Normally I don't do advertisement on this blog, but I can't help but tell you about this: Jolla finally revealed their first Phone! Since I'm a big fan of the (discontinued) Nokia Maemo/Meego line (I had every tablet/phone since the N800 and the latest of them, the N9 is still my phone of choice) I'm really happy to see that Jolla, the company founded by former Nokia Meego Team members is finally showing their first phone to the world. We already saw quite some videos of the Sailfish OS in action, but they all where on the Nokia N950 (The Nokia Meego Development device). So now it is here, the first device designed for Sailfish OS.

Head over to jolla.com to see the details. You can also preorder there to show Jolla your support and that there is a market for this phone.

Also today (20.05.2013) there will be a live presentation from Jolla in Helsinki which can be seen here: http://jolla.streamforce1.tv/ at 16:30 GMT.

Sorry for the brief downtime today, but since ArchLinux is deprecating the old sysvinit in favour of systemd I had to reconfigure the vserver. The move is now complete and all services should resume normal operation. If there are any problems with the server please leave a comment or drop me an e-mail.

As you may have seen in my previous Raspberry Pi post, I have a TextStar serial LCD display to show basic info without the need of a monitor or TV. I have written a python module which makes using the display and its various functions easier without knowing to much about the lower level serial stuff.

Read more…

And again its time for a new version of n900-encode.py. This time its only minor fixes and a more robust error handling. Thanks to Andrwe for support with the bughunting :) You can get the new version on my Github Page as always. Let me know what you think in the comments below or open an issue on GitHub for bugs and feature requests.

As you may guess from the title of this post, I'm now one of the fortunate owners of a Raspberry Pi:

Read more…

And here is the next version of my n900-encode.py script. Notable new features are CRF-Encoding as an addition to average bitrate encoding and some tweaks for N9 friendly videos, since I have a N9 now (no worries, the videos still work fine on the N900). The CRF-Encoding is turned on by using a video bitrate below 52, which is then interpreted as the CRF-Factor. The default setting is now CRF with a factor of 22. Also the usage of styled (SSA/ASS) subtitles is now turned on by default. As usual get it from my GitHub page and let me know what you think about it in the comments below.