Michael Sheldon's Stuff

For the past few months I’ve been working on the Libre.fm music service. It provides Last.fm compatible APIs, allowing you to submit your listening habits and to stream creative commons music.

Over the past week I’ve put together an Android application called Libre Droid, allowing people to stream music from libre.fm directly to their Android mobile phones. Here’s a short video of it in action:

It’s now available for download (for free) from the Android marketplace, scan the image below with your phone (or click it in your phone’s browser) to download it:

Alternatively if you don’t have access to the marketplace (e.g. if you’re using Android on an unofficial platform like the OpenMoko phones) you can download the package directly from: http://mikeasoft.com/~mike/libredroid.apk

A Not-So-Secret Project

With Jokosher 0.11.1 on the verge of release I think it’s time that I made my not-so-secret project slightly more public. For the past few months I’ve been slaving away to bring Jokosher to the poor unfortunate souls who, for whatever reason, are still stuck using Windows. That task is now for the most part complete, as this pretty screenshot will attest:

Testers Wanted

Jokosher’s 0.11.2 release will feature an easy to install Windows package, however I’m making a release candidate available now in the hopes that any major bugs can be discovered before the main public release. So if you have a Windows machine handy and feel like having a fiddle with Jokosher just download the installer package below. Everything you need is included in that one package, so installing it should be no different than installing any other Windows application. Then if you find any bugs please report them in the Jokosher bug tracker.

• Download Jokosher 0.11rc4 Windows Installer
• File a bug

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.

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-r7+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) .

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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 .