Remix your brain

Yesterday, I was trying to help out someone who was having problems using his Bluetooth mouse with Fedora 8. Turns out he's got a Toshiba laptop, and the Bluetooth adapter wasn't showing in Linux. You need some sucky code to get it working.

Hobbling to the ToshBT website, I noticed a PS3 theme extractor. Grand!

In between cleaning up my backlog of bugs and TODOs, I implemented setting your ~/.face as the icon for Rhythmbox' UPNP shares.


PS: Best pangram ever: Sex-charged fop blew my junk TV quiz

Swapsies

I showed Thomas Ninja Gaiden, he showed me XiaoXiao. Yyya!

PS: Fun song.

Of old age and diseases

Old age...

After doing my ankle about 6 weeks ago (trying to be all youthful rollerblading in Hyde Park), I thought I'd knackered my back on Tuesday. Turns out it was probably a knock, or a bit of muscle tenderness as it seems to have died down on its own after 2 days. When is science giving me new body parts then?

I also did my birthday dinner in London, in advance, with Mr. Burtonini, and he's feeling the old age just as well as I am: he didn't know the young band I got him a mixtape of, despite them being in the Guardian's guide 6 months ago. And it's all MP3s on there, no crummy DRM'ed audio formats.

...and diseases

Thanks to the Italian man mentioned above and his lovely (and young!) wife, I caught Ninja Gaidenitis. The game is hard as hell, but sometimes I'm a dumbass, which makes the adventure parts a bit trickier. I remember when it was just a bad Shinobi on the SMS.


I'm at level 3 after a week of play, in contrast to the great, but too easy, Ratchet and Clank which I finished in 4 days (that's not continuous gameplay by the way).

Update: My local team beats your new-age web-based communist/capitalist idea of a football team's butt.

Le Tango PS3 theme

The nice people at ps3-themes.org have updated their copy of the Tango theme to link to this blog, and credit me properly (thanks Jason).

I'm not too fussed about being credited as it's mostly work by the Tango artists (special mention to Jakub and Ulisse for the Sony hardware related icons) appearing (took me 2 evenings to do, still), but rather the fact that people don't get the whole story going to a resource website like that one.

No updates, no copyright information, no links to sources.

FYI, the source code is:

• Under the GPL for icons copied from gnome-icon-theme-extras and gnome-icon-theme, as well as the background derived from gnome-backgrounds
  
• Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License for the icons copied from tango-icon-theme and tango-icon-theme-extras
• Composite icons are under the most restrictive license of the icons used as sources
• The left-over icons are under whichever license Sony released their sample theme (unused in the final theme)

Feel free to ask for more information about specific icons. I'll also make sure to include this information in future releases (ie. when I know how to replace the missing icons).

Tango PS3 Theme

Sony recently released a tool that goes along with the 2.00 firmware for the PS3, allowing users to create and set themes. Despite the original application being written in Python (you can see that by not passing any arguments to the application, and seeing that they forgot to check for the length of the ARGV before trying to poke at it), the converter to their home-grown image format (GIM) isn't written in that language. A wine install and a couple of DLLs later, I can run the tool on the sample theme.

It's been done before on the PSP. So here's my take on the Tango icon theme for the PS3:



Kudos to the Tango artists for their nice looking icons, and particularly Jakub who provided me with some icons that weren't readily available. Sources are here. It's still missing a few icons, can't say the theme format is well documented...

Hmmm, networking multimedia

After working around (read: that's not a proper fix) some stupidness in MythTV's frontend, my DVB-T experience just got a lot better, as I can finally watch the stuff I record. That includes recording all the Match Of The Day shows (just in case), as well as the kinky Secret Diary Of A Callgirl.

After switching the Mac Mini to wired, the network is fast enough for the MythTV sources in GStreamer to stream to Totem, as well as streaming via UPNP to the PS3. The UPNP framework in MythTV doesn't export a lot of the things it could, such as a thumbnail, the length of the movie, etc.

Just like chpe, I've been getting increasingly frustrated at the Web going to Flash Video for streaming, instead of sticking to the embedded movie player. I guess that targetting one platform (Flash) as opposed to the big three (WMP, Real and Quicktime), is a boon for Web developers. And that's how EA pushes the online replays from FIFA.

And to the PS3 again, with Frank's help, I've fixed up Rhythmbox' UPNP source.

So, on the TODO list:

• Better UPNP in Rhythmbox
• Finishing MythTV support in Totem
• More work on the browser plugin

Feel free to help, or send me stuff from my wishlist. It's just like writing code.

Simple additions

I got my copy of FIFA08 this morning, and I'm having plenty of fun. The gameplay is much less robotic, and pretty flowing once you get used to it, the online play doesn't lag on bit (unlike the mode tacked on the FIFA07 PS2 version). PES fanatics should try it before they knock it. For music lovers, the EA Trax include stuff like Yonderboi, Travis, CSS. I particularly like The Hoosiers and Wir sind Helden. The Play like a Pro mode, where you play a single player in a game is also quite something. Get sick like in an FPS when the screen starts shaking and your view narrowing when you're sprinting the ball at your feet.

I've been playing with the rest of the PS3 as well. Rhythmbox' UPNP plugin doesn't work yet, seems to be something related to the way Coherence sets up its mainloop, but I've been able to play a few recordings direct from my MythTV machine (although the MPEG-2 decoder of the PS3 seems to be sub-par for slightly broken streams).

I'm hadessuk on there, if you fancy a game of FIFA, or a conversation typed at the speed of a tortoise.