Though the entire world is screaming on top of the roof that it is almost end of MAEMO as it has reached the end of its development lifecycle and the parent company having decided to abandon it and pursue a new OS (Meego) I still believe that it still has a long way to go and especially when it is backed by such a responsible and powerful community which almost everytime has risen to the occasion and has never let the MAEMO user down.

My Fellow MAEMO community comrades, I appeal for your help. I have taken a lot of effort to get this picture and post it here for you guys to work on, so I am sure you guys will not disappoint me and someone of you will surely come ahead and take up the initiative and challenge to fulfill this small request. 

I need to request for an APP. Now this is an APP powered from the website http://www.dictionary.com please also log on to this website to see how it works, that will give you an idea of the stuff I am talking about and requesting about. Now I know there are some substitutes available for such an APP in the MAEMO repository like the Mdictionary etc…but they still don’t match up to the utility that this particular App offers. So this is one of its kind of App and cannot be replaced by anything else. You guys may think that since I have seen this App on some other phone using some other OS I am asking it to be developed on MAEMO aswell. But no, that is not the reason. It is such a wonderful and a very useful App that it can really help and act very handy especially to people from the Non-English speaking countries and could be a great teacher aswell. Please refer the attachments that I have attached with this, which includes some screenshots and its description. I feel it is a wonderful App and a great idea on part of whoever thought of making it as a quick mobile App. 

I am sure and desperately hoping that someone of you would surely…take this up and take it to closure and make this App even for the MAEMO-5 community.

ANT+ homepage

Some Linux software already works with the protocol using a USB adaptor that is basically an ANT+ to serial adaptor:

Garmin ANT+ data downloader

another ANT+ utility

Garmin ANT+ decoder

Talk thread here.

Depending on the sensitivity of the accelerometer within the N900, an application could be written to monitor earthquakes.  Since the devices won’t be embedded into the ground they could not be accurate to the level of scientific instruments, but the density of monitoring devices would still provide valuable data to seismologists (ie. calculating the relative ground roll amplitude, refining the location of the epicentre [although already very accurate), dense data gridding of initial wave travel times).  More importantly this would be a fantastic awareness and educational tool for people to better understand when/where/how often earthquakes happen around the world.

Unfortunately, the monitoring done by any single device would only be possible while it was at rest (not moving while in your pocket or in your hand).  So it might be difficult to screen out all the erroneous monitoring (ie. Someone picks up their N900 while monitoring and it registers the movement).  But this can be overcome the same way that scientists eliminate the rumbling of trucks near their seismographs, called stacking.  Stacking works by taking all the wavelets heard by all the monitoring devices together and summing them.  This means that statistically with enough devices you begin to cancel out the random events of the individual devices and compound the events that many devices had in common.  An added level of complexity is that you have to make an adjustment for differences in travel time due to the distance from the source (earthquake epicentre).

I imagine the app providing the user with a map of the world showing the location of all the earthquakes that had happened over a few time frames (day, week, year) and their relative strengths.  There would also have to be a button to start/stop monitoring.  Plus all the data recorded needs to be sent to a central data depository on the web where it can be analysed.  

This could provide a tremendous data source for seismologists around the world, and be a fantastic educational tool for earthquake awareness.  The uploaded picture is the recording of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.