Like I said, you gotta love Nokia for putting Python on the Series-60 phones.

My first mashup was to write an app that continuously pulls pictures from the phone’s camera, and sends them over to a PC for display (thanks Jurgen Scheible for great tutorial). This gives us a lame 1-way video-only ‘call/chat’ from your phone to any PC in the world.

At first I wanted to write a JAVA applet that would display the video stream, but for some reason the Java ServerSocket doesn’t return from ‘accept’, perhaps it’s not listening on the right interface, I got tired of playing with it. Here’s the source for the Java applet if you feel like making it work.

What I did was write something VERY SMALL in Python. It listens for connections, reads the JPG files from them, decodes and shows using PIL.

Here’s what it looks like on the PC:

Requirements:

• A Series-60 Nokia phone with Python on it
• A PC with Python and PIL on it
• This PC needs to have TCP port 9134 open (configure your NAT if necessary)

Download:
That’s about it, here are the two Python scripts
camera_srv.py -> run on the PC first
cam_sender.py -> run this one on the phone

Warning:
The way PIL shows images on windows is by saving aside a copy and opening it with ShellExecute!!! This means that this remains more of a mockup until I or somebody else makes the Java Applet work.

comments/changes/etc are more than welcome, email me.

enjoy

I just got a new phone, the Nokia 6680.
It runs on Symbian.
Somebody compiled Python for it (that somebody being Nokia).

This smells like lots of fun comming up. I just love it when a new programmable device lands on my lap. Especially if it’s small enough to carry around all the time (I’m a fanatic minimalist).

I’m all booked till the begining of April, but I hope to start doing stuff by then.

I can think of a zillion programs, for example synchronizing the Calendar with my 30boxes Calendar (f!@#k SyncML), Auto-Uploading stuff to Flickr, RSS-Readers, Turning it into a web-cam, playing shoutcast radio ?, gosh this doesn’t end.
I’d bet half of these have already been done or at the very least contemplated about.

Any ideas ? requests ? wanna hop on the wagon ? email me

p.s. – this looks like a good place to start

In-Car Trash-Bins/Cans have the tendency to flip over when you take turns. It’s natural, they were created with this fantastic abilitiy that sets them apart from trash-cans all over the world.

I had this enlightment one day, it was most likely inspired by a friend’s (Vadim) talk about how usefull velcro is.

It’s all trivial from here on, so here come the pictures:

1. attach two stripes of the plastic side of the velcro to the car floor

2. attach the mushy side of the velcro to the bottom of your trash-bin

3. attach the two sides of the velcro

check out your pimped trash-bin

It’s a snap to take out and throw the trash,
It doesn’t fall aside when you take turns,
It’s sleek,
And you can do it yourself for almost nothing.

I decided to move to a laptop about a month ago, ditched my desktop completely. I’ve been on the move a lot lately (just started 3D3R Software Studio), and what can I say, Mobility wins. It’s a strong laptop so I don’t feel like I’m losing out on anything. I’ll shamelessly promote IBM’s T43, it’s a great laptop!

Anyways, This morning I found myself at a post-office. I was clumsy enough to forget my laptop (in it’s small grey bag) on the office’s floor and walk away. I noticed I’ve lost it only an or two later…

I ran like a maniac back to the post-office, to discover that my laptop was taken by the police.
I don’t know if you’re an Israeli or not, but it you aren’t you should know that people try to take security seriously around here. As in when they find a bag with no owner, in the middle of a crowded place, the police is summoned, and one of their little robots comes in, caresses the bag, AND SHOOTS IT to see if it was a bomb or not.

OH MY GOD THEY SHOT MY LAPTOP!!!

Yeah I was pretty down for some time, I wasn’t sure they were pulling a joke on me until I got to the police station to gather the wrecks.

That was the bad stuff, here’s the less-bad stuff:

• Bullet missed the hard-drive
• The state reimburses you in such cases (although it should be a long process)

To counter these two lucky points, let me point out that just 3 days ago I:

• Made a ghost-image of the laptop and decided I’m gonna incrementaly-update it every week or so.
• I insured the laptop, costs like 50$ a year.

My new laptop is already on its way and should be here by tomorrow. Hopefully enough I’ll be able to slip the hard-drive right into the new laptop for a seemingly continuous workflow. Who knows, maybe it will come back from hibernation and not even notice what happened, like a brain-transplant or something.

For all of you asking yourself ‘well is it working or not’, the answer is: it turns on, but that’s about it. I refuse to put the hard-drive back, taking no chances that any power-controling chip went berzerk and decides to fry the disk… You can’t see the BIOS but then again the screen is seriously fractured
Once I get the new laptop and it all works (plz) I’ll have some time to play with it, or I’ll just give it to Netter & Yuval.

Here’s what I managed to recover from the wreck:

So, what have I learned ?

• Keep an eye on my stuff
• Backup, Backup, Backup
• Insure your stuff

What did you learn ? Hopefully the same

be cool

Update: Just popped in the old hard-drive into the new computer and all seems to work, phew

The kind Mr. Tim Pritlove has conducted a short invterview with me regarding hte shot laptop during Kinnernet 2006, you can listen to it here.

I like a clean and tidy C:\, I bet you do too.

When you install Microsoft-Office it drops a directory called MSOCache on the root of your drive. Like you’ve guessed this is cache for the Microsoft-office-installation so that you don’t need to tell it where your installation is located.

If MS Coders would have bothered to hide it somewhere under application-data or something like that I wouldn’t even have noticed, but such a blunt disregard of my craze for tidiness deserves a response.

Apparently I’m far from being the first to notice, this little MS tool allows you to get rid of the bastard.