http://madabar.com/techblog If it ain't broke you're not trying hard enough Sun, 05 Apr 2009 06:53:30 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I needed to convert a home-made video (well slide-show with soundtrack really) that was sent over from the USA. Attempting to play this on a PAL-only TV results in unwatchable flickering monochrome output. Based on some instructions for DVD format conversion I was able to convert the NTSC disc to ... http://madabar.com/techblog/2009/04/05/ntsc-to-pal-dvd-conversion-in-linux/ These instructions are for programming a Yamaha RX-V361 AV receiver remote control so it can control a Panasonic TV: Press and hold the DTV/CBL input button on the remote While still holding that button press and hold the AV POWER button for about 3 seconds - long enough for the DTV/CBL message ... http://madabar.com/techblog/2009/02/20/how-to-program-remote-control-codes-for-yamaha-av-receivers/ My N800 was running off-line for quite a while. During this time I'd listened to a bunch of songs with Kagu and was hoping that it would immediately scrobble them to last.fm as soon as I went online. After much fiddling around, I discovered that you must play another song ... http://madabar.com/techblog/2009/02/05/when-maemoscrobbler-seems-to-be-stuck/ One of tonight's tasks was to burn a freshly downloaded Fedora 10 DVD ISO image. My dad gave me some blank LightScribe DVDs a while back, so I thought I'd give them a try, not having done so before. After a quick look around it appears the only LightScribe labelling ... http://madabar.com/techblog/2008/11/27/lightscribe-meh/ Interesting less trivial than expected problem (solved): sorting package version numbers: import re import rpm def get_package_version(name): """Return version string of installed package.""" # note: ts can take an argument that is the root of the installation # ... http://madabar.com/techblog/2008/03/06/sorting-package-version-strings/ I finally got around to looking at the problem tonight. The fix was very simple. My apologies for not addressing this sooner! Get the updated .deb. The problem was due to the volume range on the original Exaile going from 0-1. For some reason on maemo (OS2008) the volume range is ... http://madabar.com/techblog/2008/02/09/exaile-volume-problem-in-os2008-fixed/ It's lovely to see Nokia embracing "Web 2.0"... BoingBoing Slashdot Re dd it di gg ars technica Bl og s You can participate too, with a related issue. Help convince Nokia to provide out-of-the-box support for Ogg Vorbis: Vote for bug 176 PledgeBank (* I haven't pledged - sticking with my N800) The organization responsible for the Ogg formats have ... http://madabar.com/techblog/2007/12/11/nokia-vs-ogg/ Here are my notes from updating to OS2008 for getting root access via ssh and taking an early snapshot of the image filesystem with rsync: Download the OS2008 firmware image. Follow the instructions for flashing with new firmware image Go to Settings->Application Manager and go to Tools->Application Catalog and enable the Maemo Extras ... http://madabar.com/techblog/2007/12/08/updating-the-n800-to-os2008/ I've made a new release of Exaile for maemo 4.0 (i.e. OS2008, chinook). This drops a bunch of backward compatibility patches needed for OS2007, and takes advantage of some gtk 2.10 features. Also, there was a bug in the gtk shipped with OS2007 that prevented activating items in the sidebar. ... http://madabar.com/techblog/2007/12/05/exaile-for-maemo-40-os2008/ I've updated the maemo port of Exaile to version 0.2.11. There are not many visible changes, apart from alphabetic separators in the collection list. I now include the bytecode-compiled pyc files, so startup time should be reduced slightly. It still takes a bit long to start up though. I've been ... http://madabar.com/techblog/2007/12/03/exaile-0211-for-maemo/