tigert.com | my life and stuff um, what do I write here?

eek

I built my first ARM binary debian package today. Whee... It was a nasty hax0red version of the osso-terminal that used bitstream vera mono font (which I had to copy to /home/user/.fonts to make it available) and used green text over black - nice retro colour scheme ) - but it showed me my scratchbox cross compile system is now correctly set up and things work..
This kind of wannabe-l33th4x0rism might sound a bit strange for a user interface person and a graphics artist -- but I am convinced that knowing enough techie stuff when designing UI does indeed help. It's teamwork anyway, and having at least a bit of common language with developers does help wonders.

Weekend feels very good now that I work in a real office again.. Phew. It does make it easier to balance between work and free time. I find the "non-work-mode" easier to find now that I physically travel to and from work.

Random Thoughts again..

The Thinkpad X40 is no longer my WinXP email and calendar computer, but has ubuntu now. Nice. The T41 was sentenced to de*cough* enterprise groupware use as it has less memory and is slower. And the X40 is a lot nicer to carry around in my bag..

So hey. I want to write a tutorial on how to port an existing Gtk application to Maemo, from the user interface perspective, as I think we don't quite have that yet. I was thinking of something simple like Leafpad maybe? (Of course there's the included text editor in the 770 already) - another idea would be to port the gPodder podcast aggregator, as it is using python-gtk already and we apparently have python bindings.
Yet another idea would be to take a commandline tool, like castget, and do a nice schoolbook example of how to give it an user interface with gazpacho.. not sure yet. But something like that would be nice. Other ideas?

Why? Because I need to learn how the user interface design process works inside the company, and I want to help the community to be more "in line" with the styleguides and such people have internally. In other words, to make free software that works better in the handheld and hopefully continue the work we started in betterdesktop.org - to see if we can work on user interfaces in the open source community. It'll be interesting to see if that works out, and if so, how it will look like in practice.

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Video Encoding for the Nokia 770

I wanted to know how to optimize videos for watching them on the 770, and found a nice page on the Maemo Wiki that lists several examples. There's a nice purposedly made converter for this exact task (that I didn't try myself) and also two examples for using mencoder from Mplayer project.

Of course, now I want a huge MMC card.. argh It'd be nice to fetch the Finnish morning TV news and watch them in the train, for example..