a few SD cards that didn’t seem to be affected by the problem, and I have been using these successfully. However, Nokia have just released an update for the software that fixes the problem. Thank you Nokia!!!!

My problem now is, can anyone tell me is this just a kernel fix, or do I have to reflash my entire N800, thereby losing all the programs I have been installing over the last few months. Also do I just leave it for a while as it seems to be working fine on these cards, or am I tempting fate, not that I believe in fate per se.

In recent years video sites have come on in leaps and bounds, though I don’t know the entire history of how things started, I know of a few sites that I use on a fairly regular basis, and the reason why I visit them. The aim of this blog is to entice YOU, the reader, to think about what you really want from a video site that is not already being fulfilled. Adobe announced recently of it’s intention to add in AAC and MP4 support directly to the flash player. So, why do I visit video sites.

• Youtube - Well, this is a toughie. I guess I visit YouTube to see clips of favourite videos, to see video demos of new technology, and often to see instructional videos about things I’m interested in. I’ve also used it occasionally to post to in order to get a video in a nice format I know people will be able to use. I’ve used YouTube over GoogleVideo, purely because of the quality of the resulting uploaded video.
• GoogleVideo - Google Video seems to be geared towards more commercial usage, rather than just posting a video of your and your mates destroying a bin in your garden, a la Youtube. I have a few videos posted up here of my talks at HantsLUG. If I can’t find what I want at YouTube, I normally will go to google video as my second choice. Google also seems to have a much longer clip length available, which makes it excellent for some applications
• Stage6 - The Stage6 site is awesome, most noteably because of it’s high-quality videos, which are just staggering. Last time I used it, it worked well with Totem, which should please most open source enthusiasts. I go there primarily for the high-quality videos which sometimes is a must for my work. DivX also provide a web player, which at the moment is only windows and mac supported.

So I guess my questions are what should we be expecting and demanding from the next generation of video sites and video players? Are there aspects of a web player which would make it viable to download? If people started making Linux versions to these players, why would we want them? Now that handheld devices like the Nokia N800 are out and using Linux, I thought it was about time we put down some ideas.

Some people like the community side of things. Sharing videos with others.
Some people like the quality side of things. Getting the most for your buck.
Some people like features. Just having the most fun things available.

What do you want in a video site, what interests you?!?

Oh no, my little app. Before it’s even in an alpha stage, the future for the virtual guitar for the N800 is looking bleak. To put it simple the python gstreamer combination is running the N800 out of memory. The samples are not big, and I don’t know if the entire sample is loaded into memory. But, well, it doesn’t work.

Guess it’s time for another C++ porting project.

Need some help. I’ve been working on this app since yesterday, and it’s working ok. I was going to announce it once it was complete, but I’ve been having issues that require more brain power than I have access to. I’m pretty new to GStreamer, and I’ve gotten this far. Basically it’s a virtual guitar of sorts. Codenamed Tigla.

It basically works like so, the samples variable holds the start/end nano second markers for each of the sample files. These hold 5 notes from each string, and basically….make the sound.

The GUI will obviously need work, it’s just a test base right now. The problem is that when pressing any button in quick succession, the program crashes. If you wait about 3-4 seconds before pushing each button, it’s generally ok. Please can someone help me out here. I can’t wait to start polishing this app.

Code and samples available here.