strange symphonies

Nokie e61i - Fullscreen Wallpapers, Video, s60 Development

So continuing my series on the Nokia e61i.

Fullscreen Wallpaper

For some strange reason, if you take an image, resize it to the max resolution of the phone (320×240), and decide to use it as a wallpaper. It’s not fullscreen. This is because the status bars on the top and bottom block the way, and the image is squeezed between these leaving a gap on the left and right side. Very bad?

Example: The Good and Bad Wallpapers

Note: Notice the blank space on the left and right?
Disclaimer: Yes I also censored something…

After a bit of googling, I found the solution. Resize and crop to 320×198. Then it fits. So now I have the nice Dawn of Ubuntu wallpaper on my phone. You can grab my already cropped wallpaper if you are interested.

BTW: No I’m not going to stick a Ubuntu sticker on the phone, neither a GNU sticker. Though I have some Firefox stickers though…but nah… I might stick this though…

Mobile Code

Mobile Code is a way to encode information into a 2d image barcode, and decode it again.
Note: Notice the link is an IP address and not a domain? Why?

The image there supposedly stands for ‘http://aizatto.com’.

But in the list of mobile code readers only 2 are freeware applications Kaywa and UpCode.

Sadly Kaywa doesn’t support the e61i, and UpCode tries to connect to the internet via Maxis 3G, when a perfectly good Wirelees network is set up. Similarly I don’t have Maxis 3G service.

Video playback

So now I also have mini video player with me wherever I go. Awesomeness. But alot of my files are way to big in both file size and resolution for this tiny machine. Now I’m not underestimating the power of Nokia e61i but, it’s best to optimize things.

So I set my flags for ffmpeg, transferred the file. But no luck.

Thank goodness someone has covered converting videos via ffmpeg to be playable in RealPlayer.

ffmpeg -i movie.avi -f mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 -s 320x180 -acodec aac -ar 48000 -ab 128 -ac 2 movie.mp4

Note: You may want to be careful of the size (-s flag) of the output film, so that it doesn’t look stretched.
Not sure what those flags are? Tip: man ffmpeg
Note: Ubuntu will blow up on you because of the codecs. There are suggestions out there though, so just look for em. I initially did this on my OpenSUSE box, so I didn’t even notice…

Example: the love bug by m-flo featuring BoA. That hotty is BoA

Example: Creative Commons - Reticulum Rex

ODF Support

Thanks to the comment on my blog by Oscar B, there seems to be another alternative to ODF support on the s60. Though it looks a bit outdated (1st June 2006). Similarly its only quite basic.

Collecting Links

For all of these stuffs, I googled most of them. So I’ve been collecting links and storing them in del.icio.us using the s60 tag.

There is so much Freeware/shareware

There is so much Freeware/Shareware out there for s60, but how about Free and Open Source Software?

Guess the only way to solve that is to put my words into action…

s60 Development

Kudos to mypapit for advice on doing s60 development.

I have a growing list of ideas of what software to develop in (hopefully) the near future.
Possible software to develop:

• Better calendar, with tagging/folksonomy support
• ODT viewer - help adoption of ODT in Malaysia and learn the technical details of the fomrat
• FOSS video player
• Remote keyboard - I want to contorl my Linux machine!

Any suggestions? List them down!

If you have freeware alternative to these now? Please suggest some, especially for the remote keyboard. I’d love to give presentations using my phone so I don’t have to keep going back to the laptop.

Stupid Problems

So here is a list of stupid problems I’ve encountered. I’ve already checked if I am running the latest software/firmware. Yes I have.

• Audio recording is only for 1minute
• Where is the FOSS
• Mobile Code isn’t working as well as I hoped it would