Published in
Gadgets, Linux, Mobile, Nokia, Technology
TrollTech announced an ‘open’ phone, called the Greenphone. It runs Linux (QTopia Phone Edition specifically)
It is a full-featured GPRS/GSM phone:
- dual-core 312MHz XScale processor
- 64MB Ram, and a mini-SD flash slot
- 1.3 megapixel camera
- Bluetooth
- WiFi networking
Looking at the success Nokia has had with exposing various developer interfaces to their mobile phones and N770 tablet (Maemo), I think there is a huge market for an “openphone”. When I first heard of the O’Reilly Telephony Conference, I pictured people sitting around with their antiquated telephones, talking about switchboards and the like. I guess it’s a lot cooler scene than that.
Additionally, hopefully Open-hardware like mobile phones and tablets will kick the closed-minded carriers into realizing they’re slowly strangling themselves by keeping everything closed and begin to work with the huge, untapped, hobbyist and developer community.
Published in
Apple, Dashboard, Linux
KDE, a desktop environment for Linux will support the HTML Canvas element in the next release (KDE 4). What does this mean to you, the user? The KDE Team’s goal is to run Apple Dashboard Widgets on Linux!
Widgets themselves are nothing special. Having developed one and dug through, modified, and working on more, they are just a collection of HTML and Javascript that happens to show up very nicely in a big dynamic webpage called Dashboard
This will be nice since currently only KonfabulatorYahoo! Widgets are cross-platform.
Published in
Gadgets, Linux, Mobile, Programming, Python, Technology
There is the old question: “Yeah, but does it run Linux?” which has been applied to many devices over the years (XBox, iPod, iPaq, Juicebox, XBox360, and best of all, a dead badger). It’s so common that I would think device manufacturers can have betting pools on how long it will take for their device to be sporting the Penguin.
The new black of installing linux appears to be: “Yeah, but does it run Python?”
To see a small offering of devices that now offer a Python interpreter, check out
Python for mobile devices. These include:
The most suprising, to me, was the fact that apparently Microsoft Windows not supports scripting via Python! The Microsoft Python Script Repository offers instructions, scripts, and resources. O’Reilly’s Python Cookbook also has a number of scripts for setting the startup items, starting and stopping services, and controlling Outlook.
Published in
Geolocation, Linux, Programming
Exiftool is a very easy to use, complete, command-line interface to image EXIF data. It also (and especially) works with GPS data and tiff files.
For instance, to view the filename, size and latitude of an image:
exiftool -filename -imagesize -gps:GPSLatitude IMGP0737.tif
To set the new latitude of an image:
exiftool -gps:GPSLatitude=”52 deg 47′ 22.5894″ IMGP0737.tif
I read the Exif 2.2 spec (ya know, light reading), and realized that I was formatting the GPS info tag incorrectly. Exiftool formats the correct version to look pretty (and as above). However, the official spec states that the latitude and longitude info should be dd,mm,ss or dd,mmmm and then the North/South and East/West specified in the GPSLatitudeRef and GPSLongitudeRef as N/S, or E/W. Therefore, the correct format is:
exiftool -GPSMapDatum="WGS-84" -gps:GPSLatitude="34,57,57" -gps:GPSLatitudeRef="N" -gps:GPSLongitude="83,17,59" -gps:GPSLongitudeRef="W" -gps:GPSAltitudeRef="0" -GPSAltitude=1426 -gps:GPSMeasureMode=2 -City="RabunBald" -State="North Carolina" -Country="USA" ~/Desktop/RabunBaldSummit_NC.jpg
It is a full-featured GPRS/GSM phone:
My name is 