Everyone has heard of stories about hidden messages in songs, many of which could only be heard by playing the record backwards. That was in the vinyl era. CD owners had to rip their songs into wav files and process them with a suitable software tool. For example the manpage of SoX describes its reverse efect as “Reverse the sound sample completely. Included for finding Satanic subliminals”.

Some years ago I was listening to a CD by the Scottish band Urusei Yatsura when I heard the disctintive sound of a ZX Spectrum audio tape in one of its tracks. That sound had already been used several times by some artists (such as Aphex Twin), but this time it was very sharp and sounded like a complete program.

So I loaded it into the emulator and I found a funny satanic message written by the band:

The source code (it was written in BASIC) had some comments, including this one:

What is sadder?
a. Finding this
b. Writing it

For those interested, this message can be found at the beginning of the song “Thank you” from their last album “Everybody loves Urusei Yatsura”.

You can also load this program using a ZX Spectrum emulator. Get the file in TZX format here.

It’s almost a month since I last posted something here, but it’s because these last weeks I have been really busy.

However it was definitely worth it. Last Wednesday the first beta of Modest, the new e-mail client for the Maemo platform was released.

I’ve been working on Modest with some colleagues at Igalia for some time now and we have been doing our best to create a good e-mail client. Modest is still in beta, but I think that it’s reasonably usable now and we’re looking forward to improving it. The reviews we’ve seen so far have been positive and that encourages us to keep on working! Thank you all!

I’d also like to thank Philip, the author of Tinymail, for all his help and contributions and for being such a nice guy.

And, of course, the great Dirk-Jan from Nokia, the best possible leader and an amazing guy who had the good taste to announce Modest quoting one of the greatest records ever made. And he even uses Vagalume! ;-)

Well, and what happened to Vagalume then? Of course I haven’t forgotten about it, it’s just that I haven’t had much time to work on it. However I managed to introduce some new features and bugfixes, so Vagalume 0.4 is here. As usual, details in my webpage but for the impatient here are the highlights:

• New dialogs for tagging and recommending tracks
• Ability to edit existing tags for a track, and to see the list of the most popular tags set by other people
• HTTP proxy support so you can use Vagalume at work ;-)
• ConIc support: Vagalume will connect your N8×0 to the Internet if it’s offline (thanks Calvaris!)
• New Vagalume icon (thanks Felipe!)
• …and some other optimizations and minor fixes

Here’s how Vagalume looks on a PC:

By the way, this time I compiled Vagalume packages for Ubuntu too. I haven’t tested them but they should work.

And that’s all! I hope you enjoy both programs!

I’ve just released Vagalume 0.3, the Last.fm client for Gnome and Nokia 770/N800/N810.

I have been busy lately so I haven’t had much time to work on my little Last.fm client, but I finally managed to prepare a new release, so here is Vagalume 0.2!

First of all I’d like to start with an introduction because some people asked me about the name of this program…

So what does Vagalume mean?

Vagalume is Galician Portuguese for firefly.

The name has absolutely no relation to Last.fm and it doesn’t have anything to do with music either. I chose it just because I liked how it sounded :-)

How do you pronounce Vagalume?

This word is composed of four syllables and it’s stressed on the third one: va-ga-LU-me.

To pronounce each syllable you can follow these examples:

• va as in vast, vantage or varnish (*)
• ga as in garden, garlic or gasp
• lu as in lucid, luminary or lunacy
• me as in medal, melody or medical

(*) although we Galicians pronounce it as in bargain, basket or bathroom

(Updated 10 Nov 2007: as stated in the comments of this post, the Galician phonological representation of the word is /bagalume/ and the usual pronunciation is [bɑɣɑlumɪ]. Thanks Marcos and Cameron)

What’s new in this release?

There haven’t been many big changes, I basically added support to some parts of the protocol that weren’t implemented in the previous version. Here’s the quick summary:

• Support for recommending tracks to other users
• Support for adding tracks to your playlist
• Volume control for the Nokia devices using the hardware +/- keys
• A combo box to select a friend instead of having to type his/her name
• More visual feedback for some actions
• Some bugfixes and other minor changes

Now that most of the core features are more or less working, from now on I think I’ll begin to work on the UI. But beware! I’m not a good UI designer, so be prepared for the disaster :-)

Where can I get it?

You can get Vagalume from my page or from garage.maemo.org.

There are packages for the Nokia 770, N800 and N810, as well as a package for Debian etch (x86).

And that’s all for now. I’d like to thank again all of the suggestions and positive comments that I received these last days. Thank you all! :-)

UPDATE: It seems that this post has just entered planet.gnome.org. This is my first post there, so hi all! :-)

After a couple of pre-releases, version 0.1 of Vagalume, the Last.fm client for the Nokia N800, is finally here.

This is the first proper release and it comes with full source code licensed under the GNU GPL.

There haven’t been many changes since the first pre-release from last monday, but this version includes some nice new features such as:

• Proper support for loving/banning tracks.
• Support for tagging artists, tracks and albums (with multiple tags at once).
• More menu entries to select Last.fm radios. Avoid typing long lastfm:// URLs.

I have also compiled packages for Debian etch (x86) and Tablet OS 2008 (using Maemo chinook beta), so if there is any lucky owner of an N810 out there, I’d appreciate feedback ;)

I haven’t tried to compile Vagalume for the Nokia 770. I don’t have one of those and I haven’t had the time to find out if it’s easy/possible to make it work there, but if someone tries please let me know. For those interested, this program depends on GTK+2, GStreamer 0.10, libcurl and libxml2.

You can get Vagalume from my webpage.

I’d like to thank all the people who tested the initial pre-releases and sent me their comments. I’ll take them into account for future versions!

Enjoy!

Updated 02 Nov 2007: Vagalume seems to compile with gregale SDK, so I’ve just put a package for the Nokia 770 in my webpage. If anyone can try it and tell me if it works I’d appreciate it!

Updated 02 Nov 2007:Solmis has confirmed that the package for the Nokia 770 works!