Floating Free - Web Comic

Who hasn’t dreamt of living aboard a Zeppelin and leisurely cruising around the world? Lacking the millions of pounds necessary to actually do this I decided to have a go at producing a little web comic along similar lines. I don’t know how long I’ll continue it for as it has taken the best part of a week to get a single strip finished. I’d like to at least try and produce a complete storyline, even if it’s only short, but updates may be rather sporadic.

Hopefully having something that requires me to draw vaguely regularly will help me to improve my drawing skills.

I won’t post any further strips on my main blog, if you want to follow it further I’ve knocked up a quick site for it at http://www.floatingfree.org.

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Syndicated 2007-10-26 21:14:37 from Michael Sheldon's Stuff

New LUGRadio Forums Theme

Just in time for the new season of LUGRadio starting on Monday, I’ve created a new PHPBB3 compatible theme for the LUGRadio forums. The hard working trig should have it up on the official forums soon, until then you can have a peek at it on my development installation, although that might not be around for long.

And here’s a quick screenshot of it for posterity:

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Syndicated 2007-09-18 11:20:41 from Michael Sheldon's Stuff

OpenMoko on a Treo 650

Following on from yesterday’s post I now have have OpenMoko running on my Treo.

When I next have some time to spare I’ll have a go at hacking support for the Treo’s GSM chip into OpenMoko’s gsmd, then it’ll be possible to make phone calls through OpenMoko’s phone application .

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Syndicated 2007-07-01 14:40:23 from Michael Sheldon's Stuff

Im in ur Treo, Linuxin’ ur phonez…

With much help from the chaps in #hackndev I managed to get Linux installed on my Treo 650:

You can see a video of it booting and running a few applications here:

http://mirror.video.blip.tv/Elleo-LinuxOnATreo650996.ogg (Ogg Theora)

For anyone else wanting to do this, the steps are as follows:

1. Download and unpack P3t3’s Treo image.
2. Overwrite the zImage with my version. This is a more up-to-date kernel and has the initramfs built in to the kernel image (because of some buggyness in the MMC driver loading an initrd image from an SD card can be unreliable).
3. Run the following command: dd if=/dev/zero of=swap.swapfs bs=1024 count=32768
4. Copy AngstromOPIE_t650-v01.ext2, linux.boot.cfg, zImage and swap.swapfs to the root of your SD card (make sure you unmount it cleanly after you’ve finished).
5. Download P3t3’s Treo version of cocoboot and install it to your Treo.
6. Run Cocoboot on your Treo, delete the line saying “init=/linuxrc”, then hit “Boot”.
7. Enjoy the geeky goodness .

It’s still not amazingly fast, but adding the swap makes it just about usable, and there’s still a lot of work needs doing before it can actually be used as a phone. I believe P3t3 has worked out how to switch the GSM chip in to AT mode (PalmOS uses some odd binary mode for talking to the chip), but I don’t think things have gone much further than that yet.

To get back in to PalmOS just hit the reset button. It shouldn’t touch any of your files in any way, but it might be a good idea to backup first just in case .

Update: The speed can be increased greatly by passing the parameter mem=32M in Cocoboot, for some reason without this the kernel only makes use of about 16MB of RAM.

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Syndicated 2007-06-30 19:42:56 from Michael Sheldon's Stuff

Jokosher Network Instruments - Contacts Integrated

Now that I’ve got most of the libempathy and libempathy-gtk functions I need working as python bindings I’ve finally been able to get on with some fun hacking on Jokosher itself. A user’s contacts (managed by Telepathy’s Mission Control) are now offered as possible instruments which can be added to a project:

Next I’ll see about fixing some problems with the python bindings so that the avatar pixbuf generation works correctly, rather than just assigning everyone with a generic avatar.

Also, hello Planet Gnome .

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Syndicated 2007-06-18 14:50:03 from Michael Sheldon's Stuff