We started this new organization called Island Labs, located at www.islandlabs.org.
The group is focusing on mechanical engineering, software engineering, electrical engineering, and even some chemical engineering.
The group is open to the public, and you can see meeting time and location on www.islandlabs.org on the top links.
The next meeting will be a cool talk about multitouch on Wednesday, July 30th, at Farmingdale State.
Streaming last nights LILUG meeting (see last post) did not go as well as I had hoped for it to go. I guess the main problem was that I had never actually tried it on my laptop - so there was not a trace of gstreamer on the whole dang system… I ended up even having to compile gst-entrans to get it working. I had a nice placeholder looping intro video (a rickroll with some overlayed text) that lasted for most of the meeting streaming from my desktop computer. My laptop wasn’t powerful enough to encode the video in real time at the quality I had it set to, by the time I thought to lower the settings it was already the end of the meeting. The stream at the end of the meeting (of people just sitting and talking) apparently worked very well, varied from 60-100kbit (I believe, according to vlc) and was quite watchable. Next time I’ll borrow someone elses laptop (configured before!) probably, and use that to stream it.. Next meeting should go better. =]
Here is a little program I made for watching YouTube videos in a less cluttered environment.
PyTube allows you to search for YouTube videos, download them to a temporary location and then play them.
There are two versions of it, one downloads the video to /tmp/vid.flv and lets mplayer begin to play this at 20%, the other version downloads the entire video to /media/mmc1, then launches mplayer - the second version is for the Nokia 770, which seems to have trouble with playing the video at 20% while it is still downloading.
The program is, on the nokia 770, still pretty buggy - but it works, most of the time.
PC Version
http://tonybox.net/PyTube.tar.bz2
Nokia 770 Version
http://tonybox.net/PyTube-770.tar.gz
A video of searching for a video, and then playing it on a PC:
http://tonybox.net/pytube.ogg
A video of searching for a video, and then playing it on a Nokia 770:
http://tonybox.net/pytube-770.ogg
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Just extract and run “python PyTube.py”
Requires Python, PyGtk, and mplayer - Includes beautifulsoup HTML Parser and Urlgrabber
Expect some deb packages for the Nokia 770 in a bit, once I clean it up for the 770 a little more.
Enjoy 
I’ve been playing with MythTV for a few days and its working pretty well, but not without a bit of work..
The main problem right now with MythTV for me happens to be the TV part - The SVideo input on my (WinTV USB2) capture card doesn’t work and telling MythTV that my DirecTV reciever is on channel 3 is not working right…
So - I originally started by installing Fedora 7 and trying to compile MythTV from SVN there - this was a disaster. So.. fglrx, the worthless closed source atrocity that it is, does not work yet on fedora 7, but I heard that r300 managed to get my card working (my devil card - Ati Radeon XPress 200M - Took a while for even fglrx to get support for it) in SVN, so I tried to compile DRI and a few other things, this was rather easy to do, but just did not work - feeling a bit angry at it I decided to move on to just getting MythTV to work - and I’d worry about DRI later.
I checked out MythTV and friends from SVN and began to compile - Then, thinking about the last time I tried to use MythTV on this laptop, I remembered just how long it takes to compile MythTV on it, after several compile errors and an hour or so, I gave up on using Fedora 7 on it.
Feeling rather angry about the complete failure that was my first attempt to configure a MythTV box today, I decided to go the lazy route and just grabbed a copy of KnoppMyth and installed it on the box. This, almost to my surprise, worked.. The configuration scripts made it quite easy to get it to a near usable state rather quickly, which I liked, and I managed to get fglrx working on it after a bit of work.
I like to play classic games, when I used mms (mms.sunsite.dk) on it I had a nice library of snes/nes games, all playable at the click of my remote (which is nice enough to behave as a keyboard/HID on the computer - that with xmodmap made it easy to make the remote usable) - So I setup MythGame with zsnes and mednafen - this worked rather easily.
Nintendo 64 emulation (which, I diddn’t use when I used mms because of the lack of DRI on that system) was a bit tougher. Mupen64 is a very nice Nintendo 64 emulator - it even comes with a nogui version that can be launched from MythGame. The problem is that this nogui version is completely useless without modifying it quite a bit (it ignores config files and likes to ask for user input on the command line even though you told it 800 times that you want to use this video plugin). The gui version, on the other hand, works fine and supports a –fullscreen argument and a rom argument from the command line - the problem was that once you exit the game the GUI is still there. After a bit of tinkering with the source code I made it exit the program once the game is done - this works nicely, except when launched from MythGame the game says NO CONTROLLER - and I haven’t had time to look into this yet…
The last thing I configured, MythVideo was the easiest, just setup my NFS mount to my fileserver and configured it to use that directory and it worked - but then fglrx decided to try and harm me again - It has xvideo disabled by default, which both the mythtv player and mplayer are set to use in MythVideo - but this was fixed with one simple command (aticonfig –overlay-type=Xv)….
In other news, this site now uses LighttpD instead of apache…yay!
I was at a DefectiveByDesign action on May 25th, it was very interesting - We walked around in yellow hazmat suits and handed out fliers around the movie theater in Huntington, I also have some videos, but I still need to go through them.
Wow… this is pretty cool, I was curious if I could make A blog post on my cell phone, and if you are reading this, I apparently can! This post was posted from my Motorola i870 Cell Phone through Opera Mini… It can even take and upload a photo !
