* create an m4a file (I made mine exactly 40seconds according to audacity and saved as . . . → Read More: my experiment in custom iPhone ringtones via linux]]> thanks to recent nautilus (I assume is responsible – as seen in Ubuntu Lucid Lynx) ability to view the iPhones file paths, we can try this (typing this as I go, so this is draft on-the-fly quality notes)

* create an m4a file (I made mine exactly 40seconds according to audacity and saved as a .wav, then used faac to convert to m4a (faac in.wav –title “ringtone experiment” -o tone.m4a ; mv tone.m4a tone.m4r)

* copy tone into iPhone://iTunes_Control/Ringtones/tone.m4r

* edit iPhone://iTunes_Control/iTunes/Ringtones.plist to add in the details of the new ringtone. Fortunately I had an existing one already, so I just copied that – updating the GUID (I changed one character), the Name (“funky new ringtone”) and the Total Time (40000) fields.

…and bingo, the ringtone is visible in the settings (selectable, plays), but does not lock in as the ringtone to use! ok, clearly some work needed.

incidentally, this is a 32GB iPhone 3Gs with iOS4.0.2, never been jailbroken or anything underhanded done to it before. It was unlocked from the carrier a few days ago (thanks .au law) and that required a lengthy restore, but otherwise smooth.

…ok, so back to it: plugged it into iTunes (Mac) – it couldn’t read from the device (an error!)

…rebooted phone – and the new ring tone now works correctly. YAY! =) is this success?

…plugging it into iTunes again and… it’s all “Verifying iPhone” at me – something I don’t generally recall. …ok, it’s backing up as normal now…

and the ringtone tab in iTunes tells me it doesn’t know about the tone I added in, it’s syncing, so I suspect it’ll delete my added tone…

…and checking in my iPhone after it’s done, what do you know – my custom added ringtone is all gone. Checking back via linux – and the tone.m4r file has been deleted, Ringtones.plist has been completely rewritten.

So, I assume (not surprisingly at all) that iTunes needs to know about it, as the authorative master, and tell the iPhone how it’s gonna be. This fits with my observed philosophy of the iPhone – as an adjunct to the master information on the computer.

…

so, round 2… I add the m4r into the iTunes library – it automatically adds it in as a ringtone – that’s nice. I assume iTunes assumed it was a ringtone by the file extension. And in the iPhone tab it shows up as available to be sync’d… and bingo. it works.

ok, so not a pure linux solution – unless you never sync your phone to iTunes anyway – but it DOES let you make a custom ringtone without requiring garageband. That’s something isn’t it?

And I assume the method would work under windows too… anyone want to give it a go and get back to me?

In fact, atq is literally out of order – I guess the idea is that you pipe it through sort. very very old-school . . . → Read More: building a better atq]]> I was frustrated at the poor information available by atq (what’s that? You’ll tell me WHEN you’re running stuff, but not WHAT you’re running? This seems a little out of order!)

In fact, atq is literally out of order – I guess the idea is that you pipe it through sort. very very old-school thinking

At the other end of the scale, at -c provides an information overload of EVERYTHING about the job. (60+ lines of env? yikes. I don’t need to know that most of the time!)

So where is the simple and useful summary that I’d genuinely expect of atq?
ie, not only the queued command times, but WHAT those commands are – one per line.

As a result, here is my simple “batq” – a better atq

#!/bin/bash

# a better atq
#
# returns the original atq output in bold
# AND IN ADDITION, ALSO:
# * returns items sorted
# * the intended working directory
# * the command to be run
#
        # TODO:
        # $command is not robust - will fail on multiple lines

function do_extraqinfo() {
    while read job ; do
        jobid=$(echo $job | awk '{print $1}')
        detail=$(at -c $jobid)
        dir=$(echo "$detail" | egrep ^cd | sed -e 's/cd \(.*\) || {/\1/g')
        command=$(echo "$detail" | tail -1)
        # alter the following line if the bold offends you
        tput bold ; echo -n "$job" ; tput sgr0
        echo "  $dir    $command"
    done
} 

atq | sort | do_extraqinfo

http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera.html

If you haven’t seen it, then do so now.

If you have, proceed…

So if I can be allowed to blow my own horn for a moment, I’d like to boast that I occasionally seem . . . → Read More: augmented thinking]]> Now this, I am sure you will agree, is a damn cool presentation of some excellent ideas.

http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera.html

If you haven’t seen it, then do so now.

If you have, proceed…

So if I can be allowed to blow my own horn for a moment, I’d like to boast that I occasionally seem to have quite marvelous ideas independently or others. Admittedly, others who were lucky enough to think of it earlier enough and/or had resources enough to make something of it. But my claim is that I sometimes think of these things _independently_.

And it has has been said of inventing – the best inventions are obvious, which is why it’s so humbling to remember that one didn’t think of these ‘obvious’ things themselves.

But in my case, can I finally “prove” that I did…?

Back to the video – I’d like to draw your attention to a point approximately 3:45 in: “…time travel. I’m not going to show you some of the wonderful historic imagery in here – there’s some in here with horses and carriages as well [...] it also is the foundation for augmented reality“.

Now compare with an email of mine to a friend, where I wrote this:

What would be kind of cool: augmented reality goggles (this is one of those ideas I had years before I knew there was a word for it) that show recreated historical versions of the world… but, instead of just showing a certain era, you see the ‘prettiest’ building at any given location. Making a best-of-all-possible-eras virtual world

So as far as I can tell (can anyone confirm?), this talk was made on Feb 11 or 12 (based on dated video comments afterwards). My email has a date stamp of: 10 Feb 2010 15:17:07 +1000). And, frankly, even if the video was recorded first, I sure didn’t see it till today

As an aside, my email was prompted by a rather ugly house I see regularly in town, and my own wonderings if it used to be pretty…

• • Contemporary Google maps street view
  • Sometime pre 1994, it was ugly then too
  • Circa 1930s – it was gorgeous.

I especially love how you get basically the same angle on all three – which was, of course, the key to my own inspiration

So clearly, the next thing for me to work out is real time travel – at which point I can begin to start sending these ideas of mine back to people in the past with the resources to make them a reality asap! =)

256 colour support is there. It’s in the code. It works. It’s nice. And . . . → Read More: Linux UI: crippling itself?]]> I was recently talking with a friend about commandline prompt gadgetry, and our tangent conversations drifted to 256colour support in X terminal emulators. xterm. gnome-terminal, and presumably kterm and others also, though only the first two have I looked at.

256 colour support is there. It’s in the code. It works. It’s nice. And it’s… not only not enabled by default, there is no clear and simple way of enabling it even if you WANTED TO.

I was going to blog more about this, but the following IRC fragment I think says it all. Any questions?

<nemo> it'd be sure nice for a distro to set itself up with no self-crippling
        for ancient stuff that, frankly, nobody is using anymore
<nemo> (or if they do, then it's being used by people savvy enough (probably)
        to work out the compatibility issues themselves
<nemo> ubuntu does a good step, I think, but probably not enough
<nemo> 256colours should be the GLOBAL DEFAULT these days
<Screwtape> Every time somebody suggests that, they get shouted down by people
        who say things like 'BUT WHAT HAPPENS WHEN I SSH TO MY
        FreeBSD/OpenBSD/Solaris/Dragonfly/Xenix MACHINE!'
<Screwtape> We can't even figure out whether backspace should be ^H or ^? 
<nemo> [a] don't use this distro then
<Screwtape> It's hardly global domination if everybody stops using it. 
<nemo> it's hardly global domination if we're compromising ourselves for the
        compatibility of those who DON'T use it
<nemo> [b] have a nifty 'set_maximum_compatibility' script, which backwardsify
        everything

...

<nemo> so, what else has potential, but is held back by... historical compatibility?
<nemo> and by 'potential', I mean "it's there on your system now, just waiting for
        you to apply the correct settings'
<nemo> I am identifying terminal colours, and default prompts
<nemo> (terminal colours, and all the terminals, applications (screen, elinks, etc),
        etc that go with.
<Screwtape> I.. can't think of anything else off the top of my head, sadly. 
<Screwtape> Or perhaps luckily.
...

In fairness, it’s not like it’s not been noticed before:

...
<nemo> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121800
<nemo> 2003... status new
<nemo> wtf
<nemo> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=115750
<nemo> amuses me that my no-X11 server has terminfo for 'gnome' and 'gnome-256color',
        but my ubuntu desktop does not
...

And in case anyone wants to bring their terminal into the 21st century with 256colours instead of 8 (“tput colors” will tell you what yours can do), Screwtape has a nice little writeup here:

...
<Screwtape> http://screwtape.jottit.com/automatic_%24term_selection <-- Here's my
        automatic $TERM hack.

…

PS: As a final note: Shortly after this conversation, Screwtape filed the following debian bug report for vim’s syntax handling of sh scripts:  vim-runtime: sh syntax highlighting should default to POSIX.

…

PPS: Originally blogged to: http://blog.thorx.net/2009/10/linux-ui-crippling-itself. Please consider leaving comments at the blog rather than facebook or other social media side that this post may be propagated to. Thankyou

Failings?! Yes, compared to my favoured browser of many years, Galeon, firefox (through to the last version2 releases) was slow in interface, memory intensive, and deficient in interface features. (session . . . → Read More: firefox considered usable]]> For a long time I have been on the outside of many geek surfers, shunning firefox and pouring active scorn on it’s many failings.

Failings?! Yes, compared to my favoured browser of many years, Galeon, firefox (through to the last version2 releases) was slow in interface, memory intensive, and deficient in interface features. (session saving for eg was years ahead in galeon)

introducing Firefox3

Unfortunately, galeon ceased active development several years ago, and while it was kept up to date with the latest of the firefox2 era gecko engines, there were otherwise no interface changes, updates, bugfixes, etc.

So with firefox3, I have jumped ship. firefox3 improves the major issues I had with ff2 – most notably memory usage. ff3 still uses more memory for the same 70 open tabs as compared to galeon, but this is more than offset by improved rendering, basic plugins (flashblocker especially, though tabfavicon is another favourite now), and mere ‘continued active development’.

developing actively

ff3 nevertheless still fails in some aspects. Let me list the ways… all are relatively minor, so if you consider them nitpicking – that is fair. All are features I have appreciated from galeon. (in some cases I haven’t used them, but I appreciate the correctness and forethought of the options being there)

• middle-paste-URL creates new tab: in galeon this combined middle-click-load of ff behaviour, and middle-click-link=open new tab. ie, you would paste the URL and it would open in a NEW tab, not the existing. That was beautiful behaviour, and ff3 is limited by comparison. However, I’ve noticed it less than I expected as I switched from xterm to gnome-terminal at the same time.
• image context menu: I miss ‘open image in new tab‘
• tab-organising: no keyboard shortcut to move tabs? No ability to detach a tab into a new window? No ability to drag a tab between windows? Galeon had all these things back when ff couldn’t even move tabs by ANY method!
• no ‘clone this tab‘ option on tab context menu. This was surprisingly useful.
• no ‘up‘ button.
• returning from a crashed session gives me no option to save the session to bookmarks. It’s either try it again (and presumably trying to reload the page which crashed out last time!), or discard it all. I do like the more advanced saving of sessions (galeon was limited to only a list of windows and the tabs within them), but I am mildly concerned about what happens if a session file is corrupt (galeon was a relatively friendly XML file), or otherwise needs storing for future re-analysis. Expect a rant about this if it ever occurs.
• Smart bookmarks. Galeon knew to load the regular bookmark version of a page if there were no parameters passed to make it smart. Firefox? Not so much.

Firefox3. It works. But in some areas I am now changing my usage to accomodate deficiencies which were solved years ago in other browsers. I’m not really complaining mind you – on balance ff3 wins more than it loses, and it is a net gain. I would not have switched otherwise…

STOP PRESS: thanks to http://www.feelfirefox.net/blog/firefox-3-features-you-probably-dont-know/

…turns out some of my testing was biased by Galeon usage; so whilst these are not obvious within the UI (indicative of poor design?), they are at least possible!

• Cloning tabs – hold control when dragging the tab to clone it to any location
  
• Moving tabs between window – aim for the tab bar. This can be mixed with holding control to clone a tab to a new window
• Viewing image in new tab – hold control when managing context menu and selecting ‘view image’. Use ‘shift’ to get it in a new window.

this edit: 2008July09 09:52am