Quick workaround if you’re using mplayer:
xvinfo to find the port number of the overlay Xv port.mplayer -vo xv:port=<port>This will enable proper sync for video playback, but will of course disable any fancy compiz effects on videos. Hope it helps!
In my case the port was 84, so I added vo=xv:port=84 to ~/.mplayer/config
Interesting post by the allmighty Security God Bruce Schneier - Why removing bottles of liquid from airport passengers isn’t protecting us from terrorists.
Go read 
I’ve got an Edirol FA-66 firewire sound card. The only system on linux with support for this is JACK (with the FreeBoB driver). I use the FA-66 mainly for high quality audio playback. I start jackd with:
$ jackd -R --verbose -d freebob -r 44100
The command depends of course on your sound card. Test your setup with:
$ mplayer -ao jack some-file.mp3
Got sound? Excellent! Now, many audio players come with built-in jack playback support (gstreamer, pulseaudio, mplayer, xine, …) But some don’t, and the biggest issue for me here is Flash. Flash uses ALSA for playback, so it would be nifty if we could configure ALSA to redirect all it’s sound to JACK. I have been able to redirect flash audio to PulseAudio and from there to JACK, but that requires yet another sound server. No thanks! So, if we can redirect audio from ALSA to JACK, most apps should be able to send their sound through my FA-66. For apps that aren’t ALSA aware, there’s always aoss.
Googling got me to the following solution in my ~/.asoundrc file:
# convert alsa API over jack API
# use it with
# % aplay foo.wav
# use this as default
pcm.!default {
type plug
slave { pcm “jack” }
}
ctl.mixer0 {
type hw
card 1
}
# pcm type jack
pcm.jack {
type jack
playback_ports {
0 system:playback_1
1 system:playback_2
}
capture_ports {
0 system:capture_1
1 system:capture_2
}
}
Test it with aplay file.avi. Nifty, now ALSA pushes all audio to JACK which in turn pushes it through the firewire port to my sound card! If you’re unsure on what to put under playback_ports, just have a look at jack’s verbose output (–verbose flag).
Rightie, now let’s try with Flash. Pop up Firefox, youtube ahoy, nice video, play! … Nada, no sound. 
Look at the debug output from jackd and you’ll discover that the Flash player continously connects and disconnects. This results in a flood of debug messages in the console. According to this post, it seems to be a bug with Flash 9. I got to be honest with you, I couldn’t get this to work properly with flash 9. The solution? Install Flash 10 Release Candidate! I’m on Ubuntu (8.04 “Hardy”) so I downloaded the flash 10 RPM and ran the following commands:
$ sudo apt-get remove flashplugin-nonfree
$ fakeroot alien flashplayer10_install_linux_081108.i386.rpm
$ sudo dpkg -i flash-plugin_10.0.0.569-1_i386.deb
$ cd ~/.mozilla/plugins
$ ln -s /usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so
Restart firefox, check that youtube movie again and VOILA! There’s SOUND! Hope it helps, and I hope you don’t have to spend 2hrs on this as I did… :-/
Recently I wrote about how iPhone ringtones annoyed me. Adding custom ringtones “the Apple way” costs money. Well, guess what: Yesterday I discovered this article over at iSmashPhone.com:
How to Get Free iPhone Ringtones in Under One Minute
The article introduced me to a wonderful service called audiko. It’s basically a website which allows you to upload your favorite song and convert (parts of) it to a ringtone. One you can open with iTunes and transfer to your iPhone! All for free! No jailbreaking required
The site also archives the ringtones people create and lets you browse through a plethora of popular ones!
I wonder how long it takes before Apple / RIAA brings the site down though :-/ I wonder if their Terms of Use holds…
Today I spent some time hacking on my irssi notification script - Talk To Me. Up until now it has relied on irssi running on your local computer for the notifications to work. For me that’s a problem - I run irssi in a screen session on a remote server. Launching the notification commands on the remote machine would have no effect at all. Then I found this blog post.
It describes how you can set up ssh to forward connections to a port on the remote machine to a port on your local host. This connection is then used to transfer notification messages from irssi to a local daemon which listens on the specified port, and launches notify-send to display them. Neat
So I decided to incorporate this feature into Talk To Me! Go have a look!
Custom ringtones. One would think that using a song from iTunes as a ringtone would be a breeze on this sophisticated phone. I doubt there even exists a mobile phone on the market which doesn’t support this. But not on the iPhone.
No, there tou have to pay Apple $2 to “convert” an mp3 to a ringtone. Like they’re not the same thing. A previous version of iTunes revealed that the only difference between a music file and a ringtone was the file extension - the extension for ringtones is “m4r”. That’s right - Apple expects you to pay them $2 for renaming a file!
You got too greedy on this one, Apple…
Seems the talented guys at NetCom forgot to do what I asked them - twice.
So I tried connecting the phone to iTunes again today - same result.
I call NetCom and complain and I accidentally mention that I tried entering my phone number and IMEI at their unlocking site and got an error message saying the IMEI isn’t registered at that phone number. The phone call continued something like this:
NetCom: “Oh, can you give me your IMEI number?”
Me: “It’s xxxxblahmeh.”
NetCom: “Ok, I’m registering it now.”
Me: “Eh, isn’t that the same thing you’ve already done twice for me earlier?”
NetCom: “Nah, we didn’t have any IMEI registered”
OH MY GOD. Is it possible to be so stupid? I mean, I already gave them my IMEI number in the previous call. SIGH!
I try their unlock site again and this time I get a message that it works! I connect to iTunes - great success! Hooooray! Finally!
Picked up my brand new iPhone 3G at the post office today - oh my it’s shiny! However…
Called NetCom (the carrier with iPhone-monopoly here in Norway) and told them I’d like to cancel my subscription to their over-priced “iTalk” subscription. $80/month for 100MB of data traffic? I don’t think so.
The conversation went something like this:
Me: “Hi, I’d like to cancel my subscription please.”
NetCom: “Awww, okay. Why?”
Me: “It stinks, that’s why.”
NetCom: “We know
Sounds easy enough, I thought. So I connect the iPhone with the SIM card I’d like to use, but iTunes tells me to shove a certain SIM card up a certain place: “the SIM card is unsupported, sucker”. I guess it just takes a couple of minutes before it’s unlocked, I thought. I try again an hour later, the same. Another hour, the same. What’s taking so long, Apple?
When I connect without a SIM card, however, I’m able to restore the phone. Can this be it? Come on! But no, my SIM card still doesn’t work. Meh.
Called them again:
Me: “Hey, it doesn’t work, what gives?”
NetCom: “Yeah, it might take a couple of days to take effect. What’s your IMEI number?”
Me: “It’s <long number>”
NetCom: “Ok, I’ll send apple another request. You just have to wait.”
Me: “Meh, sharsly?”
NetCom: “Sharsly.”
Tried again now (00:22), still the same. It’s been 12 hours since I asked them to unlock it. Expensive paperweight.
I managed to step on my expensive Oakley sunglasses which I’d bought in the US. This happened while we were out sunbathing on an island in Sweden, near our new cabin at Raftön. When I noticed that I was stepping on them, I twitched and managed to drop my cellphone into a pool of sea water. All happened during one second.
The result: completely broken sun glasses and cell phone. Crap.
Bought new sun glasses of the exact same model the day after and have now ordered an iPhone (expensive). My wallet hates me.
