Need some computer case stickers for Linux Mint? I just found some for you.

One of the unfortunate things about using Linux is that you have to hunt to find a case sticker to cover the Windows case sticker on your computer or laptop. Granted a Google search will show up a number of folks who have stickers available that you can buy or download and print yourself, but if you run one of the flavors of Linux Mint you could only find stickers for the standard GNOME-based Mint.

I said “could” for a reason. I was running a search this morning and found a set of Linux Mint stickers on LinuxMint-Art.org. Sam Riggs was nice enough to include stickers for KDE, LMDE, Fluxbox, XFCE and even LXDE. There are two sizes for each sticker, the normal case sticker size and a larger image for other uses. Being from a good open source developer, Sam includes both PNG images and Gimp XCF files for each image. You have to supply your own sticker stock, and I’m seeing a comment about a problem with printing at 300dpi so you’ll want top print them at 1200dpi, but each image is a separate file so you can print as many images as your heart desires on a single page. I definitely want to print some Mint KDE stickers for my phone and cane, and when I can get a new computer I’ll print stickers for it, too.

Yooouge thanks to LinuxMint-Art.org user samriggs for creating the images. I owe you a brew.

We’re changing the blog’s favicon

Ever since we’ve started this blog a picture of me has served as our favicon, the icon you see in your browser’s title section. Since I write so little and Peng writes so much of the content on the blog I finally got him to let me change the favicon to a picture of him. It may take a little time for the change to show up in your browser so please be patient. You can try clearing your browser’s cache or forcing a refresh from the server to try and get it to show up sooner.

This doesn’t mean that I’m not writing for the blog anymore, even though he has a lot more to write about than I do. I’ll still contribute posts every now and then but it will be his face that will be the “face” of the blog. (Shut up, Peng.)

[RESOLVED] Does anyone know how to specify the category for games on Virgin Mobile’s Samsung Restore?

(Never mind. When I tried these lines on JAD files I had MiniCommander create for me the games installed to the right directory. I’m updating my earlier post to include the info. -Peng)

Recently I wrote a post on installing third-party apps and games on the Samsung Restore from Virgin Mobile but There’s something about it that’s stumping me. The apps and games always seem to install to the Applications group and I can’t figure out how to get them installed to Games. From looking at the JAD files for games that install (more or less) properly I see two lines that may do the job:

Nokia-MIDlet-Category: Game
Content-Folder: Games

But if I add those two lines to other JAD files they still install to Applications. This is only a problem because it can add so many apps to the Applications folder that I can’t use a numeric shortcut key to launch Opera Mini. Does anyone have an idea what I’m doing wrong?

A slight change to my suggested bill penalizing lawmakers for not passing a federal budget in a timely manner

Back in April I wrote a post containing a letter I sent to my elected officials, and as I listened to NPR’s Morning Edition I realized that it needs to be changed a little. I had proposed a bill that would reduce our federal lawmakers’ salaries if there was no federal budget by 1 October with more cuts at certain milestones. What I suggested was

• If the Federal Budget isn’t ready on 1 October, cut the pay of every Congressman (and -women) and Senator by 25%.
• If the Federal Budget isn’t passed by 1 January (the budget is 3 months late), the pay is reduced to 50% of what they should be getting.
• If there still isn’t a Federal Budget on 1 April (6 moths late), the pay for every U.S. Congressman and Senator is cut to a mere 25% of the full amount they are entitled to.
• If the U.S. Government is shut down due to a lack of a Federal Budget, the pay for our Congressman and Senators is shut down as well, with their checks being reinstated only when there is a federal budget. In addition, there is to be no retroactive pay for our elected officials when the work of our government is allowed to resume.

Unfortunately not only did they not pass a federal budget in time for this year but they’re also working on a second continuing resolution and it’s only the 4th of October. So I’m going to add one more level of cuts:

• The pay of every Congressman (and -women) and Senator is reduced 5% for every Continuing Resolution passed to keep the federal government operating.

If you agree with my proposal please let your elected officials know, and please share this on the social media sites you are on. I’m not asking this to get my traffic up but to try to create a groundswell of support for this kind of measure. It’s time that our elected officials have to suffer for not doing their jobs just like the rest of us do when either they or we don’t do our job.

HOWTO: Get YouTube videos and video files on your computer so they can be watched on your Samsung Restore mobile phone

[Updated 3 October 2011 to reflect the new name of the profile I submitted to MMC's devs, although I didn't update the screenshots. Thanks for the quick work, Mike! -Peng]

According to the user manual for Virgin Mobile’s Samsung Restore (M575, although the Sprint version of the phone carries M570) the phone can play MP4 video files, but I haven’t been able to get it to work. I have seen websites that make 3GP video files available that should play on the phone, but when I try playing them I get an error about a bad URL.

The phone takes videos, with the file extension 3g2, and that was exactly the information that helped me get video files that play on my phone. The secret is to use a free desktop computer application called Mobile Media Converter, and you can also use it to get videos directly from YouTube and convert them for viewing on not only the Samsung Restore but also for many other phones, including Android and iOS phones. It can handle a range of formats as you can see on their website.

Mobile Media Converter (MMC) is available for Windows, Ubuntu Linux and MacOS X, as well as in source code so you can build it yourself if you need to and are willing to do it. Since Linux Mint 10 KDE (my operating system of choice) is based on Ubuntu Linux that’s the version of MMC that I’ll look at.

You can download an Ubuntu .deb file from the MMC site but before you install it there are two packages you need to have installed first, mencoder and desktop-file-utils. Once you have those packages installed you can install MMC by running the following command in the directory you have downloaded the package in. (The package name may be different if you get a different version.)

$ sudo dpkg -i mmc_1.7.3_i386.deb

In Linux you can launch MMC by launching (in KDE, the path may be different on other desktop environments) Applications > Multimedia > Mobile Media Converter, or by running /opt/MIKSOFT/MobileMediaConverter/MobileMediaConverter in a terminal. No matter what operating system you use, when the program launches you get a pretty basic screen.

The first thing you’ll need to do is to get the profile for the phone. The program comes with a profile called Mobile Video – 3GP Video and it comes close, but I submitted a profile called Mobile Video – 3G2 Video (.3g2) Samsung Restore Video (.3g2) that contain a couple of tweaks to make it more useful for the Samsung Restore: Adding support for using the qvga size, it makes the preferred codec mpeg4, and most importantly it changes the file extension to .3g2. Without that last change you’d have to manually change the extension on each file you convert from .3gp to .3g2 for the phone to even recognize the video exists. For info on what the file size abbreviations mean you can see the FFmpeg Documentation page.

Of course all of this could be jumping the gun if you don’t have a video to convert. For this tutorial I’m going to use the video for a song I discovered through this week’s Studio 360, John Wesley Harding’s There’s A Starbucks (Where The Starbucks Used To Be). MMC can grab YouTube videos for you, you just have to click the Add YouTube Video button and paste the URL, select the quality you want, and click Download. MMC defaults to Worst quality so you probably want to change that. Personally I don’t like using MMC’s download function since it downloads FLV Flash videos and I prefer to use MP4 videos. Luckily you can use the DownloadHelper extension for Firefox to get MP4s for most videos on YouTube. Once it’s installed you can load the video on YouTube, click the down arrow next to the icon ion your status bar and select the video quality you want. I go with the best quality available, going with the Medium quality MP4s over FLVs any day. (My settings may be different than yours so the screenshot may not look like yours does.)

Once you have the video you want to convert drag it into the MMC window if you didn’t have MMC download the file for you. Click the Advanced … button and make sure the settings are how you want them. I go with a video rate of 100k with the qcif size and the mpeg4 codec. The qcif size gets you a video that’s 176×144, and that may be kind of small on a screen that measures 240×320, and I tried using the qvga setting to create a 320×240 video but I find that the video stutters with the larger size.

When you’re ready to convert simply click on the Convert! button and MMC will give you a screen showing the progress of the conversion. If you’re converting more than one video you’ll see a second progress bar showing the status of the entire job. Once the conversion is done you can click the OK button, and you can click the More button for information on any errors that occur in the process. Either way you have a nice, shiny video that can be copied to your microSD card for viewing on your phone.

If you use the DownloadHelper extension to download your YouTube videos you can use it on more sites than just YouTube. The extension supports a growing list of sites, including MLB.com and even WBZ TV, my local CBS affiliate. Why is that good news? The Samsung Restore doesn’t support Flash video, even with the Opera Mini web browser, so I can’t watch stories from WBZ on the phone. This sucks because I often want to see the weather forecast when I’m away from a television or the roomies don’t want to turn on the news, but with a little advance planning I can snag the forecast video with DownloadHelper and be able to watch it any time on my phone. This doesn’t help when there’s an updated forecast available on the website but it’s often better than nothing.

One more note: I recommend closing down any apps you don’t need while doing converting videos. I had some audio sync issues on some videos I converted while having my web browser open and it was annoying as hell. Understandably I had to reconvert the entire batch of videos, and since I’m on a borrowed computer it took time I really didn’t want to have to spend again.