Empathy (and Pidgin), Telepathy, Farsight, GStreamer and Gmail videochat

This post is solely for the benefit of people googling randomly, scratching their heads.

If you're trying to do a videochat with a Gmail user, but it doesn't work (it connects and then disconnects directly), chances are you may see the same issue I did.

If that's the case, the list of video codecs you present will most likely consist of JPEG, THEORA and MPV (without any H264 or H263).

What you need is most likely a ffmpeg package for GStreamer. On Ubuntu karmic, gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg is the right one. After a

sudo aptitude install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-tools; gst-inspect-0.10

things should be better (you will need to restart Empathy/Pidgin).

Sipdroid and asterisk

If you haven't found it yet, sipdroid is a small, reasonably well integrated sip client for android phones. If you install the version not available on market, you can also use it while using your 3g connection.

One drawback is that it doesn't neccessary play nice with Asterisk out of the box, these are the things I had to address to get it running smoothly (of course, YMMV).

You're most likely being NATed by your operator (if you want to be sure, you can install WhatIsMyIp and check), so

nat=yes

is pretty much a given. However, you do need

qualify=no

or your Asterisk will consider the phone unreachable.

Also, sipdroid currently only supports alaw, so you should make sure that no other codec will suddenly be required. If your asterisk is suitably located [low latency] and have ample cpu, you can use canreinvite=no for that, otherwise, you can try to restrict those you connect to so only alaw will be used, but that way may have many hidden surprises, especially if one of them is a PSTN operator.

Some app ideas, and then some

I got me one of them Android phones a little more than a month ago. Because of this, I may start posting random stuff for the benefit of people Googling, but also ideas for applications I want (and would pay for).

One meme I couldn't resist

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, even if we don't speak often, please post a comment with a memory of you and me. It can be anything you want -- good or bad. When you're finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people remember about you.

Linux on Advent 9112

A while ago my wife got a (two actually) Advent 9112 portable. Elgiganten and PC City (Swedish companies part of Dixons) has been seeling them really cheap, and in spite of their small size, they seems to be rather nice machines (they even have IEEE1394 ports if you need that).
(They are rebranded machines, original name is ECS S20II).

Anyway, this is a consumer information post for those considering one of those. As Ubuntu is our standard distro nowadays, Gutsy was what we tried. Basically, everything worked out of the box (although it took us a good while to figure out that we had to enable the built in camera with a Fn-sequence).

In spite of what is said on the tech guys page, the wlan card didn't seem to be a Intel card but a realtek one (the rt73usb driver was used). We noticed network issues after hibernation sometimes but didn't care enough to examine those.

However, she no longer has this machine. The first one she got had a hot subpixel that was rather annoying, and the replacement had the problem off turning itself off randomly (not very often, the first time was after a week's usage). When we returned that, we decided to get a HP TX1345 instead (mainly because we thought it'd be fun with a touchscreen). I'll write about that one later.

PulseAudio and v4l2 for Flash

I just tried out PulseAudio yesterday and found it a rather enjoyable experience. The only thing that didn't work out of the box turned out to be Adobe Flash. I soon found libflashsupport that I think is rather interesting. In addition to how it's used there, I'm guessing it should be easy to whip out support for v4l2, which would help if you have a modern laptop and want to use the uvcvideo-driver.

Please Dear Internet, do this for me!

In the section "Cool hacks I want to do put probably won't get around to in quite a while" we have (among other things) a value calculator for LibraryThing - something that takes a look at your (or a public) library and calculates what it would cost to buy that library.

There are price comparison sites galore for books, but I want an API to code against (I could of course screen scrape and watch it break every now and then, but I prefer not to. And unfortunately, none of the data providers I've tried asking have been interested enough to answer, it seems.