Older blog entries for Elleo (starting at number 54)

Announcing Tango Friends

With only my EeePC available (and so no real work to distract me) on the way back from FOSDEM I decided to pass the time by hacking together a little web interface to TangoGPS’s public friends server, which allows TangoGPS users to share their location with other Tango users. So now you can stalk your OpenMoko toting friends even easier from any internet enabled computer. It uses OpenStreetMap for the maps and automatically queries the tango friends sever every 10 minutes.

It can be found at http://mikeasoft.com/~mike/tangofriends.

Syndicated 2009-02-10 20:44:59 from Michael Sheldon's Stuff

FBReader now working on the OpenMoko FreeRunner

I’ve just spent the day hacking on FBReader to make it work correctly under OpenMoko (OM2008.*). Until now it’s been pretty much unusable due to the GPE version of FBReader expecting you to be using a device that has some physical buttons which then get bound to vital functions like turning the page. The changes I’ve made are as follows:

• Add scroll forward/backward buttons to the toolbar
• Add fullscreen mode button to the toolbar (doesn’t have an icon at the moment, it’s the third button from the right)
• Change fullscreen mode so that it doesn’t hide the toolbar (otherwise there’s no way to get back from fullscreen mode)
• Switch to using the much prettier blue tango icons
• Make the line separation larger so the text doesn’t overlap
• Reduce the font size
• Change the default colours to match openmoko’s colour scheme better (and so it’s a little easier on the eyes)

And most importantly…

• Make it so that tapping the sides of the screen turns the book’s pages (left = backwards, right = forwards)

Here’s a screenshot of what it used to look like:

And what it looks like with my patches:

To install it simply run:

opkg install http://mikeasoft.com/~mike/openmoko/enca_1.9-r3_armv4t.ipk http://mikeasoft.com/~mike/openmoko/fbreader_0.8.2a-r6+elleopatches_om-gta02.ipk


For those interested the patch can also be downloaded from http://mikeasoft.com/~mike/openmoko/fbreader-openmoko.patch.

Bonus points for anyone who knows what book I’m testing it with in the screenshots (without googling) ;).

Syndicated 2008-10-12 19:09:22 from Michael Sheldon's Stuff

Jokosher running on the Neo FreeRunner

Just for a bit of fun I thought I’d see how well Jokosher runs on the Neo FreeRunner mobile phone. It actually seems to be almost usable, I might see about finally looking at bug #228035 (making Jokosher more usable on small screen devices) to make it a bit easier to use.

Once some of the other more important tasks are completed I might also go back and take a look at implementing the Jokosher remote that we’ve had planned for a few years.

Syndicated 2008-08-16 23:38:15 from Michael Sheldon's Stuff

Improved Crash Protection for Jokosher

I’ve just about finished rewriting the crash protection code for Jokosher. It now supports recovering multiple crashed projects at any time after the fact (instead of forcing you to choose immediately after a crash has occurred). It also checks that the crashed project hasn’t changed since the backup was saved and makes sure the user really wants to restore the project if this is the case.

Jokosher has recently moved to using bazaar instead of SVN, as such this feature has it’s own branch, we’ll still need to see if this branch gets merged before or after the 0.10 release.

Syndicated 2008-08-10 00:23:23 from Michael Sheldon's Stuff

Jokosher Crash Recovery

I’ve just finished adding a new feature for the 0.10 release of Jokosher (scheduled for August). Jokosher can now recover a user’s project after a crash:

It still needs some testing, but it seems to work acceptably well at the moment and doesn’t appear to cause any problems with editing while backups are being saved.

Also, thanks to the great work of Sebastian Dröge fixing bugs in the GStreamer audioconvert and deinterleave plugins, when I get home in a couple of weeks I’ll be able to finish the work we started over a year ago on getting support for multiple simultaneous inputs in to Jokosher.

Syndicated 2008-05-25 16:05:13 from Michael Sheldon's Stuff

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.

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:

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 .

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.

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 .

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