Teemu’s Blog

Aaron Levinson writes on the maemo-developers mailing list:

I’m pleased to announce the first version of a VNC Viewer maemo port. Some other developers have announced ports of VNC in the past, but these were strictly builds of the RealVNC vncviewer client and were not GTK/maemo software applications. As such, they lacked certain GTK/maemo amenities, the biggest being no text input methods.

This new port is a true GTK/maemo port that basically provides most of the support that one might expect from a maemo-ized VNC viewer. I’m still working on adding some features, and there certainly is room for optimizations, but I’m pretty happy with the way it has turned out so far.

It’s available at
http://www.aracnet.com/~alevinsn/vncviewer_0.1_arm.deb .

Here’s some brief documentation:
– Press the Select/Confirm button to turn on and off the text input method window (just like in xterm).
– Use the Zoom out (-) button for middle mouse button clicks.
– Use the Zoom in (+) button for right mouse button clicks.
– Use the Cancel/Close button to send an Esc key.
– The other hardware buttons operate similar to how they operate in xterm.
– Turn on/off the toolbar from the View menu.
– It is possible to double-click, but it might require a little practice/multiple attempts.

I’m planning on writing one or more e-mails concerning my porting experiences. Hopefully, the information in these e-mails will be useful to some. I’ll also be making the source code available once I clean it up a bit more.

Aaron Levinson

Firefox is soon getting a P2P filesharing extension called AllPeers. A quote from their site says:

AllPeers is a free extension which combines the strength of Firefox and the efficiency of BitTorrent to transform your favorite browser into a media sharing powerhouse.

Seems interesting. I can’t wait to test this extension. A beta version should be out pretty soon.

Today is 23th of December and the last day at work before my tiny three day long Christmas holiday. Feels nice since it is sort of the only holiday I’ll have this winter. Today I’m heading up north to meet my big sister and her family and I’ll spend my Christmas over there. She doesn’t have an Internet connection, which is nice because it sort of forces me to stay away from computers and stuff. Well I’ll have my Nokia 770 with me, but that is only for emergencies.

Anyhow, nice Christmas to everyone and see you again next week.

PS. Here is a sort of Christmas picture of my two dogs, Niilo and Oiva. People who know Finnish can also check their blog.

Yesterday I went with my colleagues from work to blow of some steam at a shooting range called West Shooters. The best part was when I got to shoot with a .44 Magnum. Yeah the same gun that Dirty Harry has. It was great fun. Anyway, I have to admit that I’m not really a too much of a shooter and pretty much did not hit anything. But I was good enough to hit five shots out of six to the target. A bit high though… I wonder why.

A good way to end a post like this is a quote from Harry Callahan himself:

“Ah Ah, I know what you’re thinking. ‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I’ve kinda lost track myself. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”

Ok… since the last time, I’ve done more testing on how I can stream my MP3 collection at home using Nokia 770. So far I have found two additional methods. A good and easy way is to use iTunes and Rhythmbox port for Nokia 770 to stream the MP3 collection that you have in your iTunes library. This is easy to do and doesn’t require anything but installing iTunes on your PC and Rhythmbox on your Nokia 770. Then just enable music sharing from iTunes properties and launch Rhythmbox with some special tricks. Then you are ready to go.

However, I prefer still one other way. That is to install Ampache to your server machine and use the Opera web browser on Nokia 770 to browse your MP3 collection. Ampache creates playlists for streaming the music with the audio player that comes with Nokia 770. Just click on the links and listen. Great about this is that you can also allow your friends to listen your MP3 collection and you don’t need to have iTunes running all the time. Well you need the web server, but if you already have that I recommend ampache.

Release candidate 3 of Wordpress 2.0 has been released. The final version should be out soon also. Its been while since I’ve updated my Wordpress so maybe now its time to do that.

Renato Oliveira has finished porting Rhythmbox music player for Nokia 770. The install package is available for download from here. In addition of being a great looking music player, it also has support for podcasting and DAAP.

With the help of ScummVM of course. You only need to download the ScummVM for Nokia 770 and you are ready to go. Of course, if you have original versions of the games for example for PC. Just copy the required files to your N770 and you can play games like Monkey Island 1 & 2, Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken etc…

So far I’ve tried only Monkey Island and I have to say I’m hooked again. This is the game that I used to play when I was a kid and it still is one of the best games ever made. They really don’t make games like this anymore.

Openwengo has released new version of their open source SIP VoIP client. The new version is now more than plain voice, it now includes also support for video. Another bigger improvement in my opinion is that now you can use it with any SIP service. Earlier it was closed to the openwengo network only. I tested the latest Openwengo Windows version with my setup of SER and Asterisk echo test and it worked perfectly. User interface is still quite heavily customized only for wengo service, but it is still great to see nice looking and functioning open source SIP client. Of course also Linux version exists. Interesting to see how this develops.

Since the storage capacity on Nokia 770 is rather limited, I thought that it would be nice to stream the mp3s I have on my Linux server over WLAN. After little Googling I found ajax/PHP based application called mp3act. I installed it on my server and it worked fine with Mozilla Firefox on my laptop. I created playlists from the songs on my server and succesfully streamed them using Windows Mediaplayer. Then I tried it with my 770 and disappointment was rather big when I noticed that it doesn’t work. It appears that the ajax support on the N770’s Opera browser isn’t fully working. Well I didn’t want that to prevent me from streaming my mp3s. I found a workaround for the problem and I’m streaming music while typing this. Read the rest of this post if you are interested in how this can be done.
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