New phone, new toys 
Just got a new Verizon RAZR V3M phone and being how I am I have to see what I can do with it. The is no Java on this so I’m pretty much stuck with BREW which means I’ll have to buy apps off of Verizon’s service. Bummer since there is a lot of good Java apps for this phone available. Verizon has done a lot of things to make the phone as non-customizable as possible, less for them to worry about with support (curse the world of idiots!). Even the GUI is pretty static, there are 3 options by default and the differences is that it almost changes the colors…you really need to look to see a difference.
MP3 support is there in a half-ass way and the only way to get audio on it for playback is to sync it through Windows Media Player (10 or higher) which will then convert them into wma’s…why waste our time with having to convert these things? Of course this means I’ve only been able to do that when running Windows, which is about 5 minutes every 3 months or so (I have to use my aging laptop or wife’s computer to put music on). Ringtones are even tougher to get on the phone, I’ve found the best way is to email it as an attachment from gmail. I’ve used wav and mid files, I think mp3 will work for ringtones also.
Videos was the fun part, since I mainly use Linux and didn’t want to rely on Windows apps like eRightSoft’s Super which did a great job converting videos into 3GP format which the phone uses, I’ve dug around, found and tested various ffmpeg options and think I’ve found the ideal combination.
audio sampling frequency = 8000
number of audio channels = 1
audio codec = amr_nb
video codec = h263
frame size = 176×144
frame rate = 14.985
video bitrate = 190k
audio bitrate = 32
force format = 3gp
[code] ffmpeg -i {input_file} -s 176×144 -r 14.985 -b 190k -acodec amr_nb -ac 1 -ar 8000 -ab 32 -f {output_name}.3gp[/code]
With this I’ve been able to record an episode of South Park from a 175M avi to a 32M 3gp which plays back very nicely on the RAZR. The final file can be made smaller by tweaking the video bitrate (-b), changing it to 140k results in a 25M at lower video quality. With a bitrate of 190k the quality is good enough to read text so you can play around with that setting depending on what you want.
Getting the video to the phone is the tough part because yet again Verizon limits you with this wanting you to get videos from them with their fees. Even though the phone connects to a PC with a standard USB cable it is not file system friendly and is tricky to do even with Windows. What I find that works good is I got a 1GB MicroSD card ($14 after shipping from NewEgg.com ;)) and formated the card with the phone. After that using a card reader you can find and add files there. Videos need to be put at the root of the card before any of the directories. Then they can be played from the “My FLIX” in the “Get PIX & FLIX” menu
, and at about 32MB for 22 minutes that’s a lot of South Park 
I just stumbled on this today and it caught my attention because I almost bought one this year, but didn’t see any Linux support anytime soon. So it looks like December 1st 2006 LaCie released the tools to use this in Linux. It’s released under a limited license (non-GPL, closed source) but is freely distributed since it will only work on LightScribe devices.
It is available in RPM format but if you use Ubuntu you can use Automatix2 to install it.
LaCie LightScribe Labeler for Linux
LightScribe requires special discs to create the label, which cost more then normal CD-R’s, but now I wish I got the LightScribe drive…and read http://freshmeat.net daily so I can catch these things on the same day
I recently decided to try running Beryl (an offshoot of AiGLX which is an offshoot of XGL) and found 2 good guides thanks to some quick searches on the Ubuntu forums.
The Radeon Driver howto is excellent and works very well with the older Radeon 9000m card in my laptop. This got the Direct Rendering working using the open source ATI drivers.
The Edgy AiGLX - Beryl guide finished it up nicely leaving me with a simple desktop with lots of funky effect to serve no purpose other then to look good. 
I would not suggest running OpenGL games while running AiGLX since there is still major performance problems as the AiGLX uses up most of the Direct Rendering leaving little left for games. So if you are not running any games it’s a great desktop and if you do decide to fire up Quake4, UT2003 or Postal 2 be sure to log off and log on with another session that doesn’t use the AiGLX
This morning Sun made a suprise move and announced that their well gaurded and loved Java source code will be fully available by March 2007. They are releasing it under the GPLv2 license which makes it on par with the Linux Kernel.
The discussions on this are already speculating what this means, is it the death throw of a dieing company, are they desperate to fight for the ground that Microsoft has been fighting against them? I cansee this being a great move as now many Linux distributions can include it on the install media without making you jump through hoops worrying about licensing.
I’ll update with discussion links as I find them, but Slashdot is a good place as any to start with
Slashdot.org
It looks like the couple of Grub splash images I posted are attracting the most attention here (at this time ubuntu grub splash is ranking me the #1 hit…creepy since it’s just two simple images :)), so let us carry on with this theme and post up the instructions on how to make your own! You can find more detailed instructions on the GNU GRUB splashimage howto
We will use The Gimp for this example since it does an excellent job and is free so if you don’t have it all you need is time and bandwidth to get it!
- Make a new image that is 640×480, use the template to make it simple
- Do all the editing and whatnot until you have an image you wish to use, keep in mind that less then 16 colors will be in the finished product so don’t bother getting overly detailed
- Reduce image quallity to 14 colors through the image menu, Image -> Mode -> Indexed… and change the Maximum number of colors to 14 and click OK. If the image had a lot of detail with colors this is where it matters, if the image looks good lets save it as an XPM file with File -> Save as… and change the name so it ends with a .xpm (The Gimp defaults to save as the extension type) and gzip it up, this shouldn’t be required but some versions of Grub will only be able to use .xpm.gz images.
gzip newimage.xpm
and this line will compress it and add the .gz to the file.
3a. An alternate way is to us image-magick from a terminal with a quick one liner for the whole processes
convert -depth 14 -resize 640x480 image.jpg newimage.xpm & & gzip newimage.xpm
- We are nearly done! Save final gzipped image to /boot/grub and edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst (or grub.conf) to use the image, the (hd) should be the same as your kernel
splashimage=(hd1,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
Reboot and you should see your lovely image for the Grub menu, if not you did something wrong :p make sure the image is 640×480 and 14 colors and that the grub line entry is correct.
Guess I got a little carried away there…basicly, 640×480 14 color .xpm gziped image is all you need
Grub Colors
As a bonus you can change the colors of the menu to better match you image. The two lines you will want to edit/add to the menu.lst/grub.conf are
foreground=
background=
These numbers are in hexidecimal so you can either randomly plug in 6 letters/numbers from 0-9 and a-f, here’s a chart you can use as referance to simplify your life a little with this
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