Last weekend I broke my Nokia 6120’s screen. I have a military phone, which is far cheaper, so I’ve decided to keep it offline. However, being the sentimental guy that I am, I did want to save all of my contacts and SMS messages (in addition to the photos, which presented less of a problem). This proved to be a bit of a challenge without the screen working.

Usually, when you connect the phone via USB, it asks if you want “PC Suite mode” or “Data Transfer mode”. The “Data Transfer” mode has the phone show up as a standard USB storage device, which allows for easy transfer of MP3 files, photos and videos to and from the phone, without any nokia-specific software. However, it only works for the external SD card, so you can’t use that to access SMS messages or contacts.

Totem is Gnome’s built-in media player, and it really annoyed me in previous versions, and had me switching to VLC. However, the version included in the Ubuntu 9.10 release candidate has two features which are very important, in my opinion. The first feature is smooth graphical integration with compositing managers (such as compiz). In previous versions, as well as VLC, once you fullscreen the window, moving the mouse (which causes the cursor and the partial interface to appear) causes a very annoying flicker. This has been fixed (at least on my box, using an NVidia card).

I love watching TV, and hate it. Regular show schedules are horrible, commercial breaks are annoying, and the ability to rewind is very important. I love Hot’s VOD service (and happily pay to watch the shows I enjoy), but my true favorite for getting my entertainment is everyone’s favorite not-a-dumptruck, the internet. In this post, I will describe how I do it.

Everything I describe in this post can be done using miro. It’s a neat piece of software, which lacked polish in version 2.4 (2.5 is out now though), but there are a few things I don’t like about it:

At my workplace, I’ve recently been using git for code review purposes. I work on code in my own git clone, and ask a peer to review it. It works somewhat like this:

1. master branch is same code as currently in upstream.
2. Working to resolve issue #1234 pertaining to “Performance for gizmo”, I work on a branch 1234-gizmo-performance.
3. I mail a peer, John, with this information, as well as my repository location.
4. John adds my repository as a remote, lutzky. Then he branches review1 (or review2 if that is taken, and so on) at lutzky/1234-gizmo-performance.
5. John adds comments with nice big FIXME tags, which are highlighted in any decent editor. He commits this, the commit-message stating that it was code review.
6. John tags his final review commit (or, if he had no comments - lutzky/1234-gizmo-performance) with a reviewed1 (or reviewed2, etc.) annotated tag. Since the annotated tag includes all the necessary information (who tagged, when, and what), the number doesn’t really matter.
7. I merge john/review1, incorporate the changes (or reject them) and remove the comments. If no further review is necessary, I submit this - and once submitted, I merge this back into master.

It’s a nice system. I wonder what other methods there are of doing this.