Random Wii Tip …

Random Wii Tip Of The Day

I can confirm that a Nintendo Wii with 4.0 firmware will read SDHC cards; just tried it with a 16GB SanDisk card after updating firmware to 4.0.

Nokia Messaging – suckz.

Newer Nokia phones come with the brand new Nokia Messaging software, such as on my new E75. When setting up an email account it tries to be clever and guess, from the email address, all the necessary settings – great value for over 90% of email services out there. BUT, if you have non-trivial settings like xxxx@yyyy.com being hosted by zzzzz@foobar.biz on SSL port 993…the setup falls apart like a house of cards. If you somehow get to register your email acount (on email.nokia.com) you can try to correct all the settings but it still does not work; you cannot tell it to use a full email address as the IMAP account holder username.

BTW, the version of Nokia Messaging from email.nokia.com can’t be installed on an E75 – whatzup? It complains about an incompatible version on the phone and there isn’t an obvious way to uninstall that…

Bring back dumb manual setup. The older ‘New Mailbox’ on an E66 phone didn’t have this problem; nor do other 3rd party mail program like Profimail.

Nokia needs put in a manual setup option as well similar to those of every desktop email client.

Thumbs down to this lousy email wizard and website :cry:. No disrespect to the developers; I’m sure the Symbian coding is really sophisticated but the first user touchpoint is horrible. This is taking dumbing down too far.

Sony PSP filesystem /music works!

I’m using the PSP v5.03 firmware on a PSP-1000 (the fat original PSP).

The PSP firmware now allows music files to be put into the /music folder in the root directory. You no longer have to put the files in /psp/music/. My AAC (MP4) files with iTunes tags and artwork are showing up in the PSP. They don’t provide an icon for the folder though. Nevertheless the well-known tip works: put a file called ‘album art.jpg’ in any folder and the PSP uses that to depict the folder.

NetworkManager 0.7.1 Released!

Yay, NetworkManager 0.7.1 is released:

You will upgrade to NetworkManager 0.7.1

It doesn’t mention much about Bluetooth /dev/rfcommX devices or ModemManager. I guess that’s for the 0.8.x series.

I wonder whether it will probe /dev/rfcommX devices to detect 3G/HSDPA phones. Stay tuned!

Ooooo…I’m sad—NM 0.7.1 doesn’t detect Bluetooth modems. I connected to the phone using (a self-compiled) blueman. It definitely registered /dev/rfcomm0 as a modem with GSM capability in HAL. NM didn’t see it! When I used the USB cable the phone was detected.

wvdial, /etc/resolv.conf on Fedora 10

I think I’ve solved a curious problem on Fedora 10 with wvdial and pppd not updating /etc/resolv.conf. The result is even though there is a network connection, no name resolution is possible unless I manually add the nameservers to /etc/resolv.conf.

I use wvdial to connect to the Internet on mobile broadband (3G/HSDPA) using my Nokia E51 and E66. Of course, I could use NetworkManager, but why do everything the easy way? Anyway, when Fedora 10 came out, the E51 and E66 were not recognised by NM as mobile broadband devices which is why I had to learn wvdial/pppd.

One thing I noticed with wvdial (or pppd from the command line) is that they didn’t update /etc/resolv.conf even though configured to do so. Other people on the Internet seem to have encountered the same problem.

The root cause of the problem is this: when the ppp interface comes up, pppd calls /etc/ppp/ip-up which calls /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-post. ifup-post is the magic script which populates /etc/resolv.conf. However /etc/ppp/ip-up is meant to be called with 6 arguments (say 6th arg = XXXX), then it looks for the existence of /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-XXXX. Only if this file exists is ifup-post called. So…drum roll… wvdial invokes pppd which invokes /etc/ppp/ip-up with 5 arguments! The result is ip-up looking for /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-.

The solution is to create a dummy file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg- with the following lines:
##contents of /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-
PEERDNS=yes
DEFROUTE=yes

These two lines are enough for ifup-post to do its magic with DNS /etc/resolv.conf.

FIXME: Frankly I don’t know how NM does it; under NM ip-up gets called with e.g. the following args
ppp0 /dev/ttyACM0 115200 119.234.159.74 10.6.6.6 /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/PPP/0

No way does /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-/org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/PPP/0 exist! There must other stuff going on. Under wvdial /etc/ppp/ip-up is called e.g. with

ppp0 /dev/ttyACM0 460800 119.234.145.157 10.6.6.6

Notice only 5 args! BTW these scripts are highly Fedora 10 specific so this “solution” may not apply to random Linux distribution.

Linux MP4 Audio Ripping Recipe

This is the nuts-and-bolts guide to ripping to MP4 audio on Linux. Of course, you are better off using one of the GUI tools like rhythmbox. This is for the truly masochistic who want the step-by-step recipe in order to tweak a few files.

1. Convert your wave file to AAC/MP4:
   faac -q 120 -c 20000 -o mysong.m4a mysong.wav
2. Obtain the album art somehow, 400×400 jpg is a nice size. Add all the iTunes-compatible metadata using AtomicParsley:
   
AtomicParsley mysong.m4a --artist XXXX --title XXXX --album XXXX
--year NNNN --genre XXXX --tracknum N/M --artwork picture.jpg -W


You should now be able to add the song to an iPod and view all the metadata and album art. FIXME: somehow rhythmbox isn’t extracting the album art from the m4a file…hmmmm. All the metadata and artwork is viewable on Sony PSP v5.0x firmware.

On a Sony PS3 v2.70 firmware I can see all the textual metadata but not the artwork I can add textual metadata using 3gp- metadata thanks to RobertM’s post http://www.marcanoonline.com/plog/post/1/178.

When you use the PS3 to add the artwork after the fact it creates a weird proprietary MP4 atom containing the artwork (I guess). This is so non-standard (not that Apple iTunes is any better)—Sony please support getting album artwork from iTunes metadata!

For the MP4 masochists: Sony PS3 adds
Atom uuid=ba91547a-d233-4774-ac94-9b6c0f04595c @ 3475048 of size: 21944, ends @ 3496992

Within this atom I found the string “image/jpeg”, as well as ID3V2 tag-like strings TPOS and APIC! Does anyone know how to create the Sony PS3 album artwork atom?

Network scanning with Linux and Sane

Hooray, today I setup a network scanner on my home network.

The server is running Fedora 10, has the scanner attached, and the saned daemon running. Both Linux and Mac clients access the scanner using the sane/net backend. In the case of Mac OS X it’s really twain-to-sane/net-to-server. Can Vista talk to a sane network scanner: FIXME.

The big gotcha is the iptables firewall on the server. Apart from the sane-port it proceeds to open a few other ports during data transmission. Therefore you must load the nf_conntrack_sane.ko module. In the case of Fedora 10, it’s configured in /etc/sysconfig/iptables-config. I hope this helps others who run into the firewall/saned problem.

The Mission Trivial Pursuit

Years ago in the eighties was the film “The Mission” starring Jeremy Irons and Robert de Niro. It’s about the Jesuits in South America, native Indians, and Spain/Portugal/Catholic Church politics. As with all these things everything ends badly and lots of sympathetic characters die. I remember a scene with an Indian child singing beautiful alto, ostensibly to demonstrate that these Indians were as “soul-full” as Europeans and should not be consigned to slavery. Naturally, this demo failed to move the powers-that-be…
Coincidentally, around the time I watched a BBC teleplay starring Alan Howard with an incredibly similar story line. I never figured out what the connection was. I’ve only recently discovered that that BBC teleplay from 20+ years ago was in fact “The Holy Experiment”—an English adapation of “Das Heilige Experiment” by the Austrian playwright Fritz Hochwälder.
Surely this must be the Trivial Pursuit question of the week: “Which Austrian play has a similar plot line to the movie The Mission?”.

真夏の果実

Today’s Favourite Song

My current favourite song…Manatsu no Kajitsu by Keisuke Kuwata of the Southern All Stars. It’s taken from the soundtrack of the film Inamura Jane.

Jacky Cheung has a very good cantopop cover 每天愛你多一些.

真夏の果実 Lyrics

作詩：桑田佳祐 作曲：桑田佳祐

涙があふれる　悲しい季節は
namida ga afureru　kanashii kisetsu wa
誰かに抱かれた夢を見る
darekani dakareta yumewo miru
泣きたい気持ちは言葉に出来ない
nakitai kimochiwa kotobani dekinai
今夜も冷たい雨が降る
konya mo tsumetai amega furu

こらえきれなくて　ため息ばかり
koraekirenakute　tameikibakari
今もこの胸に　夏は巡る
imamo kono muneni　natsu ha meguru

四六時中も好きと言って
shirokujijyuu mo suki toitte
夢の中へ連れて行って
yume no nakahe tsurete itte
忘れられない　Heart & Soul
wasurerarenai Heart & Soul
声にならない
koeni naranai

砂に書いた名前消して
sunani kaita namae keshite
波はどこへ帰るのか
namiwa dokohe kaerunoka
通り過ぎ行く　Love & Roll
toori sugi iku Love & Roll
愛をそのままに
aiwo sonomamani

マイナス100度の太陽みたいに
minus(mainasu) hyakudo no taiyou mitaini
身体を湿らす恋をして
karadawo shimerasu koiwo shite
めまいがしそうな真夏の果実は
memaigashi souna manatsu no kajitsuwa
今でも心に咲いている
imademo kokoroni saiteiru

遠く離れても　黄昏時は
tooku hanaretemo　tasogare dokiwa
熱い面影が胸に迫る
atsui omokagega muneni semaru

四六時中も好きと言って
shirokujijyuu mo suki toitte
夢の中へ連れて行って
yume no nakahe tsurete itte
忘れられない　Heart & Soul
wasurerarenai Heart & Soul
夜が待てない
yoru ga mate nai

砂に書いた名前消して
sunani kaita namae keshite
波はどこへ帰るのか
namiwa dokohe kaerunoka
通り過ぎ行く　Love & Roll
toori sugi iku Love & Roll
愛をそのままに
aiwo sonomamani

こんな夜は涙見せずに
konna yoruwa namida misesuni
また逢えると言って欲しい
mata ae ruto itsutte hoshii
忘れられない　Heart & Soul
wasurerarenai Heart & Soul
涙の果実よ
namida no kajitsu yo

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