Gadgets and gifts

The great sport that is Vincent sent me a copy of Hacking vim for my troubles. Hopefully, I'll be able to get more code written, as requested.


In the free stuff department, last week, a kind soul at Ericsson sent me 2 Sony Ericsson mobile phones, one being the pretty new Sony Ericsson k850i. The other (less interesting) phone is already on its way to one of the gnokii developers without such a device.

I've started playing around with it. It has a good bunch of interesting modes when plugged in via USB, or over Bluetooth, which beg to be (better) supported including:

• MTP device (Rhythmbox and gvfs)
• Mass Storage media player (Rhythmbox)
• ObexFTP over USB and Bluetooth (gvfs, obex-data-server)
• Serial port (NetworkManager, gnome-phone-manager, gnokii)

Funnily enough, poking people at Nokia didn't get me a test phone in the ~2 years I tried. My wishlist is online :)

Knock knock. Who's there? Stripes, again! Got booze?

Googling for phone stuff today, I found this great phone. Just for you Ezio!



Ezio provided material of his own. The bestest pasta ever!


And to cap it all off, via sebzen, and "Tendance High-tech" (lamest name ever):

More suckage

Lovefilm ties up with Amazon DVD

Sigh. I actually chose to use Amazon rather than Lovefilm because it was integrated with the rest of the Amazon shopping, including wishlists, and IMDB (look up a film on IMDB, click on the Amazon link, add to rental list).

Lovefilm is also more expensive (I pay £9.99 a month for 3 DVDs at a time, 6 per month), which would now be £9.99/month for 1 DVD at a time, with unlimited rentals, or £7.99 for 2 DVDs at a time, and 4/month. No word about Blu-ray discs counting as DVDs either (as is currently the case with Amazon).

I also wonder about Amazon cannibalising themselves, as Lovefilm also sells DVDs and offers some for download.Bah!

gvfsd-obexftp

I committed my work on the ObexFTP backend for gvfs yesterday, and fixed a good number of bugs in it today (one deadlock, missing icons, etc.). And it's looking quite neat.

After selecting the device in the Bluetooth applet's "Browse Device..." menu, the device shows up on the desktop with a nice name and a window pops up.

Nice icon!

Photos I need to upload somewhere!

The nice thing is that it'll automatically unmount when the phone is out of range, or the Bluetooth adapter is removed/disabled (such as when suspending).

How lucky is that

Wednesday.

Monday.

Talk about a waste of time.

gnome-bluetooth nearly dead

After the fun time debugging, I started implementing ObexPush in gnome-user-share, pretty much as planned. Code's in SVN. Next up are notifications, and asking whether to accept transfers for each session.

My little transfer just got started

I also committed the new goom visuals to gst-plugins-good. Better visuals, MMX, SSE2 and Altivec optimisations (I think). Get it from CVS while it's hot!

Hot chips, yummy

Much more TLA!

I'm on holidays ATM, but at a friend's place, and he's got a Freebox with TV-over-ADSL. That allowed me to test and fix the Cone (see where the name comes from?) plugin of Totem to have a good enough VLC-compatibility to handle the page. Details over in Bugzilla.

Late night French TV using Totem

PS: Vuntz owes me.