Categories
Movies

Time for a free alternative to iMDB?

After writing my last blog post, I wrote to iMDB to hear what they thought about my first suggestion. They have a whole department for this kind of stuff 🙂 Sadly they weren’t that happy about it: “The minimum cost to license data from IMDb is US$15,000 per year. If that is within your budget […]”. So I guess I’m back to the second solution: create a library for passing iMDB html pages. While thinking about the whole thing yesterday, it hit me (hard), that it’s quite strange there is no wiki-like site available for this. The idea is to use a wiki-like site, with a little stricter syntax so that it’s easier to pass, colored with a voting system. The same concept could also be used for music. While wikipedia does have some classic movies, it does miss the voting feature. So why hasn’t this been created before?

Categories
Movies My Media System

imdb page layout restructuring

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:

  1. Find out if imdb is willing to give FOSS projects access to their xml data
  2. Create a library, like imdbpy but in c++, to encapsulate the imdb parsing if 1 fails
Categories
On the web

Cool T-shirts

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 🙁

Categories
Free Software My Media System

Going to Fosdem

I’ll be attending Fosdem this year, staying at the Atlas Hotel. Let me know if anyone wants to meet, especially if you’re using MMS. I had that wonderful opportunity at Wacken last year and it’s always nice to talk face to face with people that you have only talked to over email.

Categories
HTPC Movies My Media System Personal

Building a 100″ projector screen

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:

  • 228x131cm 16mm MDF board (screen size calculator).
  • 40mm wide wood frame
  • 1 liter of very low gloss paint. The color code used was S-1502B (I think it’s a european standard).
  • 100 ml very low gloss black paint.

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.

painted projector screen

I have been super happy with how it turned out. First a picture of a TV source (4:3) projected on the screen.

projector screen 4:3

Finally a picture of the result with a 16:9 source.
projector screen 16:9

Sadly the camera on my phone doesn’t do the final result justice. More pictures with real camera here on flickr.

Categories
tablet

Nokia 770 tips and tricks

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.

Categories
HTPC My Media System

My Media System on a Playstation 3

It’s cool that the Playstation 3 runs Linux. That means it can run all kinds of nice applications 🙂

MMS running on a Playstation 3

Categories
Movies On the web

The Corporation

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.

Categories
Free Software tablet

Getting Samsung SGH-E900 DUN working with Nokia 770 and Linux

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:

  • Dummy connection to simulate a real connection
  • gprs-ppp4 needs to be placed in /etc/ppp/peers/
  • gprs-chat needs to be placed in /etc/chatscripts/ and changed to your local operator. Currently configured to TDC DK.
  • rfcomm.conf needs to be placed in /etc/rfcomm/
  • start-gprs helper scripts
  • A resolv.conf file, since the nokia device doesn’t seem to get it automatically. One can get them by connecting using a normal Linux machine.

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

Categories
Books iola On the web

.random

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.