Sleighing / Ir a trineo

This week we had a visitor on our couch and we decided to do some Slovenian winter sport activities and we got a couple of our sleighs and went to a hill near Ljubljana called Kurenšček. Well here you can see the actual photos, the adventures and misadventures ;)

Snow is FUN!

So we took some pictures, I hope you can find some enjoyment in them as we did in sleighing.

B.

Dublin is grand!

I was lucky enough to be able and take some time away traveling and this time we went to Dublin, Ireland. We spent four days walking around the "town", visiting tourist and some less touristy attractions. Had a taste of Guinness (actually I hat to taste and re-taste it quite a couple of times).

We also went for a "Free walking tour", which was great and so was our guide Rob.

I must say I like the "town" A LOT!
The weather we had was surprisingly nice and the people were extremely nice to us.
I definitely would recommend to visit it.

Here are some photos I took during the visit:

Sony Ericsson W910i and its "special" ways

Yes, special... (as in special needs).


After fiddling around with many (many, many, ...) options of how to make Album Art work in visualization options, I have figured out it supports ID3 v2.3 (and v2.4 but is faulty - read on) tags that can have embedded pictures in them. It supports only image/jpeg type files. After twiddling for quite some time I converted all the tags to version 2.4.0 and UTF-8 encoded them - BIG MISTAKE, the player displays all the artists, albums and song names incorrectly than. The names seem to be split in 2 or more characters - GO SE ;). So I had to convert them all back.




Here is the final coctail of Id3 tags, that does work and display all fields ok:

• ID3 version 2.3.0
• Picture field with image/jpeg type
• ISO-8859-1 (latin-1) encoding

I use Kid3-qt tag editor for most jobs with tagging my audio files.

Another glitch I noticed was that the device did not correctly disconnect when umounting the phone (as a storage device) from the PC. I use Ubuntu as my desktop and what I needed to do was to use eject (or a variation of it) to get proper disconnect - so this is the concoction I brewed to make it work properly:
in ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/ create a file called Eject with the following contents:

MNTPNT=$(echo "$NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS" |tr -d '\n')
gnome-eject --pseudonym "$MNTPNT"

When right clicking on the device icon on your desktop (the storage device that displays either the internal or the storage card of your W910i phone), navigate to Scripts->Eject, now the device should be ejected correctly and the phone will display the message that the storage session is finished.

Well hopefully someone else will stumble upon this post instead of wasting a weekend arranging their music files and discovering the tags have all gone beserk...

PS: The same procedure should work on older/other SE W(alkman) model phones/players.

Ubuntu, VirtualBox and suspend

Hey, I know, long time no write, well, long time no time left...

and allways running around requires me to suspend my laptop a lot, mainly when suspending it with VirtualBox running. Well after resuming the suspend VirtualBox froze most of the times. Killing the program and restarting it did not work, removing the module was impossible, so the only fix was the reboot. Well until smarter thought came ofcourse.

Create an pm script (in Ubuntu go to /etc/pm/sleep.d/) create a newfile named 90virtualbox with the following contents:

#!/bin/sh

USR_RNNG=$(ps aux |grep VirtualBox |grep -v grep |cut -f1 -d' ')
if [ "x$USR_RNNG" != "x" ]; then
    if  [ $(id -u) -eq 0 ]; then
        su $USR_RNNG -c $0
    else
        for VMS in $(VBoxManage list runningvms |egrep "^[0-9]"); do
            VBoxManage controlvm $VMS savestate
        done
    fi
fi
exit 0

Dont forget to make the script executable (chmod +x 90virtualbox).

Well that works for me, now before doing ACPI suspend the virtualbox machines are suspended nicely and afterwards you have to start them again, but they are up in a heartbeat (well 5 seconds in my case).

You can do that either by running VirtualBox gui and starting them or running: VBoxManage start UUID|name_of_virtual_machine

Happy virtualizing...

Vacation in Spain

...we enjoyed very much. The people were great, the sights were excellent, the water was perfect. The pictures... well those you can judge for yourself.

I would recommend it to anyone, but maybe not necessarily by car and maybe you could take a bit longer (we had 3 weeks to enjoy it) lingering in each of the locations.

Spain 2008

Geocoding photos

A couple of posts ago I mentioned I was awaiting an GPS bluetooth gizmo. Well (to the dissapointment of my wifie) it arived. I spent a couple of evenings coding or should I better say recoding two peaces of software (python s60) progs to work as I want them to work and now I have a nicelly working GPS data reader and uploader from Symbian S60 phone with Python and a storage card (the data taken can come up to a couple of MB in size) and an external GPS bluetooth receiver.

• The file is saved with a datetime timestamp, and is internally of NMEA 0183 format.

• After you transfer the file to your computer (either in NMEA or GPX format - I use my uploader script for the second), you can use a peace of software called gpicsync. You could ofcorse use any other software that does the same job, but I am verry satisfied with gpicsync. It also works on Linux, Win, and OS X.
  

• The program asks you to enter the path to the coordinates file (NMEA or GPX formated) and to the directory where the pictures (JPEG format) are kept.

• You can also do some additional tweaking like the UTC time offset, but other than that you are set to go - so click "Synchronise!" and the coordinates are read from the GPS files and the coordinates are writen to the EXIF info in the JPEG files.
• All you have to do now is to upload your pics to a web service that can make use of the coordinates embedded in the images, Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, etc. or you can view the locations in Google Earth application or another app that can read KML files.
  

Here is the web album of some geocoded pics.

And the map of the photo locations.