I will keep posting. But the page and layout will change (I have exported my all my posts and comments from here to my new blog). I will have my touch in it so that you would enjoy more personal and passionate blogging. wordpress.com won’t restricting me anymore, will learn new things by being my own boss  ( we sort of )

FOSS is about the freedom.

And guys although I will no longer be updating posts here with new post. I will always response to your comments will also post links to my latest post on my new blog

Me New self-hosted blog:  www.bigbrovar.aoizora.org

Thanks and Appreciations

I first would love to thank nobu who has been very encouraging and offered me to host my blog on his server for free. I really appreciate this gesture of good will and can’t thank you enough.

I would also love to thank everyone who visited, dropped a comment, posted my guide to Digg, reddit etc. Thanks guys. You all keep me going.

So some months ago I got me an E71 Nokia phone, among other things I was hoping to use it as a music device so I slammed in an 8gb memory card, and was all set but for one factor: 60% of my music collection are in ogg format and nokia default music player does recognize ogg. Sure there are some 3rd party music apps for E71 which can play ogg files out of the box but they all lack the kind of integration which you get with the Nokia default music player. While in confused mode I decided to call up a friend nucco and he gave me the tip about .is_audio_player.

What is .is_audio_player

If like me, you have a music library made up of different music formats, and you want to be able to sync them to your portable music player in one music format say mp3. Example, my music collection is composed of different formats, .mp3, ogg, aac but I want to sync everyone of them as mp3 to my Nokia e71. This is where .is_audio_player comes in handy. Nope its not an application, nope its not a codec, its not a library either. Its just a file (yeah file) its a file you place in the root directory of the storage of your music device from where it does its magic.

Configuration

First you open your favorite text editor (gedit, kate, emac, nano, vi whatever). Then you place in the following entries:

audio_folders=Sounds/Digital/

folder_depth=3

output_formats=audio/mpeg

Explanation

audio_folders = Here you indicate the relative path of the music folder on your portable device. On my Nokia its in Sound/Digital

folder_depth = Here you indicate the folder depth of the music folder (remember that every storage device attached to your Linux computer is mounted on /media/ hence you will start counting from the device mount point. In my case it was.

/media/e71/Sound/Digital

Since our final destination ™ is Digital (in my case that is) which is 3 step away from /media I indicated the value for folder_depth to be 3

out_formats = The last parameter is quite straight forward it’s asking what media format you want your files to be encoded in before sync. In my case i want them encoded to mp3 hence i added audio/mpeg

Now configure the file the way it meets your needs and then save as .is_audio_player remember the . (dot) in-front of is_audio_player. Once the file is saved, place it at the root of your music device (Nokia, Sony Erikson, China Mp3 device etc). In my case i placed it inside the memory card of my nokia phone (make sure you are using a mobile phone that can be seen as a mass storage device)

Note: Any file with a . (dot) in-front of its name is hidden by default in Linux hence you may not see the file after saving it until you tell your filemanager to view hidden files (ctrl +h) for (gnome) and (alt + .) for (kde)

Below is the .is_audio_player file inside the memory card of my nokia.

Once all is set, you can now plug your portable music player to your Linux computer and open Rhythmbox.

If all goes well Rhythmbox will detect your audio device. (in my case my nokia.)

All that is left is for you to select the tracks you want to sync. (you can always create a playlist) Drag and drop them into your portable music player’s icon. (You can also drag from your portable music player into your Music library.)

Transferring from your music library in rhythmbox to your portable music device might be slow, especially if it has to encode them to another music format before the transfer.

In the end I was able to encode all my ogg to mp3 files and sync them with my freedom hating E71 on the fly. I hope this helps someone out there.

FYI:

• I don’t know if this method would work with ipods.
• Legends have it that Amarok supports .is_audio_player I can’t tell since I have not been able to get it to work in amarok 2.1. If you have been able to please let me know.
• The Original ogg file on my music computer library is unaltered.

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This new theme is not as cool but at least it gives me a proper sidebar and also width for my guides so its not quash down. eventually i hope to host my blog on my server and i have already started working on that. for now i would appreciate feed back on what you guys feel about this new look.

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This weekend we had a crucial world cup qualifier game against Tunisia it is a must win game for us. If we lose or draw then our qualification to the world cup would have left our hands and would depend on Tunisia (who currently top our group) losing . I decided to do something i have never done before. Bought a ticket and went to see the game live at the Abuja National Stadium. I was not alone and lots of Nigerians and non Nigerians came out in large numbers all wearing the national colors so the whole arena was painted green and white.

It was a great game our boys played really well, but we drew the match which was really painful because we led the game twice but the Tunisian came back. oh well i guess there are no guarantee in life we live to fight another day i guess. Anyway here are some pictures i took at the stadium thought i should share.

P.S I really missed the presence of someone who is very dear to me, just want to say i missed you very much and i love you dearly. i wrote this for you. (you know who you are)

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How it all started

Ever since i started a blog i had always wanted a wanted a application which would allow me do my blogging (preferably offline ) without having to use the web browser. One of the reasons for this was because i (as at then) did not have a stable Internet connection and had to go to Internet cafe to do my blogging which wasn’t really convenient. I wanted a way to do my blogging offline and then upload later. Even when i had a stable Internet connection i still prefer to having to use a browser for blogging. Unfortunately for me most of the blogging applications ( Drivel BloGTK KBlogger gnome-blog) i tried on Linux just didn’t cut it, some didn’t work with wordpress and the once that did weren’t powerful enough or were buggy or just too basic.

I gave up and resigned my self to the web for blogging. This was until recently when (I Cant quite remember how it happened) i found about about Bilbo Blogger and Beng. I saw the tool i just needed

Bilbo Blogger

Bilbo Blogger is a free/Open Source Blogging client, focused on simplicity and usability. Its is based on Qt4 (KDE) but should work well on gnome (i haven’t tried it but it should.. just remember i said should)

Here are some Summary of some of its Features

Currently featured:

• A full featured WYSIWYG editor + An HTML editor

• Previewing your post with your blog style! like when you are visiting it at your blog.

• Support for Blogger1.0, MetaWeblog, MovableType (WordPress supports All of these!) and Google GData (used on Blogspot.com blogs) APIs!

• Support for Creating/Modifying/Deleting posts.

• Support for creating drafts and scheduled posts!

• Support for uploading media files to your blog (Just on supported APIs e.g. MetaWeblog and MovableType)

• Support for Fetching your recent blog entries.

• Support for adding Images to post from your system. It will upload them on

• Submitting post to blog (Just on supported APIs e.g. MetaWeblog and MovableType)

• Support for saving local entries before publishing.Saving your writing copy to prevent data loss, at configurable intervals.
• Internal auto spell checker. (KDE spell checker used so most of languages are supported)

Installation

Although as of blog time there were only two binaries available for Linux and one for windows.

Archlinux users Bilbo should be available in the arch community repository ( am not sure about this as i don’t have an arch installation to confirm) but in any case an arch package can be downloaded from here

(K)Ubuntu

To install on ubuntu. You are going to add a third party repository popularly called PPA To your system. This is not hard.

To start open Terminal and copy and paste the following command (you can do this via GUI but when writing a guide some things are better down using commandline copy and paste of cause i would explain every process so at least you know what you are doing)

First we download and add the key for the repository we are about to use and add it to how system.

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com \ 0xfe0272d55c41c17774052e575646f8b10331274d

Then we add the repository with this command

echo deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/neversfelde/ppa/ubuntu `lsb_release --short --codename` main | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list

Then we refresh the system and download bilbo with

sudo apt-get update ; sudo apt-get install bilbo

Once installed you can find Bilbo on the Internet section of your application Menu

Now i give a brief guide on how to configure Bilbi blogger to your blog

First your start bilbo ( like you don’t know that already hehe) once installed you will find it under the Internet section of your application menu.

The first thing you want to do is to add a blog, (my blog is hosted on wordpress.com hence that is what this guide would be based on. )

Just select Add Blog from under Blog menu

This would open a dialog box, something like this

Type in the URL of your blog then enter your blogs username and password and click the Auto Configure button. In my case it was http://ubuntunigeria.wordpress.com and i clicked the Auto Configure button. Then Bilbo would work its magic and Auto configure the settings for the blog. If all goes well (and it always did in my case) The dialog box would now look like this.

Bilbo has auto configured my blog settings, pulling the Title of the blog, the correct URL. You can go to the Supported features tab and check out the list of features bilbo has support in your blog here is mine

Once your blog is configured and loaded up. you would see a page which looks like this.

So here is the layout of Bilbo Blogger, it always you to use both WYSIWYG, or for code warriors you can always use the HTML editor field. one really cool feature with bilbo is the ability to preview you draft and see how it would look like on the blog page, This for me is one of its killer features

HTML Editor

Normal Preview

Preview with blog style

Other cool features of Bilbo

• It support multiple blogs hence you can setup more than one blog at a time.
• It also allows you to edit previous blog posts ( or delete them)
• If you are working on a blog post, you can always tell it to save locally, like as i was writing this post, i got disconnected, if i was using the web interface i might have lost some of my works or would have to wait for the Internet to get back before i continue. With bilbo i just told it to save my work locally and continued working.
• It also allows you to add tags and post the blog to a category

Bilbo also supports tabs you can edit more than one blog at a time with it just by opening a new tab.

Most importantly i found bilbo to be very stable, its doesn’t slow down on me or crash on me. i never experience on crash with it.

There is just so much to talk about Bilbo you would have to give it a spin to see your self.

I hope someone finds this useful.

However one thing i have always wish it had was the ability to run in the background so that if i close thunderbird i want it to minimize to the system-tray/notification area and inform me real time when i have a new mail. Thunderbird has a small memory footprint hence am not bothered about it sucking up my system resources. For a very long time i took what life offered and made do with opening thunderbird to check for a new mail and closing it when i am done (i hate having my task manager side of the system panel filed up with running applications). Then one day i was like heck i have had enough and decided out to find a way to get thunderbird to do exactly what i want (run in the system-tray when not needed.) i did some googling and the name firetray came up, turned out it was just want i wanted.

Installation and Configuration

Firetray is an add-on for thunderbird and can be downloaded from here download and save the file to your hard disk. In Mozilla Thunderbird, open Add-ons from the Tools menu.

Click the Install button, and locate/select the file you downloaded and click “OK”.

After this you need to restart Thunderbird for the firetray to start working. You might also want to go through the preference of firetray to configure how you want it to behave, for example by default thunderbird does not minimize to the system-tray when you close it. You can go through the settings and configure it to your taste. Here is how i have configured mine.

Conclusion

I have come to find firetray a very valuable plugin for thunderbird.

It allows me to make Thunderbird run in the background and get out of my way. when they is a new mail, i get notified and it tells me how many unread mail i have in-box

One more cool thing i love about it is how it makes it easy to check for new messages and even send a quick email, By just right clicking on the icon on the system-tray

Ok that is the end of my rant. Hope this helps somebody.

FYI: Firetray can also be added to firefox, sunbird, seamonkey 2 and songbird, allowing to set up custom icon, minimizing to tray instead of closing, control playback using multimedia keys in songbird