I wanted to listen to the French radio stations France Inter and Europe1 on my n800 internet tablet but found that I could not launch the players available on their web sites using the browsers, (or, more likely, the Flash plugin), on the n800.

Should anyone else want to do the same and face the same problem, this is how I got around it.

1. The following software packages are required:
osso-xterm
becomeroot
MPlayer

2. Create the following 2 wrapper scripts with your favourite text editor.

#!/bin/sh

mplayer http://vipicecast.yacast.net/europe1

Save it as europe1 in the folder called Documents.

#!/bin/sh

mplayer http://mp3.live.tv-radio.com/franceinter/all/franceinterhautdebit.mp3

Save it as finter in the folder called Documents.

Start xterm and issue the following commands to make the scripts executable and copy them to /usr/bin/

# cd /home/user/MyDocs/.documents/
# chmod +x europe1
# chmod +x finter
# sudo gainroot
# cp europe1 /usr/bin/
# cp finter /usr/bin/

3. Download these 2 images to the folder called Documents.

Then, still in your xterm session, copy them to the correct location.

# cp europe1.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/
# cp fr_inter.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/

4. Create the following 2 desktop files with your favourite text editor.

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=0.0.1
Name=Europe1
Comment=Listen to Europe1 with mplayer
Exec=osso-xterm -e /usr/bin/europe1
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=europe1
X-Icon-path=/usr/share/icons
X-Window-Icon=europe1
X-HildonDesk-ShowInToolbar=true
X-Osso-Type=application/x-executable

Save it as europe1.desktop in the folder called Documents.

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=0.0.1
Name=France Inter
Comment=Listen to France Inter with mplayer
Exec=osso-xterm -e /usr/bin/finter
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=fr_inter
X-Icon-path=/usr/share/icons
X-Window-Icon=fr_inter
X-HildonDesk-ShowInToolbar=true
X-Osso-Type=application/x-executable

Save it as franceinter.desktop in the folder called Documents.

Then, again still in your xterm session, copy them to the correction locations.

# cp europe1.desktop /etc/others-menu/extra_applications/
# cp europe1.desktop /usr/share/applications/hildon/
# cp franceinter.desktop /etc/others-menu/extra_applications/
# cp franceinter.desktop /usr/share/applications/hildon/

They will then be accessible from the Extras menu. A click will launch xterm which will spawn mplayer and load the stream.

Thanks to a very generous donation from Claws Mail user Guido Rudolphi, Colin and I are now owners of the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet. This will enable us to discover just how justified the complaints from the oh-so-demanding n800 users of Claws Mail actually are, and where other improvements can be made.

As the n800 runs GNU/Linux and a modified Debian, using it is fun and easy. I don't have a wi-fi connection, so it's not as much fun as is it might be; I have to download packages on my main PC and then copy them onto the n800 via USB, so it's not quite as easy either. I wanted to upgrade the firmware, as you do when you get a new device such as this, but it was no-go, just forever waiting at "Suitable USB device not found, waiting". I guess that the device-mapping has changed since flasher-3.0 was written, but I'm still not sure. Anyway, this sort of stuff doesn't stand in my way.

Here are a few screenshots (click the image for a larger version)

Claws Mail XTerm desktop

Having one of these devices is a big incentive to actually spend a little more time looking at the maemo bug reports and feature requests, and to spend time contributing to Jean-Luc Biord's Maemo port, but not to the detriment of Claws Mail as a desktop app, that will retain the main focus.

Let the hacking commence!

Claws Mail Maemo port: http://www.claws-mail.org/maemo/
Claws Mail at the Maemo Garage: https://garage.maemo.org/projects/claws-mail
Jean-Luc Biord's page at maemopeople.org: http://www.maemopeople.org/index.php/jlbrd/

	RipperX is a GTK app that rips CD audio tracks and encodes them to the Ogg, MP3, or FLAC formats. It is also my favourite simple ripping tool, but it still uses the ugly GTK1 interface. That was my motivation to write a patch that ports ripperX to GTK2. Patch against current SVN: ripperX-2.7-gtk2_i18n-rev2.patch.gz RipperX source with the patch applied: ripperX-2.7.1-gtk2.tar.bz2 The patch is to be applied against the current code in SVN, but if you don't have all the necessary build tools to build from SVN and want to give it a go I've provided a tarball, made with 'make dist'. What the patch does: GTK2 Implements a GTK2 interface, version 2.6.0 or greater is required. Not all deprecated GTK functions have been replaced. For developer help, I've added the --disable-deprecated configure option, with sets GTK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED. (Since not all are replaced, using that will result in a build failure at present.) i18n Implements the i18n (internationalisation) framework. gettext 0.15 or greater is recommended. The patch includes a British English translation, po/en_GB.po, but this is simply a demonstration, as there's nothing that needs translating into British English. build system autoconf >= 2.60 is required. All the files that will be auto-generated have been removed, such as configure, Makefile.in, etc. There is now no need to have a configure script in each sub directory. I have added autogen.sh, and this should be used to initiate an svn build, configure options can be passed to autogen.sh, as it runs configure. configure.in has been replaced by configure.ac, and configure.ac has all the necessary directives for building. 'make dist' will build both tar.gz and tar.bz2.
UPDATE [14-Jun-2007] Updated both the patch and the tarball. The changes are in configure.ac: the configure script will now refuse to go any further if libid3 cannot be found.
UPDATE [25-Jan-2008] A modified version of this patch is now in ripperX SVN, see this post for more information.

Moving from Thunderbird to Claws Mail is getting easier. Now, in addition to the mailbox conversion script, (tbird2claws.py), we have added a script that converts Thunderbird filtering rules to Claws Mail filtering rules, thunderbird-filters-convertor.pl. So, in next to no time you can start a leaner, meaner email experience.

Component: Sidebar Widgets Plugin, version 1.0.20060711
Patch: SidebarWidgets_no-title-means-no-header_plus_rem-wordpress.com-meta-link.patch
Apply this patch in the /wp-content/plugins/widgets/ directory.
Description: This patch does 2 things:
1. It affects the Text widgets, removing the empty header, (<h2 class="widgettitle">&nbsp;</h2>), that is added to a text widget that has no title. The empty header is an annoyance because it adds an empty space where no space is needed.
2. It affects the Meta widget, removing the link to wordpress.com. The link is unnecessary.

Component: WordPress core, version 2.1
Patch: WordPress-2.1_show_blogroll_descriptions.patch
Apply this patch in the /wp-includes/ directory.
Description: The default behaviour for the blogroll links display in WordPress 2.1, (using the Links widget of Sidebar Widgets Plugin, version 1.0.20060711), is to not show the link descriptions, which is the opposite behaviour of previous versions of WordPress. This patch reverses that, making showing the descriptions the default. It patches the _walk_bookmarks function in the file /wp-includes/bookmark-template.php. (There is no way to change the default behaviour, with or without this patch.)

Of course, don't believe everything you read, especially if you read it in a newsgroup.

The Claws Mail 2.6.1 thread on alt.comp.freeware is full of it. Susan Bugher writes of Claws Mail/Sylpheed-Claws and Sylpheed, "I've been trying to sort out the current situation with these apps", but apparently didn't think of asking anyone on the Claws Mail development team. "It used to be that both Sylpheed and Sylpheed-Claws could be found at: http://sylpheed-claws.sourceforge.net/ …"

The truth is that Sylpheed could never be found at http://sylpheed-claws.sourceforge.net; the Sylpheed tarballs were, for a short while, being mirrored on SF, but they were always hidden and couldn't be viewed on the Files Page. This stopped when Claws Mail and Sylpheed went their separate ways.

"The Claws team seems to have taken over at SF", she continues.

More than that, the Claws team didn't recently take over at SF, but started the whole Sylpheed-Claws thing at SF and were in charge from day one.

"Thanks, Susan, for finding this out", says Jeffrey Needle, funnily enough.

Later in the thread Jeffrey Needle says, "I think they're selling short by not supporting Windows, but that's their choice." The use of stocks and shares terminology is an interesting one, since the whole freeware thing is about free as in free beer, and shows their lack of understanding of or lack of respect for free as in freedom. Free beer is great, but in the morning you find that you're still surrounded by the same old shit, and that hangover doesn't make it any better. Besides, we do our bit to help make things easier for the guys over at the gpg4win project.

Today we changed the name of Sylpheed-Claws to Claws Mail, as we move further from our Sylpheed origin. This will help those people who still mistakenly think that Sylpheed-Claws is the development or bleeding edge version of Sylpheed – which it ceased to be a long, long time ago – and will stop people referring to Claws as 'sylpheed', (which is something that began to bug me more than it should have) – it is even packaged as 'Sylpheed (claws version)' for one distro. There is little that is shared between the two anymore, they don't even share the same license: Sylpheed is (partly) LGPL whereas Claws Mail is, of course, GPL – there's nothing lesser about Claws Mail.

Goodbye Sylpheed-Claws, Hello Claws Mail.

The Sylpheed-Claws meeting took place in Bristol over the 14th and 15th of October, I'd been meaning to blog about it sooner, but I didn't for one reason and another. It was good to finally meet everyone, (not everyone, but Colin, Hoa, Ricardo, and wwp), since we have been engaging in all manner of discussions on IRC over the last few years. Everyone seemed in person like they have seemed on IRC, so there were no surprises.

It wasn't much of a geek meeting, although we did discuss Sylpheed-Claws for some of the time, but was more of a social gathering. We drank cider in the hotel room, (the cider wasn't finished despite me providing the best cider in the world), and then went to a pub in St Nicholas's Market, walking through the throngs of drunken revellers, much to wwp's 'delight'. Also taking in a round of pizzas – wwp's was the one with the pepper! (say 'When'!) Colin walked around with his camera around his neck, but fortunately no-one decided to try to steal it!

The following day we visited the sites, on foot. The distance that we walked was quite a bit further than I had remembered it being, everyone undertook it with a smile but I'm sure I was being secretly cursed for making everyone endure such a distance!

All things considered, I'd have to say that the meeting came to an end too quickly, but, of course, there's always the possibility of another meeting in the future. It was a pleasure to meet you guys.

The latest release of GCstar, version 0.4, the collections manager, has support for importing Borrower information from Sylpheed-Claws' address book. Hopefully a later version will support mailing via Sylpheed-Claws also. Hmmm, perhaps I could find the time to create a patch to do that?