Fuelled by the outrage, anger and misery caused by not receiving my Metroid Prime 3 pre-order (I was hoping for a little enjoyment before having my tooth pulled out on Tuesday :(), I’ve fixed a couple of things today. First was my Wii’s crappy component output; I’ve read that it’s out-of-spec, which sounds about right given the two TVs I’ve had have both had problems with it. Long-story short, the problem is bright colours are over-exposed (causing detail to be lost) and no amount of brightness/contrast adjustment will fix them – added a resistor to the luma channel of the component cable, Bob’s-your-uncle, sorted 🙂 Second fix, been using a rapidly-failing wireless track-ball to interact with my ‘media-box’ (in quotes, as it’s just a stock Ubuntu gutsy machine). I would be using Elisa and my lovely media centre remote a friend donated to me, but it would appear that Elisa has resigned itself to being outright sucky (sorry Elisa guys, but 0.1 series was usable, 0.3 series can’t even keep a video in sync and navigation is a complete mess.. but I’m sure it’ll get better, right? :)) Anyway, I took the time to look up how to configure totem with lirc (completely undocumented, nice!) and sorted that out. That wasn’t enough, however, I wanted some basic desktop-wide navigation with my remote-control, so I hacked up ‘presskey‘ using libfakekey. Just a crappy short C app that uses libfakekey to send key presses. In combination with my ~/.lircrc, I can now navigate through folders, start watching videos, seek through videos, switch through apps, etc., all with my remote and all without installing some horrible media centre. Further potential good news, daf was messing around with libjana and python and found a shortcut to instantiate jana widgets through python without bindings… Perhaps he’ll work on starting up some jana bindings?? 🙂
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