making apps, making webs.

Pygame on nokia phones with pys60! Details here: http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?p=516861 The port is very fresh(by GameDude from Finland), so there's a few incomplete parts, but enough things to have fun with. Nokia should be congratulated for supporting python on their phones(the most popular phones in the world). Unlike apple, which does not allow python on their iphone.

I started adding more midi support to pygame . Pygame can already play midi files, however it can not get midi input, or send midi output to devices. Nicholas played around with some midi stuff in our eye stabs computer game... where it turned notes from a real guitar using pitch detection into midi events. This experiment used portmidi, and it seems to work ok in a cross platform manner. I hooked up my USB midi controller, and am able to get midi events! I've also added some code which converts the midi events into pygame events, and posts them to the normal pygame event queue. This simplifies things for people already used to handling events with pygame (like mouse, keyboard, and joystick events). I can also get it to write to midi outputs, but haven't really got a use for that yet. However I would like to hook it up to my casio keyboard to get some retro sounds out of it... but I have no midi output converter anymore. It is possible to get USB->midi converters fair...

For a full system image backup tool, clonezilla is really nice. You can boot off a CD or a usb stick and clone partitions or disks over the network to some network drives. The iso CD image is about a 90MB download. You can backup to ftp, smb, ssh, or local usb attached drives. It doesn't backup the whole size of the image, only the space you have used on your disk. So if you have a 600GB drive, and only use 40GB it'll only backup the 40GB. It can even compress the saved images with various forms of compression(gzip, bz2, lzo etc). The only downside is that you need to take your machine offline to do so. However to save a lot of time restoring your OS(s) in the future, it's a really good tool. It's based on linux, and is free to use/modify. It works on apple hardware, but only has experimental support for backing up OSX partitions... but I think it works with full disk images. It works fine for windows, and linux partitions of course.