I think maemo mapper is the killer app for the internet tablet. I use my 770 for lots of other things, but having a quick, zoomable copy of a street map and satellite map of where I live and drive and bike and hike on a handheld with this nice a screen is great. I downloaded all the maps for the island I live on from google maps. Even got a temporary ban from them after about 300 MiB (lots of .jpg files that were really html files saying “service unavailable at this time” or somesuch; had to write a script to delete the ones that weren’t images and wait about a week to download more). Since the new version of mapper, I’ve downloaded all the maps from virtual earth, too (street, satellite and hybrid). Now you might say that all this is somewhat silly, since the island isn’t that big and I rarely travel to the other (unknown) side of it, but I still like seeing what it all looks like from above.

A few days ago, I submitted a bug because os2006 doesn’t backup/restore my /etc/apt/sources.list (the list of application repositories I typed in). Paul Klapperich suggested the custom backup trick to add your own files and dirs to what gets backed up and restored. According to Jakub Pavelek (of nokia), /etc/apt/sources.list is backed up on os2007 on the n800, but this info still might help somebody if there’s anything else they want backed up.

I created a file called my-custom-backup.conf based on this and I think others might appreciate having it, since it fixes 2 bugs or adds 2 features (depending on how you look at it) to os2006 – it backs up the application repository list and all archived email (among other things – see below).

It saves the following files/dirs for the following reasons:

/etc/apt/sources.list list of the application repositories /media/mmc1/.archive this is where the email program stores “archived” emails – I lost a bunch of these when I reformatted my rsmmc card to have 512 byte blocks for maemo mapper a while back because I didn’t check for hidden files on the card /etc/others-menu applications.menu is already saved in the default backup configuration, but I thought I should save this, too /etc/hosts I manually enter the ip addresses of my other computers in here so I can scp from the 770 with a machine name instead of an ip address /home/user/.ssh this is so I don’t have to share my keys across my machines after every os update on my internet tablet, and also so I can have my usual login name on my other machines in .ssh/config – the default for ssh is to use the current username, which is “user” on the 770 /home/user/.bash_profile I got used to the alias ll=”ls -l” on redhat a few years back and can’t get by without it /home/user/.bash_history /home/user/.ash_history /home/user/bin for a couple scripts I wrote /home/user/keys the ssh keys for the other machines /media/mmc1/.albums this is for obscura, which is already looking really good /home/user/.thumbnails I think this is where file manager stores the image thumbnails – might as well back it up /etc/…/my-custom-backup.conf this config file, of course

Instructions:
download my-custom-backup.conf, edit it to suit your needs, get root & xterm on your 770, and as root, copy my-custom-backup.conf to /etc/osso-backup/applications/ and backup to your heart’s delight. I tested restoring with this custom backup file and it didnt’ brick my device, which I look at as a success.

Any word on whether you can videoconference from an n800 to anything besides another n800 right now? (I only have a 770, so I can’t test).

Undoubtedly (I like positive thinking) the skype client will take advantage of the webcam api to provide video connectivity to skype users on win/mac (since the regular linux client doesn’t do video AFAIK). It’ll be a good thing, because my parents use skype on windows and my girlfriend uses skype on her mac. So they’ll finally be able to see me. Not that they have webcams, mind you. But once it does work, I’ll have an excuse to get each of them a webcam.