Asterisk GTalks

While upgrading my Asterisk from 1.2.x to 1.4.x I noticed that long waited support for Jabber and Jingle is finally available to use. This means, that I am not only able connect through Asterisk to any Jabber server, but I am able to route calls from SIP phones to GTalk accounts and vice versa. Basically I am able to make and receive calls from my Nokia E70 to and from GTalk accounts with no additional S60 software. If I am using WLAN, calls utilize the WLAN connection. If there is no WLAN available, I am still able to receive GTalk calls through GSM network and make them through 3G.

As I wrote on my previous article I'm a bit tired of setting up mp3 capabilities on every Linux workstation I use. Main reason for me needing mp3 support is my Nokia E70 which I use as portable audio player. I was advised to try Symbian OggPlay. So I did give it a try.

I really do hate the fact that to be able to either listen or encode mp3s you have to do plenty of extra work to get it done almost on every Linux distribution. Although my home machine running Ubuntu rips mp3s just fine after I spent hours to find out how, my ThinkPad running Red Hat WS 5.1 I use at work still didn't.

Best solution would be not to use mp3 for anything. We already have ogg and other free formats. The problem is, that although these free formats are supported on Linux distributions out of the box, on most portable digital audio players they are not. All my E70 knows about ogg is that it can not eat it, so it wont.

Quick and dirty way to get Sound Juicer to rip mp3 files on Red Hat Workstation 5.1 (Tikanga)...

I thought I was getting this for xmas, but I had to wait couple of weeks more to get it. The box includes two albums both in CD and vinyl formats. I got In Rainbows right after it was published as mp3, so I knew half of what I was getting in more touchable format.

Now I got also the bonus disc which has eight tracks I haven't heard before. I been listening it all day and I got to admit, it's much better than I was expecting. First track continues where Video Tape left us. Radiohead could have released these albums as double album and it would have worked perfectly. Well, that's what they actually did, but only for those who bought the disc box.

Amarok comes by default on most Linux distributions. Amarok is great audio player and keeps your music organized as well. I have found Amarok very useful not only at home but also at work, since sometimes it's hard to concentrate to do any work when there's all annoying background noise on office. I feel better listening music when silence is not an option. On the road, on airplain for example, I like to listen same albums I do at home and work, but on long flights my laptop battery wont last long enough, so I have found listening music with my E70 a better solution. That is why I actually bought decent head phones which also blocks outside noise quite efficiently, so I'm able to relax better.

There are many ways for transferring files between your Linux laptop or workstation and mobile phone over bluetooth. I have Nokia E70 and I wanted to be able to mount both my 64MB internal memory card and 2GB external memory card over bluetooth link. That way I'm able to access files on mobile phone by using command line tools or graphical file manager.

I noticed following article about WWIGO:

N95 as a wireless webcam

Since WWIGO is S60 application, I decided to give it a try on my E70. Turned out that WWIGO is suitable to be used as handy wireless webcam.

Although Nokia E70 is capable of showing full length movies, I haven't found any place where you could buy or download anything else except trailers. Only possibility seems to be to rip your own DVDs and convert them to E70. There are some commercial products for Windows for that.

How about already existing tools in standard Linux distribution?