I never got around to blogging about this when it happened, but here goes; When I first got my new computer, the power-supply exploded (literally), shooting flames, sparks and loud, angry noises at everything in its immediate proximity, taking two fuses and a sizable portion of my nerves with it. Unfortunately, this was after I had hooked everything up, and it gradually became clear that the motherboard (or CPU or RAM, I didn’t know for sure) had sustained some damage.

The symptoms were fairly perculiar; whenever there was a lot of sustained traffic on the machine, either disk I/O or a lot of video card activity, the machine would spontaneously reboot. (A short side note; backing up your system is a great source of a lot of disk activity. Great time for a crash, eh? No? Bingo.)

Anyway, yesterday I finally got my replacement motherboard, and it has been performing nicely so far. Due to the strange nature of the errors I’ve been seeing I’m not regarding myself 100% safe yet, but things are looking good so far. Whee. =)

Audioscrobbler and last.fm have been a couple for a while, but recently they both got a huge makeover and were merged into the awesome new last.fm.

One minor irk, though, was the fact that you now need to use a separate player to listen to the radio. They have their reasons for doing this, and it’s not a huge problem, since their player is released with full source, under a free software license. However, it’s not a secret that it’s lacking some functionality which more mature players have.

This is why I wrote LastFMProxy. It’s basically proxy, acting like a player, but instead of playing, it simply relays the stream to your player of choice. Problem solved.

The idea isn’t entirely new, though. The last.fm staff have been thinking about the very same thing, and the plan is not dismissed yet, so at some point the official player might carry the same proxy functionality. But for now, this is the route for those who want to cling on to their old player.

This post is a bit belated, but hey, it’s not like anyone but me is reading this, is it?

Anyway, since my recently acquired gadget with telephonious capabilities has bluetooth support, I swiftly ran off to my local geekstore, Clas Ohlson, and picked up a Bluetooth dongle. I went with a
Billionton one, which happened to work very well, and it has a reasonable range (it says 10m, but it works nicely from one end of the house to the other, so I’m happy).

It turned out, though, that the hardware aspect was the least of my worries. I went on to try gnome-bluetooth, which didn’t seem to want to cooperate with my system at all, apparently being written for an earlier PyGTK version than what I have installed. I tried fixing the obvious API changes, but it still made GTK scream for mercy, so I gave up. (gnome-obex-send and gnome-obex-server worked well, though, so at least I can push files from either end to the other.)

Still wanting more I went on to try obexftp and obexfs, neither of which could do more than spot the address of my gadget. Bah. But finally, feeling adventurous, I installed some KDE bits and pieces, as well as kdebluetooth, which provides an OBEX method to konqueror. Lo and behold, it worked! Now I can browse all my phones public files by simply going to obex://[00:0f:de:a7:21:89]:7/. Nice and handy.

But to be honest, I can’t say I’m using the latter much. For daily things, like downloading the odd ring tone or theme, or uploading some pics and video snippets, gnome-obex-send and -server do their jobs very nicely, from the command line. Once a keyboarder, always a keyboarder, I guess.

The last few days have been spent scratching my head over the “mmf” files that Linda’s phone (a Samsung X640) seems to be so fond of. They’re ring tone files in Yamaha SMAF format, which you apparently have to sell your soul to get the specs to.

Specs or not, with a little bit of reverse engineering, I managed to concoct a small utility to convert to and from (some of) these SMAF files. Take a look at mmftool.

One of my more dubious stunts in a while;
Flashing my Samsung TS-542A DVD-burner
under Transgaming Cedega.
Silly Samsung thinks everybody is running Windows.
Unfortunately, Cedega isn’t quite free software
either, but at least it runs under Linux.
(And no, I don’t have Windows in my house, and no,
I certainly don’t plan to get it.)
(Plain Wine, which is free, might
have worked too, but I didn’t get around to testing it. And I
don’t want to push my luck, to be honest.)

(There was one minor problem, though. According to the
upgrading instructions, the flasher application has
three buttons in the top left of the window;
one to select a firmware file, one to start flashing, and one
“About”-button. Neither of these buttons showed up while running
under Cedega, but they were easily located by clicking randomly in
the target area.)

The reason was that I recently bought some cheap DVDRs
at Lidl, which my drive promptly spat out, coughing
and wheezing. So I flashed it. It didn’t help.
Oh well. The firmware is up-to-date, if nothing else.

So, now you know it can be done.