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.

Terratec Cinergy 400 USB Mk2 and Linux

I spent some time yesterday investigating my TV device, as it would please me greatly not having to reboot to OS X to record stuff.

As it had support for some devices from the same company, I thought the Em2880 driver was a good place to start looking. So i put in a sensible configuration and made it use that driver. No luck.

After some additional fiddling, I decided to open the box and see what I had. Most of the circuits seemed pretty normal (SAA7113H, TDA9874AH, ALC202), but there was a IC3160-64TQ I didn't recognize.

After some googling, I found it in a product list as TV tuner USB. I didn't manage to find any datasheet or other documentation though.

Somewhat later, I found this review of the Compro Videomate Action Pro and Ultra, which explained that the IC 3160 was previously known as AVIClink AL5000. At least that explains the ViP5000 I see from it.

Next step; there doesn't seem to be any drivers available for that chipset, so it's write your own if I want one. I do, but am not sure how long that would take (although thanks to this page, I've found usbsnoop, which could help a lot). And if I get another card (they seem to be rather cheap nowadays) I have a feeling I won't be as eager to work on this.

C# for Emacs?

Dear lazyweb, is there still no C# mode (ruleset) standard enough to be a part of cc-mode, or at least available as a simple apt-get?

(My current environment is Ubuntu gutsy.)