Crossed Wires

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Classic Mac sounds on my mobile phone

Apr 9

Posted by Vic in Fun, Hardware

We watched WALL-E the other day. A bit of trivia for Apple Mac fans (if you didn’t already know) is that WALL-E’s startup sound — heard when he’s finished his solar recharge — is that of a post-1997 Mac computer (with Steve Jobs on the board of Pixar and Disney, WALL-E was never going to make The Microsoft Sound (: ). Coincidentally, at around the same time as I saw WALL-E I was going through that modern malaise of mobile-phone-alert-tone-taedium… So, inspired by this bit of cinematic crossover coolness, I decided to get some Mac-chime action for my handset.

The first thing was obviously to get hold of the audio file. This turned out to be surprisingly easy, thanks to Google pointing me to a piece of software called MacTracker. MacTracker is actually a reference guide for Apple products (computers all the way back to the Macintosh XL, the MessagePads, printers, displays, even iPods and mice), but part of the information it holds about the computers is their startup and death chimes.

There’s no option in MacTracker to export the audio files, but by opening the app package (“Show Package Contents” in Finder) it’s possible to navigate to where the chime sound files are stored. Then from Finder, all I had to do was zap the file to the phone via Bluetooth. On the phone, opening the Bluetooth message gave me an option to save the “music” file, which I did — this adds the file to the Music Player, but importantly makes it easily selectable in the configuration of the alert tones.

So now when I receive an SMS I hear the death chime of a Macintosh LC, and the startup sound of the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh alerts me to incoming e-mail. I’m going to apply similar configuration to my desktops: on-and-off for the last ten years I’ve been using a Homer Simpson soundbite to advise incoming mail, and it’s a bit tired now…

Next task will be to replace the startup sound on my N810 with something a bit retro-Mac! :)

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BOM Radar for Cisco 7970

Dec 12

Posted by Vic in Fun

I’ve written an XML app to display rain radar images from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology on the screen of a graphics-capable Cisco IP phone. It seemed like it would be simple to do, and I couldn’t work out really why no-one had done it. Well it wasn’t hard to do, but I can see now why it hadn’t been done…

While the screen of the 7970 looks nice on it’s own, and is certainly a drastic improvement over the 7940/7960, it doesn’t have the resolution to be able to display anything useful other than text and simple images. The BOM images are 524×564, while the largest image the Cisco can show is 298×168.

Here’s an example of my app in action:

bom7970

Because the phone’s image viewer can’t scroll a large image I’ve had to scale and crop it, losing a fair amount of detail in the process (I did try just scaling it to fit the entire image, but it was totally useless to view). Plus, one of the key attractions of the BOM radar site is the animated images, and the phone has no way to display animations.

So what do you think, lazyweb? I’ve learned a bit more about coding Cisco XML apps, but other than that have I wasted my time? I will put it up on my Projects site eventually (once I’ve put in some more error handling etc), but let me know with a comment here…

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OpenTTD

Jan 28

Posted by Vic in Fun, Linux

So I was catching up on the RSS feeds I subscribe to, and came across an article on the latest issue of Full Circle (a magazine about goings-on around Ubuntu Linux). In it I found an article on OpenTTD, an open-source clone of the old 90’s game Transport Tycoon Deluxe. As one who spent many an hour in front of games like Railroad Tycoon in my youth, I had to try it. Unfortunately, I’m hooked…

I’ve been playing the game all night since I found it on Monday afternoon. Sleep seems a distant priority compared to making sure I snag the subsidy for a passenger service from Podlondlington to Nunmubhattan…

It’s easy to install on the Ubuntus, but you do need to obtain the data files from the original CD — the Full Circle article contains instructions on how to do that (or I’m sure the website tells you).

Sure, the graphics don’t measure up to today’s insane system-melting specifications and the isometric view, while state-of-the-art in its day, is at times frustrating (I’m sure there was a control you could use to hide the buildings so you could see behind things… maybe I’m thinking of Lincity). Still, it’s both a great bit of entertainment and a trip down memory lane at the same time. If you’re like me and played with the Tycoon games as a kid, or if you’re a bit of a retrogamer, I encourage you to check it out. Don’t expect to see much of your family for a while though… :)

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Holiday time

Mar 25

Posted by Vic in Fun, Life

LIVE from Dicky Beach, Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia, it’s the Crossed Wires Holiday Show!

Jokes aside (particularly at the name of the venue, which is actually named after a shipwreck… oh dear, not getting much better is it) we’re on our “summer” holiday.  Caravanning on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast.  Beautiful…  well, after the heat in the van’s canvas annexe… and trying to sleep at night amongst the insects in said annexe, since I’m too tall to fit the beds in the van…

Maybe I’m too used to travelling, especially given the places I visited on holiday twelve months ago.  I’m sure that it’ll do me good to rough-it a little for a while.  Caravanning is something I can generally take only in small doses, so we’ll have to see how I go with ten days straight!  We’re about four days down now, so if you see any headlines about psychopathic laptop-wielding Linux admins going postal north of Brisbane, check back here to see if it was me…

Connectivity for this blog posting comes courtesy of Optus 3G data via my Nokia N70 phone.  Didn’t get the Bluetooth link to the phone quite sorted yet so it’s via USB right now, but having got the PPP config right I can now take it into the Bluetooth mode with a little confidence.

Off to the beach in a minute, hopefully to get some photos of Nicholas going absolutely hog-wild in the surf — he’s loving the beach…  Watching him enjoying the beach so much is well-and-truly making up for the insects at night. :)

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More on XBMC — ‘Lets go to the movies!’

Jan 18

Posted by Vic in Fun, Hardware

My experiences with XBMC are still happy ones.  I’m learning to live with its lockups (usually caused by me making vicious, unprovoked attacks on it by doing things like pressing buttons on the remote)…  No, that’s too harsh :)   In seriousness, I’m very impressed — almost as impressed with it as I am with how much disk space I’m going to have to buy if I want to rip my DVD collection to play on it!  (I’m beginning to wonder why I’m entering this in the Fun topic…)

I was explaining to a friend just the other day about how DVD was different to CD.  ”Audio CDs,” I said, “are a completely different format to data CDs, which meant that the first CD drives for computrs could not even read music CDs.  With DVDs it’s easier because all DVDs are basically data discs — the ones with movies on just have a special directory layout, and the movie is just simple computer files on the disc.”

What an idiot.  How I regret ever saying anything so stupid!

Over the last week I have tried more than a dozen combinations of software on Mac OS X, Linux and Windows to do the job of getting thosse “simple conputer files” off the DVD and onto my server so that we can view them on XBMC.  First complication is the fact that XBMC currently does not understand DVD menus, and only understands how to read a VIDEO_TS directory if it’s on a physical DVD.  So my first grand plan of simply copying VIDEO_TS to my server was a failure.

Here started my journey into ripping and transcoding.  A journey that has taken me from Mac the Ripper and Handbrake, through drip and quickrip, past countless forum pages and mailing list archives and a side-trip into Forty-Two, to arrive at ffmpegX (Mac) and dvd::rip (Linux).

I almost gave up on dvd::rip when I first set it up.  It has a cluster mode, and I naturally assumed that my Pentium-4 2.4GHz-HT clustered with my dual-Opteron server would make mincemeat of my DVDs (figuratively of course).  Unfortunately the Opteron is not strong on this sort of work (or perhaps the Gentoo ebuilds for the transcode package are not well optimised for AMD64), and the Pentium-4 was held back because it accessed the files over NFS.  That, combined with the fact that I had repeated errors and failed transcodes, drove me back to the Mac.

Not that that’s a bad thing.  Most of the software around is optimised for and benefits greatly from the Altivec engine.  Having a w00ty dual-G5 Power Mac is also a help ;)   Mac the Ripper takes no time at all (well, okay, about 5 minutes) to rip a DVD — maybe a bit longer for a hefty DVD9 — although I do only rip the main feature to save a little time.  Then, using either Handbrake (for simple jobs) or ffmpegX (for better access to tweaking knobs) I make an AVI or MPG out of it.

There are two costs to all of this: 1) time, and 2) storage.

Time: this is actually a double-edged sword.  Not only does it take a sodding-long time to actually do the transcode (luckily you don’t have to sit by it) but I then have to transfer the file to the server, then light up XBMC and give it a test.  Not necessary to watch the whole thing (usually the first minute or so is enough to tell you how far out of sync the audio is).

Storage: I thought that editing Mini-DV and mastering that to DVD takes storage…  There is no way I will rip my whole DVD collection.  Apart from the fact that there are some movies that you just have to watch in original quality (oh, didn’t I mention that?  Yes, transcoding does require you to sacrifice some picture quality, although you do have a little control over just how much you do lose), I can’t justify putting more storage in the server just to watch the occasional movie.

So what will I use this for?  Some things are ideal — I can see the kids videos that get played on endless repeat being done this way.  Nicholas will be able to do it himself without us worrying about DVD drawers and smudges on discs (just have to make sure I can lock out the “educational videos” from his set ;)   And, some things like the Bottom stage shows and episodes that we put on just for a laugh sometimes.  But not Matrix — not in MPEG4, anyways ;)

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New home for Crossed Wires

Dec 7

Posted by Vic in Fun, Life

Having paid for the veejoe.net domain some time ago (got a fully sic deal as well, 5 years for the price of two, or something) I decided to finally do something about it.  So, it’s now the new (official) home of Crossed Wires.

I’m hardly going to submit it to Google or anything like that, but it’s something newsworthy in the life of the site anyway.

From a Linux perspective, I’m using Apache VirtualHost directives so that access to the other stuff I host is not changed (at least that’s the plan).  Over time, I’ll upgrade things and integrate the photo gallery, but one step at a time!

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