Seems imdb has changed their page layout again. This is bad news for all parsers, such as MMS, which relies on the format of the html structure for fetching information. Luckily MMS has already been updated and now works with the latest page layout. Expect a release soonish. There are two things I would like to do to better this current playing catch up situation:
I stumbled upon the threadless t-shirt site some days ago. Very interesting concept. Their business model seems to be letting the users do the design and filtering of suggestions while they just print the shirts and run the site. They pay back the designs gets picked in cash. The only problem with the shop seems to be that some (all?) of the really nice shirts are sold out 🙁
I have so far projected the picture of my Sanyo PLV-Z4 projector onto the wall. Clearly this is not optimal, so I have been looking for a screen for a while. I decided to built it DIY-style this weekend. It’s a lot cheaper than buying one from new and can give excellent results. Plus there is nothing to beat the feeling of having created something yourself.
For the project the following materials was used:
The wood was bought at Bauhaus and the paint at the local paint shop.
After we carried the board up the stairs it was quite clear that it was perhaps a little too big for the wall. But after some rearranging we got it to fit 🙂
Here’s a picture of the screen being painted.
I have been super happy with how it turned out. First a picture of a TV source (4:3) projected on the screen.
Finally a picture of the result with a 16:9 source.
Sadly the camera on my phone doesn’t do the final result justice. More pictures with real camera here on flickr.
Having used the Nokia 770 for a while now, I have some tips and tricks to make the device even more useful.
There is no included calendar program by default so one has to install external to provide this functionality. At iola we use the Google calender service pretty extensively so this was a requirement for the application. I tried installing Dates without much luck, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to add a calendar? Anyway, next up was the GPE calendar which was recommended to me on #maemo. I installed it and this special debian package which fixes some bugs in part that handles the subscription. Viewing the calendars is working great, it easily handles my 3 calendars, but it doesn’t seem to handle adding new appointments.
To access other IM services one needs to use transports or install gaim. Jaim.at provides icq and msn transports and an easy way to register with them. The only problem seems to be the lack of renaming in the default jabber on the nokia 770. It’s quite to know all your IM buddies icq ids 😉 I think I’ll try gaim.
The last tip is getting Wikipedia to use the whole screen. The default theme has a menu in the left side of the screen which takes up quite a lot of screen space. By installing a new theme, one can customize it better for the Nokia 770 display making it much more pleasant to read Wikipedia articles.
It’s cool that the Playstation 3 runs Linux. That means it can run all kinds of nice applications 🙂
I saw the documentary The Corporation today. Extremely interesting movie. A very cool thing is that they created a divx version of the movie and is distributing it on bittorrent making it very easy to get. They then plead people to donate at the start of the movie. Interesting concept, I really hope it works for them. The movie touches a number of very interesting topics related to corporations, including governments, patents, science, marketing, environmentalism etc., besides explaining in a very clear way what corporations are.
It took a little while but now finally got my new phone working with the nokia 770. It doesn’t work out of the box because Samsung phones are a little different than nokia phones. To get Dial up networking (DUN) working one needs several files:
Then it’s just a matter of running the start-gprs script from a console. Hopefully Nokia will fix this is future versions so that this hack is not needed
I stumbled upon two articles by Paul Graham. Interesting tips for startups.
Interesting blog with a some thoughts on wikipedia and software in general.
Lessig’s Code version 2 is out. Will be interesting to see what has changed.
I recently bought a Nokia 770 to use as a remote control for MMS (among other things). The first thing one notices is the screen: very clear, big and with great contrast. The built-in IM client is great. It’s excellent for when you’re not near the computer but want to chat with people anyway. It’s quite easy to write on the screen, I’m currently using the virtual keyboard but have also tried the recognition briefly without much succes.
The Opera browser included is very light-weight and quite fast but doesn’t work correctly on all pages, so sometimes one needs to use Minimo (firefox port). Sadly Minimo is a lot more heavy on the system and can cause the system to spontaneously reboot?! I have no clue how a browser can cause the whole system to come crashing down. I thought we cured that when we moved away from Windows 98? 😉
Furthermore the built-in rss reader is quite nice. The font is nice and big which makes it easy to read. I like to read the latest news on the device when I’m eating breakfast in the morning and it saves booting up the computer. The Nokia is ready in seconds.
Before I bought the device, I read in a lot of reviews which claimed that the battery time sucked. That might be true if you’re using it constantly, but if you’re not using it for a little while it will shut down the screen and will wake up in ~1 second again. That way it can easily keep running for quite a few days of rss feed reading and browsing. So you get battery lifetime comparable to a normal phone.
A last thing that I have been using the device for is VOIP. The device has a built-in microphone and speaker so one doesn’t need anything extra to make it work. I would have liked to use my headphones but it appears that for the time being that is not yet supported. By downloading gizmo project software one is able to make very cheap (even free) phone calls to phones in Denmark (and to almost any other part of the world). The sound quality is comparable to Skype.
I havn’t started hacking on it yet but from the brief encounters I have had with the documentation and development enviroment it looks quite nice. To be continued 🙂