Like everyone else, I am totally stoked about the new Nokia 770. The hardware looks sweet, but the fact that it is coupled with a sane open development platform just makes it ridiculously attractive. Especially considering it’s based on a platform we all know relatively well :)

The screenshots look really great. One thing I wonder about, though, is how well the included apps deal with an unreliable network. I mean, if I stroll out of range from my wifi, will all kinds of errors and stuff show up, or will it deal gracefully? The development site mentions some things about getting events like “low battery” over dbus. Hopefully “network is down” is the same kind of thing, and apps can just go into offline mode or whatever.

It would be really fabulous to get mono running on this thing. I wonder if something like a “compact edition” of it would be needed.

Martin Palma has gone to the work of packaging muine-ipod and ipod-sharp for Ubuntu hoary. You can get them here.

Work progresses. I’ve still been getting used to bazaar, which I’m using for version control. Overall I really like it. I want to start learning some of the more advanced features, though.

The latest muine-ipod snapshot has support for optionally syncing only the current playlist to the iPod. I’ve been told this works pretty well for shuffle users. I still think we need some way to individually mark songs in the library for syncing (similar to what iTunes does I think?). iPod Mini users would especially benefit from this, since they probably can’t sync their entire library — and composing a playlist would just be a bit ridiculous (6gb of music in a playlist!).

Also, I sent a patch to muine-list this week that added a plugin for inotify support. It simply monitors the directories you’ve added to muine, and if something gets added/removed/changed it takes the appropriate action on the song library. I’ve wanted this kind of behavior in a music player for years, and now that inotify has come along it’s finally possible. I’ve been using rml’s inotify kernel for SuSE 9.3, and it’s working quite well. You can get the patch + plugin here.

A while ago I started working on a plugin for Muine that syncs your library with an iPod. I worked on it a bit more lately and it seems to be coming along, so I’m trying to get people to test it. You need this and this, to start.

Right now there is no HAL integration, as I’m having an incredibly difficult time figuring out the correct way to integrate with that stuff. What it will do, however, is mount/umount your iPod assuming it is setup correctly in fstab (correct device, ‘user’ option, etc). It defaults to /media/ipod for the mount point, but that is configurable through a gconf key (/apps/muine/ipod/mount_path).

I’ve been using it for the last few days with no serious problems. I do suggest you backup your iTunesDB file before giving it a shot, though, as corrupting that is the worst thing that can happen. You can find it at /media/ipod/iPod_Control/iTunes/iTunesDB. If you encounter problems, feel free to email me.

Update: You will need muine 0.8.3 or greater to use this plugin, as previous versions lack the necessary interface.

Another Update: I’ve checked ipod-sharp and muine-ipod into arch at http://www.snorp.net/bazaar.

A volunteer has packaged rcd/rug for fc3, and I have put the rpms here. Enjoy.

I didn’t want to be left out.

I just committed ipod-sharp to CVS, a library for manipulating iTunesDBs. It’s written entirely in C#. Currently you can use it to add/remove songs, and manipulate any existing playlists. There is also a cheesy little tool that lists the songs/playlists in a given iTunesDB.

I mostly wrote it to add iPod syncing to Muine. I have a patch which does this, but it needs a lot of work still. I haven’t yet totally worked out how the HAL integration will happen, for instance. For starters, I patched gnome-volume-manager to mount the appropriate partition when it sees an iPod and invoke ‘muine —ipod-sync ’. But that doesn’t cover unmounting. Also apparently you need to ‘eject’ the device for the iPod to put up the happy “ok to disconnect” screen.

You can get the code from the ‘ipod-sharp’ module in gnome CVS, or here. Hopefully I’ll get the Muine patch in a useable state soon.

From the beatiful sights of Milford Sound we went to the Circus Town, err Queenstown. It's packed with rollercoaster attractions like speedboats, bungee, tandem skydiving etc. But since I'm not much of an adrenalin person, we did the jetboat thing and continued north west, to the glaciers. We chose to climb the Fox glacier simply because it was cheaper, but visited Franz Josef the next day too.

From there we continued north to Punakaiki. I managed to get a few shots of a kiwi-like bird which turned out to be the weka. Even when the weather is playing games with you, New Zealand is really marvelous for giving you a number of fantastic scenic views. That place is simply heaven for nature photographers.

The farm we stayed at was really close to the nice Purakaunui falls. Met some photographers there and they obviously didn't think much of my "why carry a tripod when I can just stick the cam on a railing, eh?". The method works really well for the lazy bastards like myself though. Especially when I saw a poor fella carry around a big camera bag on the Tongariro crossing track. Yuck.

We visited a few places on the way, like the McLeans falls which I found more appealing than Purakanui which were listed as the most photographed one on the south island. Them tourist guides. The wind almost blew us away at the fossil forest at Curior Bay. It's not much exciting on the photos though. We stayed overnight in Te Anau, preparing for what became one of the highlights of our trip - Milford Sound.

Everybody was telling us we should expect a rain, since it almost always rains at Milford Sound. Well I guess we were lucky, since we had a lovely day from the early morning. The trip there alone was miraculous and we had to make a stop every few minutes. You'll be driving the same road back so you can stop at places you missed ;).

The boat trip was quite nice, but I enjoyed the time on the land more. We regret we didn't go on the 3 day track, but it's a weather gamble.

From Oamaru we went to Catlins park area, which we didn't plan initially, but turned out to be one of the nicest places we visited in New Zealand.

On the way, at a place they call Nugget Point, we met two blokes who were enjoying themselves driving two very fast radio controlled cars on the beach. I enjoyed shooting a lot pictures there. Some turned out quite nice, but the fun framing those fast beasts was even more fun than the result. I'm sure they had fun driving them too :)

When we saw a few seals at Nugget Point we thought we saw something. Later we managed to get a few feet from big sea lions at Surat Bay and later at Abel Tasman kayak close to the seals and have dolphins swim around us. Stuff like that happens in NZ about as commonly as cars get stolen in CZ.

Since it's about 5000 pictures and 13.3GB to go through, I'll be posting my New Zealand images in batches. This first batch covers the first three days of the trip with a single shot from the 38 hour flight ;). Czech republic is almost exactly on the other side of the globe and we had a lot of waiting between the flights (PRG>AMS>KUL>AUC>CHR).

We arrived in Christchurch after waiting for the last plane in Auckland. We totally looked like zombies there. I managed to leave all contact info for Glynn at home, so we wandered around Christchurch on our own. NZ towns look way more american than anything else I've seen. Wide roads, everything orthogonal. That's quite a contrast to the roads out in the open, where it's not uncommon for it to become dirt roads and back to "state highway" again. The highway only has one lane per direction though. And most of the bridges merge into one lane in both directions. Oh and we even went on a bridge that shared the line with a train. Very funky.

Of course driving on the wrong side of the road got me a honk honk at the very first crossing in Christchurch ;). I got used to it later on (driving on left, not the honking), but at one point we stopped at a nice place to make some pictures and when we got back on the road I said to Iva that it wasn't the safest place to park. And she replied with "Shouldn't you be driving left?". At the second I got back to the right lane a speeding toyota truck went past us just when we were going out of that curve. One second. Phew.

The weather in New Zealand was changing day to day, and later on even minute to minute. Overall it wasn't too bad, although the kiwis said this summer was very cold. I found it funny when a complete stranger approached us in New Plymouth, asked about where we come from and apologised for the weather ;) The people in NZ are the firendliest I've ever met.

We had some snow around lake Tekapo, yet the next day we got sunburnt on the Hooker valley track near Mt Coook village. It doesn't take long for a european to get burnt even when you try to avoid it.