After purchasing a glorious new Nikon D40X Digital SLR Camera online today, I was inspired to fix up a couple images.
So, I was trying to get rid of the obvious flaw in the following picture, and I found a pretty easy way to do it with GIMP.
So, you have your Jailbroken iPod Touch or iPhone with 2.0 firmware running OpenSSH, and you have MxTube 1.5 or better, of course. What if you want one of those pesky videos that YouTube deletes all the time, like Paris Hilton For President? Or maybe you want a full movie on your iPod without having to sync to iTunes since you’re stuck in Linux Land. Well, here’s how:
This can be done lots of ways, but somehow obtain a version of the video that ffmpeg can read. It can be just about any format. Let’s assume that we get a file called paris.flv.
ffmpeg -i paris.flv -b 500000 -s 176x144 -ac 1 -ab 64000 paris-high.mp4
This will make a nice movie for us to play. Let’s put it on the iPod:
scp paris-high.mp4 root@ipod:/var/mobile/Media/MxTube/
We need to grab a frame from the middle of the movie. Let’s use mplayer for that!
mplayer -vo jpeg -frames 1 -ss 30 paris.flv
This will make a file called 00000001.jpg. Let’s put that in the right spot:
scp 00000001.jpg root@ipod:/var/mobile/Media/MxTube/paris.thm
Edit /var/mobile/Library/MxTube/VideoLibrary.plist on the iPod. Make a new dict entry in the list like so:
<dict>
<key>author</key>
<string>hank</string>
<key>duration</key>
<string>01:50</string>
<key>high</key>
<string>/var/mobile/Media/MxTube/paris-high.mp4</string>
<key>id</key>
<string>64ad536a6dQ</string>
<key>thumbnail</key>
<string>/var/mobile/Media/MxTube/paris.thm</string>
<key>title</key>
<string>Paris for President</string>
</dict>
Just fill in the right filenames for the thumbnail and movie like you used above. Also, change the author to yourself or the original director, and the duration accordingly. Keep the id something random. Also, you can change the display title as the last option there.
Keep in mind that if you want to be able to delete the movie from the interface, you need to change the ownership on all the files to mobile:mobile using chown.
Well, it totally works, with sound even.
Good luck!
I wanted to put images on my iPod Touch without using iTunes since, as most of us know, there is no good way to use it from Linux. It turns out there is a magic directory on the iPod Touch where it saves images from Safari. I simply looked at how it saved them, and applied it on my box here at home.
convert and mogrify from ImageMagick installedAll of your images must be in the format IMG_XXXX.YYY where XXXX is a number < 9999, and YYY is either JPG or THM (THM is a thumbnail). To rename our files, I use a simple trick I outlined in my last post:
EII=4; for i in *.jpg; do ls $i; \
NEWNAME=IMG_00`printf "%02d" $EII`.JPG; \
echo Renaming $i to $NEWNAME; \
mv $i $NEWNAME; EII=`expr $EII + 1`; done
That will rename all the JPEG files in order from 4 to, in my case, 62. Now, I have to make the thumbnails:
for i in `ls *.JPG | cut -d '.' -f 1`; do \
convert $i.JPG -resize 75x75! $i.THM; \
done
The 75×75! part makes sure they are exactly those dimensions. You end up with something like the following:
IMG_0004.JPG IMG_0016.JPG IMG_0028.JPG IMG_0040.JPG IMG_0052.JPG
IMG_0004.THM IMG_0016.THM IMG_0028.THM IMG_0040.THM IMG_0052.THM
IMG_0005.JPG IMG_0017.JPG IMG_0029.JPG IMG_0041.JPG IMG_0053.JPG
....
Now, note that the iPod can only display images under 100KB (to my knowledge). If your high-res image is too large, it will just display the magnified 75×75, which is really ugly. So, make sure all your images fit that description, and if they don’t, mogrify -resize them until they do (or take other measures as necessary). I used this:
mogrify -resize 400x *.JPG
All my images turned out to be between 30 and 90 KB. This also keeps the aspect ratio, unlike the 75×75!.
Now, SSH into your iPod (if you can’t do this yet, google it). You should have the following file:
/var/mobile/Media/DCIM/.MISC/Info.plist
Open this file in vi, and observe the plist>dict>integer part of the hierarchy:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>LastFileGroupNumber-100</key>
<integer>62</integer>
</dict>
</plist>
So, I put 62 in there since the last image I have is numbered 0062. It’s a very simple idea. Now, just load them onto the iPod:
scp IMG_00* root@ipod:/var/mobile/Media/DCIM/100APPLE/
Let’s have a look from the iPod console!
HanksTouch:/var/mobile/Media/DCIM/100APPLE root# ls
IMG_0002.JPG IMG_0014.THM IMG_0027.JPG IMG_0039.THM IMG_0052.JPG
IMG_0002.THM IMG_0015.JPG IMG_0027.THM IMG_0040.JPG IMG_0052.THM
Beautiful. Now, to test it…
I wanted to speed up package downloading to set up my apt-proxy today in Gutsy, so I decided to find the correct way to find the fastest Ubuntu mirror. It’s actually done like so (stolen from here):
This automatically updates the /etc/apt/sources.lst file. The same utility can also be reached from the Synaptic Package Manager, through “Settings | Repositories”.
In action:
It says mirrors.rit.edu is the best one for me. Makes sense.
Ziya is pretty cool, and the documentation is slowly starting to surface. I was annoyed that I couldn’t find a good example paste of how to make a line chart. Then I watched the screencast. It’s the first example he does, so I’m posting it here so those who can’t watch it can actually find out how to do it.
I’m going to operate on the precondition that you’ve installed Ziya and included it in your controller properly. Do the bar chart example before going any further.
Now, make this function in your controller:
def refresh_chart
chart = ZIya::Charts::Line.new
render :text => chart
end
Notice that I can do a -g for a progess bar! Yay! Now for an action shot:
hank@rofl:~/tmp/coreutils-6.7$ cp -g coreutils_6.7-1_i386.deb /nexus/mod0/www/deb/binary/
coreutils_6.7-1_i386.deb | 48% | 3.2 MiB | 118 KiB/s | ETA
Most people will want this. Add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list at the bottom:
# Hankzilla
deb http://modzer0.cs.uaf.edu/~hardwarehank/deb binary/
Then run a sudo apt-get update. Then install it with sudo apt-get install wxwaste. Run it with waste.
# Checkinstall is optional, but it makes it nice since removal is just thru apt.
sudo apt-get install wx-common libwxgtk2.6-dev wx2.6-headers checkinstall
./configure && make && sudo checkinstall
# Put this in /usr/share/applications/waste.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Version=1.5b4
Name=WASTE
GenericName=Secure Filesharing
Comment=Facilitates encrypted filesharing between trusted clients
Icon=gnome-term-linux.png
TryExec=waste
Exec=waste
Terminal=false
Categories=GNOME;Application;Network;
So, last month sometime, BrainSlayer got DD-WRT working on version 8 of the WRT54G. Now this was great news to me when I read it since I’ve been wanting to get rid of the crappy LinkSys management from the beginning. Some of the procedure worked, and some of it didn’t for me.
So, earlier this year, I decided it would be cool to mirror Wikipedia. So, I successfully set up a local copy on my system, and it’s been just sitting there ever since. But lately, I’ve been interested in fulltext indexing offered by various indexing engines, and Sphinx has looked especially tasty. So, I figured I’d sit down and try it today.
I pointed it at my 16GB of Wikipedia text in my MySQL database.
I got mad at gnome-terminal today. It wasn’t opening links. So, as usual, GNOME hid the setting away somewhere completely insane.
.gconf/desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http
Why isn’t there just a .gnome-terminalrc? How hard would that be?
