Mplayer on Tom Tom

I am now trying to run Mplayer on Tom Tom so that I can watch videos and drive anyone reading this to drink. I found however that Mplayer requires a lot of system resources that are being used by the Navigation application (ttn) So I needed a way to free up the memory and resources being used by the application. This should be as simple as just killing the application using

killall ttn

But the problem is that the ttn application is responsible for petting the dog. That is to say that there is a WatchDog Timer which resets the device after 15 seconds unless something continuously resets the timer.
All that was needed was a script to reset the timer instead, So here is my solution:

#!/bin/sh
killall ttn &&
while(true) do
echo '' > /dev/watchdog
sleep 10
done

The trick is to kill the ttn but also keep the Watchdog from reseting the device. The script also has to be invoked as a background job, so I used an ‘&’ after the command.

./free.sh &
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Hold on to my Tom Tom, Tom

Tom Tom One XLMy TomTom arrived in the post today. I was very excited but managed to hold of my temptation to open the box until I had at least had my dinner. Later on I wanted to try it out whilst taking my friend Tom to the local Morrisons, I handed it to him and said “Hold on to my Tom Tom, Tom”. Ha Ha Ha I am so funny. The TomTom was a Christmas present (well actually I bought it in the Halfords sale using money my parents gave me for christmas). I am very pleased with it so far, its very easy to use and very intuative. In fact I didn’t need to reference the manual at all… not that I ever do anyway.