Engwar

Fetching song lyrics

LyricWiki is an excellent free service providing song lyrics. A la wikipedia for song lyrics. One cool feature is that the site uses nuSOAP to provide a web services interface for fetching lyrics. Wrote a small PHP class with the help of WSF/PHP which will give a simpler interface. Grab it here (make sure to rename it to .php).

Here’s a few method calls,

Getting song of the day should be easy. getSOTD() method returns an array, song title, artist and the lyrics. Let’s just fetch the song and display only the lyrics.

<?php
require 'lyricwiki.php'
 
$lw = new LyricWiki();
 
$song = $lw->getSOTD();
 
print $song['lyrics'];
?>

Ok, let’s try to fetch lyrics of a song you know,

<?php
require 'lyricwiki.php'
 
$lw = new LyricWiki();
 
# parameters: artist and the song title
print $lw->getSong('iron & wine', 'boy with a coin');
 
?>

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Nokia N78

I’ve been using a Nokia N78 for couple of days now and it feels great. The biggest barrier in the very first couple of days was the lack of touch screen. I’ve been touching the icons and wondering why nothing happened, almost restarted the phone This will be like a mini review about the phone. Please bare with me for the references to HTC Touch ‘cos that’s what I’ve been using for quite sometime.

Form factor. First of all, given the width and height of the phone I quite liked the candy-bar form factor. No fugly qwerty maps. Relief. Feel comfortable in the hand too, unlike the N95, which IMO is a bit bulky. In the back there’s no protective cover in the housing over the camera. This has been the case with HTC Touch as well but they have a nice cover to put the phone on. Likewise, you might not wanna use this phone without a pouch unless you’re ok with scratches.

Keypad. Housing doesn’t feel great compared to other models, specially given my previous HTC Touch experience. For example it’s not easy to press the end key. Even if you do manage to press this, sometimes it has pressed the right selection key instead. This can get annoying. Ditto for left selection key and the call key. Rest of the keys are ok, but compared with the keypad designs in N95, it’s doesn’t feel natural when composing a text message/email.

Camera. N78 comes with a 3.2 megapixel camera which gives quite decent picture quality. Heck, my old digital camera is a 3.2 megapixel one. The phone has 3G so you it does have 2 cameras. Install vigo and you can transform your phone as a wireless web cam.

GPS. Phone comes with integrated GPS which you could use to do all that GPS jazz with maps etc… Also it has A-GPS support which gives you more accurate results.

Radio. It’s nice to have a radio on the phone so that you could tune into house music on local radio channels when you’re in a situation where you can hear horrendous music in the background In addition to the visual radio, you could listen to a large number of online radio stations.

FM transmitter. One cool feature of N78 is the built-in FM transmitter. You could play a song and then transmit on a frequency of your choice. Didn’t quite check the exact distance but the receiver was able to play quite nicely when the phone is about 10 meters away. No more burning of podcasts into CDs to listen while you’re driving. Just tune in and listen to stuff playing on your phone!

Storage. Comes with 90MB of RAM, 76MB of phone memory and a 2GB microSD card. Quite enough for the podcasts, indie music plus some techno.

WiFi. I’m really happy that the device has wireless. So there’s the option of being always connected without having to run your mobile phone bill sky high. Works seemlessly with access points with WEP+hidden ESSID.

3.5G. You can enjoy HSDPA speeds upto 3.6Mbps with Nokia N78. I just enabled dual mode, and enjoying 3.5G HSDPA with my Dialog connection. Armed with the webkit based browser, life cannot get any better

Message reader. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that there’s message reader. Which reads out your SMSes and emails at a surprising rate of accuracy. It was nice to hear it reading xyz LKR as xyz Sri Lankan Rupees.

Navi Wheel. This is another really cool feature where you could scroll by touching the outset of the ok button in clockwise/anti-clockwise direction. This doesn’t work for all the menus though.

Apologies for not having any screenshots. For the life of me, I can’t seem to get either Best Screen Snap or Screenshot to work.

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Windows mobile: the good and …

… the good. Surprise! IMHO, one of the best and stable products Microsoft has put out is Windows Mobile. 6.0 to be more specific because that’s what I use. I’ve been using an HTC Touch for more than a year and (surprisingly?) haven’t had a single problem with the phone or the Windows Mobile 6.0 software. Although I haven’t flashed ROMs I’ve been heavily using some 3rd party apps and have done some UI customizations. Nothing critical though, just installing a fraction of all the free apps out there. There was never a single moment where I had to restart the device due to a software bug or OS crash.

I’ve got HTC Home Customizer which adds 6 tabs instead of the boring 3 tab default layout in the home screen. This also allowed installing the vista icon set which is quite nice. HTC Touch doesn’t have 3G nor GPS but the device is quite functional and does have WiFi. Also, get PointUI installed if you like smooth animation effects like in an iphone.

Task scheduling functions which comes by default in WM6 is superb. You could schedule a task, which repeats from say, Monday to Thursday or which ever days you could pick and set reminders etc… The flexibility it provides for this is just fabulous and the interface is really easy to use.

The only minor annoyance I could think of is inability to use headphones when the phone is plugged into the charger or to the USB. Default on screen keyboard might be best used with the stylus. It’s not easy writing a text message with your thumb. There are plenty of free on sceen keyboards which makes writing with your thumb an easy task. PocketCM and TouchPal comes to mind. You have the word/excel/power point set but I haven’t used any of these. I’m not a big fan of wordpressors myself so that might be the reason for the lack of usage, then again other than reading a doc file that doesn’t have any fancy formatting it’s really hard to imagine someone doing their useful wordprocessing tasks using these. Adobe PDF viewer which comes with it is pointless. Why? when you zoom the text in a PDF to a readable level you’ll find yourself constantly having to scroll horizontally to read a sentence. This is the case with Adobe PDF viewer in almost all the mobile phones with a limited screen size.

Will rant about the current mobile device later.

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