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Thanks to a handful of donations, I was able to purchase a Logitech G15 keyboard so I could add support for the LCD. I’ve got the technical details worked out of how to display stuff, but I’m not sure what is most useful to display.

The screen is 160×43, so there is very limited space. The “medium” font size is reasonable for quick information. The “small” font takes more than a glance and large font just doesn’t give enough characters per line.

I’ve come up with this (the top line is the “small” font and the others are “medium”):

LastXmit is the user that last transmitted something
SrvrJoin is the last user that joined the server
ChanJoin is the last user that joined your channel
Ping is the name of a duck in China

Or this style, which is really just an event log (I’m actually just showing off that I got the logo on there):

Certainly, the community can come up with better ideas… so post your thoughts here. For bonus points, draw a mockup in 160×43 (or at least to scale… like 320×86)

As an example of what can be done with the libventrilo3 library, we’ve created the much requested jukebox bot that will play MP3s from your music library.

It’s not installed/compiled by default, it’s definitely not stable, and the only way to get it is to compile from source (and even then it takes some effort). The jukebox plays random songs from your music directory, allows users to search for songs, has volume control, and refuses to play Creed songs on principle.

You’ll need some additional libraries to get the jukebox working: libmpg123-dev libmpg123-0 libspeexdsp-dev libspeexdsp1

After the bot logs in, enter global chat with it and type: !start

Chat Commands:

!start -- start playing music
!stop -- stop playing music
!next -- play a new random track
!move -- move to your channel
!play [song/artist/file name] -- search for a song by filename and play the first random match
!volume [0-1] -- Set the volume to the specified level: ex: !volume 0.5

Usage:

mangler-jukebox \
    -h hostname:port \
    -u username \
    [-p password] \
    [-c channelid] \
    [-v volume_multipler] \
    [-s stereo; celt only] \
    /path/to/music

For all of the PulseAudio haters out there, “Haxar” in our IRC channel has written a patch that gives Mangler native ALSA support. This is now in the latest SVN revision with a couple of new options to configure. To build with ALSA, run:

./configure --enable-alsa

Then rebuild Mangler and give it a go. It hasn’t been tested extensively, so let us know if it does or does not work for you. And come join us on IRC and give Haxar big slobbery kisses for his effort.

Update: In the latest SVN revision, ALSA is enabled by default if you have the appropriate libraries.

Over the past month, we’ve taken what we feel is a well deserved break from coding. However, with the new year, we’re ready to start going again. We’re not quite to the point of having a new snapshot available, but we’ve made good headway in the past few days. If you’re running directly from SVN, the following features are now available:

• You can now log in as an admin
• Drag and drop users to move channels
• You can kick and ban users via right-click
• Per-user volume settings are saved between restarts
• Channel passwords are saved between restarts
• A master volume control is available in the Audio Settings menu

Remember, the SVN build is unstable. Things may or may not work as expected. But if you’re feeling adventurous, test it out.

As previously stated, the next release will focus primarily on administrator functionality. Also in the works is version 1.0.1 which fixes some minor issues and gets us on the path to inclusion into the Ubuntu repos.