If you decided to give the heck on what Steve says on his keynote soon, and got a nice iPod nano, and horror of horrors, Linux doesnt make it work out of the box immediately like it does for the older iPods, check out this patch and instructions to build yourself a new HAL.
Planet maemo: category "feed:ff519306558ac96c290aca11617ffc72"
Ari Jaaksi of maemo.org and Nokia wrote an interesting blog entry yesterday, I thought I'd share with you who don't read planet maemo..
"I'd like a true operating system (Linux) and advanced middleware (GTK, Gnome, DBUS, ….) power new exciting connected mobile devices. I want to use the devices and their software as innovation platforms and want to create something new; not just re-implement something that has already been done. And yes, you are able to talk, see, hear and communicate through these devices but they are not your old cell phones. They are something else!
(answering the endless question about why the Nokia 770 is not a cellular phone) Check out the whole post.
Makoto has the best Maemo/Nokia job ad ever on his blog 
check it out. Especially if you are into gstreamer and multimedia.
We've been preparing a revamp of the maemo.org website conglomerate using Midgard CMS, the same system that's been considered for the upcoming Gnome.org revamp. In Maemo there's quite similar situation - we wish to replace several traditional web services (wiki, blogs, static content, project pages, software catalog etc) with one setup that hopefully works out nicely, having common admin interface and centralized user account management etc. In short, to end the madness of various pieces of php from different projects and trying to tie them together with duct tape. So far things are going great, and since I am familiar with Midgard already, it's fun to hack this. We're also doing this very much in the open, our feasibility study is in garage.maemo.org svn, for example, along with everything we've been doing so far for the templates and artwork. Which leads to the other part of this blog entry: designing websites with Inkscape.
I have noticed it's very nice tool for this kind of stuff, especially since the SVN "bleeding edge" version can do gaussian blur's on objects. Mmmm.. super-nice and easy drop shadows..
What I found even nicer, is that if you have a new layer, call it "slices" for example, and put simple, outlined rectangles there, and use the "object properties" dialog to name them like "corner-topleft" etc, if you select them, then hide the "slices" layer, and choose "export bitmap", inkscape automatically defaults to "export selection" with your chosen name, with a .png in the end. There is no automated way to "export all rectangles in "slices" layer as png's with the layer hidden" of course, but it's still pretty handy if you change the design, to just re-export them all without much typing. And with vector graphics its very easy to alter the design without having to re-do much from scratch, like you often need to do with pixel-based programs. This is quite similar to what Adobe web tools do with their "slices" concept. A bit hard to explain, but maybe it lights up a bulb in some inkscape users' heads..
I had this problem lately, that sometimes sound just stopped working. This is not related to the previous incident - I checked that first... but I was to find another surprise this time..
Turns out Acrobat Reader was to blame for this one:
# lsof /dev/snd/pcm* COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE NODE NAME firefox-b 17368 tigert mem CHR 116,11 8338 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p acroread 21635 tigert 147u CHR 116,11 8338 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p
What the Fsck?? Last I checked, "Acroread" was a tool to view PDF files. Why does it block the audio device when nothing is even being played..?
(for an added shock, if you are an interaction designer or involved in usability, check out the acroread preferences, if you haven't for a while.. they have 21 pages of settings.. but that's another story..)