Last weekend I attended the N9 Hackathon in Vienna. Nokia kindly sponsored all food and accommodation costs and, at the very end, surprised me with an entirely unexpected gift of a N9 phone.

Andrew Olmsted built the first FBReader packages for Harmattan, after tweaking the build system a bit. The desktop version of FBReader already used Qt 4, and ran almost unmodified, but with some bugs (segfault on task switch) and ugly UI.

Andrew Olmsted built the first FBReader packages for Harmattan, after tweaking the build system a bit. The desktop version of FBReader already used Qt 4, and ran almost unmodified, but with some bugs (segfault on task switch) and ugly UI.

Last Thursday I received a package containing something called the Nokia N950 development kit. Sweet sweet hardware, shame it's not going to be sold to end users. The software is visibly an unfinished pre-release version, but shows great potential. There are almost no 3rd-party apps, which is why Nokia is loaning these N950s to random developers.

I intend to port GTimeLog to it. Although my more immediate need is to have FBReader, so that I can stop carrying both this one and my N900 with me everywhere. Also, vim would be nice.

I've already hacked up Lithuanian support to the virtual and hardware keyboards, thanks to the very nice design of Maliit. As a comparison, I've had my N900 for a year and a half, and I still can't type Lithuanian on it. XKB is not fun.

Last Thursday I received a package containing something called the Nokia N950 development kit. Sweet sweet hardware, shame it's not going to be sold to end users. The software is visibly an unfinished pre-release version, but shows great potential. There are almost no 3rd-party apps, which is why Nokia is loaning these N950s to random developers.

I intend to port GTimeLog to it. Although my more immediate need is to have FBReader, so that I can stop carrying both this one and my N900 with me everywhere. Also, vim would be nice.

I've already hacked up Lithuanian support to the virtual and hardware keyboards, thanks to the very nice design of Maliit. As a comparison, I've had my N900 for a year and a half, and I still can't type Lithuanian on it. XKB is not fun.

My N900 has a SIM card with a flat-rate 3G data plan. My laptop hasn't. What do I do when I want to use the Internet on my laptop somewhere that doesn't have WiFi? Well, there are many options:

My N900 has a SIM card with a flat-rate 3G data plan. My laptop hasn't. What do I do when I want to use the Internet on my laptop somewhere that doesn't have WiFi? Well, there are many options:

Sorry for flooding Planet Maemo -- it was a side effect of changing this feed's URL to only include posts tagged "maemo". I'm not sure if the fault is PyBlosxom's or the aggregator's

As a penance, here's a Terminal trick for you:

LABELS='[Tab,Esc,Enter,PgUp,PgDn,F2,VKB]'
KEYS='[Tab,Escape,KP_Enter,Page_Up,Page_Down,F2,Return]'
gconftool -s /apps/osso/xterm/key_labels --type list --list-type string "$LABELS"
gconftool -s /apps/osso/xterm/keys --type list --list-type string "$KEYS"

This changes the toolbar to have three extra keys (Enter, F2, and a key that acts like Enter when the hardware keyboard is open, and opens the virtual keyboard if the hardware keyboard is closed).

Update: added screenshot:

Nokia N900 Terminal app with new toolbar buttons

Sorry for flooding Planet Maemo -- it was a side effect of changing this feed's URL to only include posts tagged "maemo". I'm not sure if the fault is PyBlosxom's or the aggregator's

As a penance, here's a Terminal trick for you:

LABELS='[Tab,Esc,Enter,PgUp,PgDn,F2,VKB]'
KEYS='[Tab,Escape,KP_Enter,Page_Up,Page_Down,F2,Return]'
gconftool -s /apps/osso/xterm/key_labels --type list --list-type string "$LABELS"
gconftool -s /apps/osso/xterm/keys --type list --list-type string "$KEYS"

This changes the toolbar to have three extra keys (Enter, F2, and a key that acts like Enter when the hardware keyboard is open, and opens the virtual keyboard if the hardware keyboard is closed).

Update: added screenshot:

Nokia N900 Terminal app with new toolbar buttons

... not having a headache.

In other news, my Nokia N810 Internet Tablet finally arrived. It looks better in real life than in pictures.

Strange quirk: the 2 gigs of extra internal flash memory (formatted as FAT32) are mostly unused (according to df) while at the same time being three quarters full (according to du):

/media/mmc2 $ df -h .
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mmcblk0p1            1.9G      8.0k      1.9G   0% /media/mmc2
/media/mmc2 $ du -sh .
1.5G    .

Ouch. Time to run fsck.vfat on it. Or perhaps just reformat, to avoid the other famous bug (attempt to access beyond end of device), which, let me check, yes, I also see:

[584959.868000] usb-storage: device scan complete
[584959.868000] scsi 3:0:0:0: Direct-Access     Nokia    N810              031 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
[584959.868000] scsi 3:0:0:1: Direct-Access     Nokia    N810              031 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
[584959.872000] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] 3932160 512-byte hardware sectors (2013 MB)
[584959.872000] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[584959.872000] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 0f 00 00 00
[584959.872000] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[584959.872000] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] 3932160 512-byte hardware sectors (2013 MB)
[584959.876000] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[584959.876000] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 0f 00 00 00
[584959.876000] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[584959.876000]  sdb: sdb1
[584959.880000]  sdb: p1 exceeds device capacity
[584959.884000] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk
[584959.884000] sd 3:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[584959.884000] sd 3:0:0:1: [sdc] Attached SCSI removable disk
[584959.884000] sd 3:0:0:1: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0
[584960.240000] attempt to access beyond end of device
[584960.240000] sdb: rw=0, want=4013848, limit=3932160
[584960.240000] Buffer I/O error on device sdb1, logical block 501728

It would be interesting to know how this came to be. Do some N810s have more internal memory than others? Or was the filesystem image made too big for all of them by accident?