Have you ever tried just turning off the TV?

This blog post is a short account of how Wiki MONSTER was created in less than 24 hours. The app passed the certification process and is available in the WP7 Marketplace.

On December 21st Microsoft Slovenia organized a 24hr Windows Phone 7 Hackaton. Mostly young developer from all over Slovenia were invited to Brežice where we were given 24hr to complete a WP7 app. Some came with ideas, some came with partially coded apps. I came with my laptop and no clue what I was doing there.

At 7PM the competition started and I was staring at an empty piece of paper. Knowing, that most competitions that were tightly timed didn’t go well for me, I was ready to give up. At 7:15 I somehow manged to order my toughs. I decided that it would be really cool if I managed to plan, code and upload an app in less than 24 hours. The idea for Wiki MONSTER was born shortly after. It is a small tool that tries to invoke a persons natural curiosity. It uses the live tile functionality of WP7 to show a picture and name of an Wikipedia article on the home screen. When you use your phone you are in a way forced to catch glimpses of the tile and sometimes the content catches your attention. If it does you can read the article summary and see images associated with it. When you want to know more, it is possible to open the article in the browser. In the app you just have to shake the phone and a new article will be shown.

That is the functionality I was able to throw together in the limited time. The app is on my phone for almost two weeks now and I must say that there are times I can’t stop shaking the phone for new articles. Sometimes they are dumb, sometimes boring, but a lot of time it is stuff that I had no clue about.

Unfortunately the current version needs 8 direction changes before it recognizes a shake and the next article appears. This is proving itself to be too much. A revised version is already in the certification process. This is now resloved.

For this kind of app I think it is more than appropriate to open source its code. It is poorly structured and uncommented as you expect from code written in a coding marathon:D The repo is on GitHub: https://github.com/TomyMMX/Wiki-MONSTER

I think it is still useful for someone that is learning to code WP7 apps. Any changes people will desire (read: code themselves) will most likely find its way to the marketplace app.

Now I just have to wait what the jurors of the competition say. They have some Nokia Lumia 800 phones to give away for the best and most successful apps.

Please leave your coment on Hacker News, Reddit or XDA-developers.

My girlfriend got an work netbook the other day. The only thing it should be able to do is edit documents and once in a while show videos over a projector at the class she teaches.

The netbook was used and came with windows 7. Everything kind of worked, but it was slow and unsatisfactory.

So I said OK.. we’ll put Linux on there and it will fly. I chose to use xubuntu since Xfce is known to have a small footprint. And as it turns out that was true. The machine felt much faster. But there is always a “BUT” somewhere. The machine has an intel GMA500 (poulsbo) graphics card. The official support for this card is almost non existent. Luckily we have people who worked out how to make this thing work and using this I got the gorgeous 1366x768 resolution display working.

There was a problem dough. When looking at the display settings the only available mode was for 1366x768. Xrandr confirmed this:

tom@smaltom:~$ xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1366 x 768, maximum 2646 x 1024
LVDS0 connected 1366x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
256mm x 144mm
1366x768       60.0*+
SDVO-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

That is a problem because I needed to get the vga port working with a cloned image on there. In class my girlfriend needs to see what is on the projection behind her when she faces the class.

Since the projector has a native resolution of 1024x768 we need that resolution on the LCD screen. As it turns out it is easy to force xrandr to use a different resolution.

As described here we just do the following…

We get the raw data for a desired resolution and refresh rate:

tom@smaltom:~$ cvt 1280 1024 60

Then we use that to add the mode to the LDVS0 screen that represents the netbook LCD:

tom@smaltom:~$ xrandr --newmode "1024x768_60.00"  63.50  
               1024 1072 1176 1328 768 771 775 798 -hsync +vsync
tom@smaltom:~$ xrandr --addmode LVDS0 1024x768_60.00

Now we can, when something is connected to the VGA port, enable the new mode and also the projector.

tom@smaltom:~$ xrandr --output LVDS0 --mode 1024x768_60.00 --pos 0x0 
               --output RGB0-1 --mode 1024x768 --pos 0x0

We get a perfect clone. For the convenience I added two icons on the top panel so it is really simple to switch between modes.

There was only one thing left that annoyed me. The Fn+(F1-F12) hotkeys didn’t really work. As it turns out this is also easy to fix.

We have to edit the /etc/default/grub file. Where we change the following line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=
"nosplash pciehp.pciehp_force=1 pciehp.pciehp_poll_mode=1
 elevator=deadline acpi_backlight=vendor acpi_osi=Linux"

Some of the switches probably aren’t necessary, but people say they help:D

After this procedure we have a working netbook that runs quite fast and has a nice and sharp picture. It can also be connected to a projector and be used for presentations and video playback.

Hopefully this little adventure is the first of many I find time to share on this blog.