valites.net

I picked up a Sharp Zaurus 5600 (poodle) a while back and was recently able to connect it to my Verizon LG vx8100 cell phone to dial into the PPP servers at work. If you’re not familiar with it, the Zaurus is an extremely hackable PDA that runs linux. It has a terminal with ssh and can run Firefox or pretty much any *nix application out there (including X-Windows). I can now drop the Zaurus, cell phone and a USB cable into my waterproof Simms camera bag, hike a couple miles up a creek and no longer have to worry about being paged for work and not being able to respond.

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One of the things I finally got around to doing for the end of hunting this year was to figure out how to convert videos into 3gp format to watch on my LG-VX8100 phone. I used the venerable ffmpeg program to do so. Due to licensing restrictions on the 3gp (AMR) codecs, the version of ffmpeg shipped with Ubuntu is not capable of doing the conversion without being recompiled. While there are a handfull of guides on the web for compiling ffmpeg with 3gp support from source, I didn’t find one that detailed how to make a Debian .deb package it & I hit a few bumps along the way, so here’s the steps I took to get it to work.

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