I had toyed with the idea for a while, and even written a post some time ago suggesting that my next phone would like be an Android one. A couple of weeks ago my n900 decided to stop booting at all, and I had to send it away for repair. While it was away I borrowed a G1 from a friend, and got to spend a week with it.

One of the things which I like about Maemo is the way they arrange an application repository structure go with a development cycle of an app.

I recently watched a really interesting you tube video about drive. Eg that which motivates us.
It’s really interesting in two ways. Firstly the content is interesting to me, as it pertains to things that motivate people and what generally makes people happy in work.
The second, is that the style of the video is fantastic, it’s basically a lecture which has been put to an animation of drawing on a whiteboard, drawing pictures and words that go with what is being said. I really love this idea and it makes for a great video. So if you got this far without clicking on the link, go spent the next 10 minutes watching. It’s ok. I’ll wait.

Recently Nokia released the much awaited pr 1.2 firmware for the N900, and among the many bug fixes and tweaks, came the ability to easily rotate applications to portrait by hitting ctrl+shift+r, then closing the keyboard and rotating to portrait. This feature had the knock on effect that I started to look seriously at portrait support in Witter, where upon I quickly found a pre-canned python module that I could just include to get persistent portrait support available from the talk.maemo.org forums

In the last couple of days I’ve spent several hours trawling the internet in search of an example of something I hoped would be fairly easy. How to trigger an IM/Email type notification event from python. Many people have asked that Witter do these style of notifications when a mention or DM is received. But how to do them? I had been using:
note = osso.SystemNote(self.osso_c)
result = note.system_note_infoprint(str(receive_count) + ” Tweets Received”)
to display a banner, but I could find nothing that would point me towards the style which flashes the corner menu button and shows up in the task switcher until dismissed.

It’s no secret I am a huge fan of Nokia phones. Every mobile I’ve ever owned has been a Nokia, for over a decade no other manufacturer has come close when I’ve looked for my next phone.

The last week has seen some interesting progress for the n900. Firstly it was great to see phototranslator finally being availiable in extras-devel. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about having lost patience waiting and played with OCR myself. However phototranslator has put it together in a slick package and combines with google translate api to provide a pretty cool application.
Obviously it is of most use if you are travelling to a foriegn country, translating signs and menus as you go, but it is still interesting to play with and just show off the capabilities of the device (without having to drop to a terminal).

This week I decided to spend some time playing with something a little different on my n900. Namely optical character recognition.

For the last couple of weeks, my time on Witter has been spent refactoring the code to be more managable. And hopefully allow easier addition of things like multiple account support.

Updated 27/5/2011 – updated to reflect comment that really using 200ohm resistor is at the upper limits of spec and more likely to cause a problem than no resistor at all.