This post (like the last) was also tapped out on the Nokia N810. The video above was taken on the Nokia N95 and uploaded from the tablet. I decided to forgo the last half mile (you will soon know why) but I will post a full wrap up when I get home.

After a couple of pre-releases, version 0.1 of Vagalume, the Last.fm client for the Nokia N800, is finally here.

This is the first proper release and it comes with full source code licensed under the GNU GPL.

There haven’t been many changes since the first pre-release from last monday, but this version includes some nice new features such as:

• Proper support for loving/banning tracks.
• Support for tagging artists, tracks and albums (with multiple tags at once).
• More menu entries to select Last.fm radios. Avoid typing long lastfm:// URLs.

I have also compiled packages for Debian etch (x86) and Tablet OS 2008 (using Maemo chinook beta), so if there is any lucky owner of an N810 out there, I’d appreciate feedback ;)

I haven’t tried to compile Vagalume for the Nokia 770. I don’t have one of those and I haven’t had the time to find out if it’s easy/possible to make it work there, but if someone tries please let me know. For those interested, this program depends on GTK+2, GStreamer 0.10, libcurl and libxml2.

You can get Vagalume from my webpage.

I’d like to thank all the people who tested the initial pre-releases and sent me their comments. I’ll take them into account for future versions!

Enjoy!

Updated 02 Nov 2007: Vagalume seems to compile with gregale SDK, so I’ve just put a package for the Nokia 770 in my webpage. If anyone can try it and tell me if it works I’d appreciate it!

Updated 02 Nov 2007:Solmis has confirmed that the package for the Nokia 770 works!

The two teasers I did earlier (the picture and the video) were both composed, uploaded, and posted with the combination above: The Nokia N95 and the Nokia N810. I discussed this combination before and wanted to put it to a good test. Yesterday afternoon, the FedEx man dropped off my new N95-3 and this morning service was established for it. It was hiking time!

Camera performance:
The N95's camera was a solid performer. Even on a hazy day, I managed to snap off a handful of very good shots. They were directly uploaded to Flickr with Shozu. Go ahead and look at that gallery to see the results.

Video Recording:
The video I took was less impressive. My hands were shaky by that point in the climb and I was on unsteady ground so there is a lot of wobble in it. The N95 did not handle the wobble too well, as can be shown in the YouTube video.


Internet Access:
I got a solid 3.5G connection through the whole event. Granted this mountain is literally IN THE MIDDLE of a city - still it was nice to have a solid, reliable, and fast connection.



Actual Blogging Performance:
Blogger's page worked perfectly, as did YouTube. I wasn't able to Shozu upload the video as it was 13 megs and Shozu caps off at 10. I copied the video to the N810 and then uploaded it. It went across the Bluetooth link twice. I wish I could have avoided that, but I wasn't able to use the Bluetooth phone browser as a source on the YouTube upload page. The upload was the longest wait (I didn't time it) but at that point in the hike I NEEDED the break.

I noticed several typos in my entries (fixed when I looked at them at home) that I'll chalk up to carelessness with the keyboard. Even so - I would not have had those typos on a regular keyboard. Still: it's the best thing yet for pocket blogging.

ThoughtFix's Performance:
My feet hurt. My back hurts. My arms hurt. I forgot to snag a GPS shot while I was there. I flaked out on the last 1/3 mile of the hike (because it looked like this) so didn't even make it as far as I said I would. Oh well. At least I got the review material I wanted. I also took yet more pictures using my PowerShot. That was a nice painful amount of fun.

1. In the beginning, there was Netscape, and there was the US Government
2. And they ignored eachother.
   • And all was well,
   • because there was no commerce.
3. And then Netscape created SSL,
   • and this was progress,
   • but all was not good
   • Netscape offered 40-bit encryption,
   • and the US Government said, "that's ok",
   • so things were not bad
4. But this was not quite good enough,
   • so Netscape offered 56-bit and 128-bit encryption,
   • and the US Government said "not for export"
5. And there was some degree of panic
6. But all was good for commerce in the USA.
7. And then Microsoft stabbed Netscape,
   • and this was not good
8. So Netscape promised to open source Mozilla,
   • and there was some celebration
9. But the lawyers spoke up,
   • and reminded everyone about the US Government
10. So Mozilla was released without crypto
    • and with it were flags for --enable-crypto and --disable-cypto
    • and this would lead to confusion
11. People inside Netscape could use the flag
    • because they had the source
    • and people outside could try to add binary blobs later
12. With time, the sources for crypto were released,
    • but the US Government was unswayed
    • it continued to insist that strong crypto not be exported
13. And this was interpretted that crypto would not be on by default,
    • so it wasn't
14. With time, the government changed
    • its rules,
    • regulations,
    • and regulators
15. And some of the rules expired,
    • and this was progress
16. Finally, it was decided that it was ok to switch the default to --enable-crypto,
    • and some said this was good,
    • or at least better
17. But alas,
    • people from the micro-optimization-weenie camp
    • who didn't care about compatibility
    • or supporting the internet
    • would toggle random build flags
18. And this was still a build flag to this day
19. So they came unto #developers
    • and asked bsmedberg about a problem yesterday,
    • and he lamented
20. For while some of the regulations have expired,
    • there are still lawyers
    • and they still worry that in some poor country it might be a violation of export law to not be able to build --disable-crypto
21. And as such, bsmedberg can not yet hide that flag from the optimization weenies
22. And here we are the day after yesterday, retelling the story
23. Fixing it will have to wait until the day after tomorrow?

This story was brought to you in part by CVS, mozilla.org, Perl, and Bonsai (sponsor of CVS Blame)

I am not the only one who took a stab at building a Nokia N800 vs. N810 comparison. Here we have:

• NeonCherry
• Tabrez
• Forum Nokia's comparison chart (at the bottom)
• NokNok.tv

All worth reading for different angles. Yay second (through fifth) opinions! If you have your own (or see another) N800 and N810 comparison article, let me know.

On a related note, I love it when users comment with different angles on the same technology. Even when someone says "Dan, you're totally wrong because...." it helps me break my mold and expand on others' insight. If you don't read my comments from time to time, I welcome you to do so.

On a final note: The contest entries are due in two weeks! Win an N810!

I uploaded two new variants of the free ring tone I recently created for use with N800/N810. You can get them from my ring tone downloads page:

Karoliina’s free ring tones for Nokia N800/N810

These new variants are shortened version of the original one. I have boosted the melody somewhat up and made the dreamy pad background a bit quieter. I prefer myself the original version, but in noisy environment etc. the melody is hard to hear in that version and also it is hard to distinguish if some distant radio channel is playing or is someone calling you with Googletalk. The new versions get straight to the business and may be more suitable for ring tone use that way.

To install new ring tones to the device, all you need to do is to download the .wav -file, save it on your memory card. Then go to status bar and select sound -applet. Select settings from the menu. Then activate the ring tones -tab and tap browse. Select the file from the memory card you just downloaded there. Adjust a proper volume (I would like to recommend selecting quite high volume setting because otherwise you don’t hear it if the device rings in your pocket or hand bag). Select close and you are done.

I have licensed my music with Creative Commons -license, so feel free to tweak the tracks by yourself if you like.

This is a silly question, really. Better to ask:

What doesn't scare a build engineer?

Sleep. Children.

Some scary statements:

• I just grabbed the firefox source and I'm about to build it for the first time :-)
• Then comes the meddling...

How do I specify which version of gcc on my system to use?

• on osx you could use gcc_select
• however typically you'd use a mozconfig and add CC=, CXX=, etc
• please read about how to use a mozconfig

What OS was this villain using?

*** CTCP VERSION reply: Version 5.2 - an IRC client for emacs (ERC (mailing list: erc-discuss@gnu.org))

• emacs-os? - I'm not sure we support that
• Gnu/Linux, sorry - Ubuntu 7.10, to be exact

What's scary about that?

• note that many versions of gcc are more or less broken

What do you mean by "firefox source"?

• did you grab the latest using client.mk checkout?
• or did you foolishly use apt-get source
• or did you download a firefox2 sourceball?

No, I used CVS. I wasn't aware of it (client.mk) until now

• whatever you did sounds wrong :)

How to start?

Read Build_Documentation perhaps?

Actually, what's more interesting is when people ask other questions. Our villain asked a really scary question, because when I pointed him to gcc.mozconfig he noticed --enable-crypto.

Feel free to read my retelling of that story

GigaOM has a very interesting article on the new N810 internet tablet, and how it will be relevant for the developing world:

Infonetics estimates that 47 percent of all mobile subscribers come from the Asia Pacific region, 36 percent from Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and only 9 percent from North America. Nokia alone will ship 400 million handsets this year, and most of those devices can surf the web. Geography, power consumption, and lack of wired infrastructure mean that much of the planet will see its first web page on a portable handset. Not only will Internet handsets be everywhere, they’ll be open.

Via Internet Tablet Talk. Probably would be a good time to brush up my WURFL skills...

Technorati Tags: maemo

On my uStream.tv channel, I will be hosting a "Live Community Tech Support" session this coming Thursday at 6PM Arizona time. I get tons of tech support questions on a wide range of issues and do not have time to answer them all, so I figured I would make a live chat and invite community members to join in and answer each others' questions.
You can mark your calendar with this link:

As of this writing, there are three entries to the N810 Giveaway Contest. Track this page to see current entries and to get ideas on how you can use your own tablet. With the deadline for submissions still 13 days away, there's plenty of time to get your entry in.

With judges barred from nominating their friends as finalists and InternetTabletTalk users deciding on a final winning entry, there is enough protection for EVERYONE to enter except the judges themselves. Yes, Texrat. Even you can post a video. (That's an inside joke if you're not an InternetTabletTalk regular.)

As in the world of mobile and embedded aggressive changes in technology and devices’ capabilities occur at a high frequency, I decided to make Tinymail’s API very flexible or adaptive.

Yet I wanted to provide a certain functionality, which means a message view component that also shows the typical message headers.

What if the developer wants to wrap the message view in a scrolled window, have a message viewer as a new window or put the thing that displays the header in an expander? On a mobile device with a limited screen height it is a waste of space to show four or five lines of information. If the user wants this info, he can decide to expand it.

Imagine the same software vendor want to adjust the E-mail client for another device? However, nowadays software development must be fast. The change is something that should not destabilize everything that was already working. It must be easy to develop a new version of the message view component that perhaps behaves in a new way. Who knows what the screen will be capable of?

This diagram shows the flexibility of Tinymail’s types. I’m using the decorator pattern here. Decorator is also used by the streams API of Java, .NET and GVFS. I explained Tinne about decorator by simply referring to a painting and its borders. When decorating a painting with borders, you can still look at the painting. Nothing about its functionality really changes, but you add things to it, you decorate it.

In stead of subclassing TnyGtkMsgView, I decided to decorate it with a new implementation of the TnyMsgView interface. This one wraps the TnyGtkMsgView instance (it makes a composition with it). I did the same thing for TnyGtkHeaderView that implements the TnyHeaderView interface.

Because TnyGtkMsgView’s method for creating its TnyHeaderView is abstract, I inherited it as TMutTnyGtkMsgView (which will be the type that we’ll decorate). The TnyGtkHeaderView is decorated by TMutHeaderView. This TMutHeaderView is then created by the TMutTnyGtkMsgView.

TMutHeaderView decorates TnyGtkHeaderView by surrounding it with a GtkExpander. TMutMsgView decorates TnyGtkMsgView (TMutTnyGtkMsgView, actually) by surrounding it with a GtkScrolledWindow.

The results from my first poll are in. Thanks to everyone who voted. The question was: What is the most wanted (missing) N810 feature, and the options and results are:

USB OnTheGo 39 (8%) FM Tuner 32 (7%) Video Out 51 (11%) Scroll Wheel 47 (10%) Full sized SD slots 100 (22%) WiMAX 67 (15%) SIM slot (cell phone) 101 (23%)
It looks like GSM radios edged out over my favorite (Full SD card slots) by only one vote. WiMAX trailed in at number 3. I locked this so only one option was available to each voter so there is demand for each one of these options.

I am not certain if my last option meant to include data access as well thus taking votes from WiMAX. I'll create a simple poll this time. I talk at length as to why the N800 (and now N810) are better without an integrated cell phone. It's too big to be a phone. It would need to be banded internationally or have region-specific models. It would raise the cost and lower battery life. Even so, there is demand for this feature within the tablets. My vote, obviously, is "no." What's your vote? Should Nokia offer "phone" and "non-phone" models? Look for the poll in the right navigation bar on tabletblog.com.

Speaking of polls, there's a great one on InternetTabletTalk as a follow-up to the podcast. Read the post, see the votes, check the comments, and read Jonathan's take on if users are "always connected" or "connected on demand."

Ok, it’s a long time since my last post, but I’m really busy improving EFL, developing Canola (the whole team is, that’s why you see no posts from them either) and also with some presentations about EFL.

Today I’ve presented at CELF Embedded Linux Conference 2007, Linz, Austria, the title was “Fancy and Fast GUIs on Embedded Devices” and is now available online at http://talks.gustavobarbieri.com.br/efl/elce2007/Fancy_and_Fast_GUIs_on_Embedded_Devices.odp Maybe it’s useful to you (trying to get your managers to use something else than GTK/SDL for embedded devices?).

The conference was really great, I’ve met some great hackers that I just know from mail/IRC and could talk again with others that I already knew from other conferences. Free software hackers are usually very kind.

People’s reaction was quite positive, most people realize that trying to modify GTK to fit desired effects or building on top of SDL are both way too painful. I’m not saying that these are bad and nobody should use it, but that they have their own niche and trying to have them to cover the whole word is a bit difficult.

Related to this, Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) (EFL lead developer) was officially announced as “Lead Architect - Graphics” at OpenMoko, a previously GTK-only device. He will not vanish with GTK, but instead create nice native applications, full of special effects and so, that’s cooperation, each technology doing their best to achieve the final goal: usable interfaces.

UPDATE: Video (OGG/Theora) is now available:  http://free-electrons.com/pub/video/2007/elce/elce-2007-gustavo-sverzut-barbieri-fast-fancy-gui.ogg, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2292516949813732934&hl=en

A build of the c3270 IBM 3270 (TN3270) terminal emulator is available for Maemo Bora. If you don’t have the Osmosoft repository you can add it by clicking here, and then find c3270 under user/Emulators in Application manager.

In the photo you can see c3270 running in one xterm tab whilst connected to Hercules running in another. Although there is no reason why you could not use this to connect from an internet tablet to your corporate IBM mainframe if you have one.

Disclaimer: This is provided as-is, without any warranty of any kind, and don’t blame me if this bricks your device or you realise after all these years of working with GUIs that text is better.

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Karma: The total effect of a person's actions and conduct during the successive phases of his existence, regarded as determining his next incarnation. (wiktionary)

Many communities struggle with the question of how to recognize their most valuable members. This is true also for Nokia's maemo.org, the community for open source development on internet tablets. With the two latest device releases, Nokia has given hefty discounts to some members of the community, raising obvious questions on who should be entitled to such a developer device.

One part of answering that question (and managing the developer device program in general) was developing a CRM system for maemo.org including karma calculations based on community activity.

Karma is a complex concept which we decided to simplify a bit following the model we implemented for evaluating newsworthiness of incoming blog items in the Social News project:

• count different contributions user has made
• run those through a rating system (forum moderation, app catalog stars, social news favs, ...)
• apply a contribution type modifier
• add them up

...and we have karma:

Technically the Karma system was implemented as a feature of Midgard's net.nehmer.account profile management component. Out-of-the-box it is able to calculate Karma from various items like forum posts and blog comments inside the Midgard database. To complement that it has a quite simple plug-in architecture for Karma calculations from other systems like GForge, SVN or Bugzilla.

It will be interesting to see how Karma builds up when we start pulling it from different pieces of the open source community infrastructure and external services like Ohloh.

Technorati Tags: maemo, midgard, karma

I've mentioned it in a couple conversations and a guest spot in a podcast, but never posted here about a conversation I had at the Nseries Unlocked Event. Someone asked me what the greatest advantage and disadvantage to the N800 was. My response may not be the whole community view, but here it is:

I'm taking a break from all things Linux. Not because I don't think that Linux is the way forward, but because I have zero time at the moment to play with things that aren't absolutely essential and unfortunately that means Linux and Internet tablets for me. I'm sure I'll be back soon enough though!

Everyone is no doubt already aware of Google's entry into the Mobile market. [Thanks to RogerS at InternetTabletTalk for the link.] It's software only, which is a good move on Google's part. They KNOW software. They KNOW how to integrate their products. Now I'm going to tell Google some things they know already: Don't make a phone of your own. Why?

• They're better than you. Nokia, Motorola, HTC, and others have been doing this for years. They have dozens of phones on the market, brand trust, and experience to make hardware and an integrated OS.
  
• You're not ready to support hardware. Google products (excepting the Google Search Appliance) are all software and are offered without warranty of any kind. In fact, many are still tagged with "beta." You can't do that with a consumer electronics device. You have to offer warranty support, distribution channels, a call center, and a "finished" product out the door.
• People already have phones. That's right. NEW phone sales are slowing with carriers now requiring two-year contracts. Ask any consumer what they hate about their carrier. Count how many times "two year commitment" shows up.
  
• Software can stay carrier independent. Look at the iPhone and how the lust for the word "unlocked" drives people to spend so much more for them. The Nokia Nseries, including the internet tablet, are available on all GSM carriers without commitment.
  

Now let's talk tablets:
Imagine, if you will, Google for Maemo. This will incorporate a series of software package to run on top of Internet Tablet OS and will combine Google products:

• Gmail
• Google Calendar
• Google Documents
• GTalk
  
• YouTube
  
• Picasa
• Blogger
• Jaiku
  
• And (fanfare) Google Gears for offline use
  

Now imagine all this linked to a single Google Account driving the whole tablet. Take this suite of online-to-offline applications and put them on a phone too. Now let that suite run on all phones, all carriers, and in all countries. There's your Google phone - and it's already in everyone's pocket.

This article on Yahoo got me thinking about the role of a PC in the typical home and what tasks it performs.

We have got around 900 submissions to the N810 maemo device program, which is an interesting subset of the >7000 users registered in maemo.org. We have 500 discounts to be distributed among people that is or could be pushing this platform forward. Now we only need to connect this sensible, common-sense principle to 500 userIDs. Because [...]

And apparently all applications are created equal
Android does not differentiate between the phone's core applications and third-party applications. They can all be built to have equal access to a phone's capabilities providing users with a broad spectrum of applications and services. With devices built on the Android Platform, users will be able to fully tailor the phone to their interests. They can swap out the phone's homescreen, the style of the dialer, or any of the applications. They can even instruct their phones to use their favorite photo viewing application to handle the viewing of all photos.

November 12th for the SDK...

More info here

I thought I'd report on the status of my offer of two free keyboards. Curiously, I only received three keyboard requests. I meant to impose a barrier to entry, but maybe not that high a barrier!

I decided not to choose, but instead to make three keyboards. I have ordered and received the electronic parts. I've decided that while I might be able to produce keyboards from the hand photocopies the winners sent in, it's too uncertain a process. Still tinkering with the design, but I think I've settled more on a "kit" for a keyboard.

The trouble with the Chordite is that it really needs to fit your hand. And yet, as a portable device, it needs to be sturdy. Adjustable yet fixed. Malleable yet unchanging. This is not a new problem for people to have faced. Screws, nuts and bolts, glue, clay, plaster, wood, plastic, metal, and rock are all substances which can be changed and yet which are sturdy.

Hands are variable in two ways that matter: in finger length and spacing and in palm width. The chordite needs to be stretchy in both those dimensions, and yet, if you drop it, it shouldn't fall into pieces. It needs to be lightweight so that you can carry it. In order to make all this work, I think that I'll put the switches on little PC boards interconnected with 18 gauge copper wires, covered with a layer of polycapralone. The copper for stiffness, and the polycapralone for sturdiness.

I've done some testing, and an ordinary hair dryer puts out enough heat to soften a fairly thick layer of polycapralone. Once softened, the keys can be moved around, with the copper wire keeping the keys in position while the polycapralone is soft.

Once I've made the PC board with the bluetooth module at the heart of this keyboard, I'll ship these to the lucky winners. We'll see what they have to say. If it's not good, then back to the drawing board.

I thought I'd report on the status of my offer of two free keyboards. Curiously, I only received three keyboard requests. I meant to impose a barrier to entry, but maybe not that high a barrier!

I decided not to choose, but instead to make three keyboards. I have ordered and received the electronic parts. I've decided that while I might be able to produce keyboards from the hand photocopies the winners sent in, it's too uncertain a process. Still tinkering with the design, but I think I've settled more on a "kit" for a keyboard.

The trouble with the Chordite is that it really needs to fit your hand. And yet, as a portable device, it needs to be sturdy. Adjustable yet fixed. Malleable yet unchanging. This is not a new problem for people to have faced. Screws, nuts and bolts, glue, clay, plaster, wood, plastic, metal, and rock are all substances which can be changed and yet which are sturdy.

Hands are variable in two ways that matter: in finger length and spacing and in palm width. The chordite needs to be stretchy in both those dimensions, and yet, if you drop it, it shouldn't fall into pieces. It needs to be lightweight so that you can carry it. In order to make all this work, I think that I'll put the switches on little PC boards interconnected with 18 gauge copper wires, covered with a layer of polycapralone. The copper for stiffness, and the polycapralone for sturdiness.

I've done some testing, and an ordinary hair dryer puts out enough heat to soften a fairly thick layer of polycapralone. Once softened, the keys can be moved around, with the copper wire keeping the keys in position while the polycapralone is soft.

Once I've made the PC board with the bluetooth module at the heart of this keyboard, I'll ship these to the lucky winners. We'll see what they have to say. If it's not good, then back to the drawing board.

[Tags bluetooth, chording, keyboard, chordite ]

While I was not searching for a new project, I have been throwing TMut together. After six quick sessions of working on it, I made TMut:

• Support multiple accounts simultaneously
• Open and display text/plain and text/html E-mail
• Open and display IMAP folders
• Open and display the INBOX of a POP account
• Delete IMAP and Maildir folders
• Create IMAP and Maildir folders
• Move IMAP and Maildir folders
• Copy IMAP, POP and Maildir folders
• Rename IMAP and Maildir folders
• Delete messages from IMAP folders
• Delete messages from POP folders
• Move messages from one folder to another
• Put the connection in IDLE on IMAP and receive notifications
• Create new messages
• Create a reply of a message
• Create a forward of a message, as attachment
• Have accurate progress information

Not unimportant but because Tinymail comes with this support I also made TMut:

• Do CONDSTORE on IMAP
• Do QRESYNC on IMAP
• Do BINARY on IMAP
• Do IDLE on IMAP
• Do various SSL and TLS encrypting
• Do various authentication methods
• …

I’m planning to fine tune all this a little bit, then do a GPEPhone port of it. This will include overriding some of the virtual methods that are right now creating a more or less standard user interface for a GNOME desktop.

I also have to make some sort of optional account editor. Optional because some device vendors have the account editing done by a web page and then uploaded to the device via an SMS (this is not uncommon on for example Nokia phones). I just remember I still have to make a little bit UI for adding and removing attachments from a new message too. When forwarding the forwared message is right now added as an attachment already.

Once all that is finished I of course have to prepare a video demo of running code. I guess the VMWare image will help me a lot with that. After that demo, I will most likely do a release of TMut. Perhaps at the same time release a first Tinymail version too? I’m not sure of that yet. Perhaps I will do a few more pre-releases in stead. It has to be perfect.

I think TMut is ready for contributors now. If you want to join and hack together your favourite E-mail client feature, just get on the Tinymail mailing list and post me your great patches. I also have to document the code of TMut a bit more. And make TMut’s wiki page a bit better too.

The joy of starting yet another cute little project starts …

Maemo Tutorial and Maemo Porting Guide have been updated to contain the latest changes in Chinook, and they have now been published on out website. If you wish to start developing for maemo 4.0 now, please take a look at:

• Maemo 4.0 Tutorial
• Maemo 4.0 Porting Guide

I also rearranged Maemo 4.0 How-to section to a more logical order. I hope you like it! Please send us feedback to chinook-feedback@maemo.org.

Terje

With 10 days (closing at midnight Pacific time on the 16th) left to submit videos, the Nokia N810 Giveaway Contest is reloaded! Look at those prizes! That's right. Together with Dynamism, I am pleased to announce that the contest is not just open internationally but ALL FINALISTS will get a prize! The grand prize winner will get the Nokia N810 when it is available for delivery and the other finalists can get one of the second prizes. Second place will get first choice in the new prize pool and so on. In the event of a voting tie, judges will determine the higher ranked video. The new prize pool is as follows:

• Puchi Puchi bubble wrap keychain/phone charm.
• Laser clock
• Nohonon desk character (choice of colors for luck in work, romance, or health)
• Star Wars 1GB Thumb Drive (choice of Chewbacca, R2D2, Darth Vader, and Stormtrooper)

All of these prizes will be shipped by Dynamism after the winners claim their prizes. Prize deliver, of course, depends on product availability.

Huge thanks to Dynamism for making this contest so much cooler and for making sure we can allow the world to enter. Big thanks to the other bloggers who have linked to this contest as well, thus encouraging others to enter. Don't forget that the original official rules still apply.

Maemo - code in your hands
Originally uploaded by Setanta!

mobile nirvana – everybody in need of some serious typing on the nokia internet tablets should take a peek at the new aluminium apple wireless keyboards (79$).
they are small and stylish, a perfect fit for Maemos. the design is absolutely marvelous. they easily find a place in a bag, are very light and just way cooooool.

now i only need a swissgerman keyboard layout on Maemo…

(post typed on the sofa, keyboard on my lap and N800 standing left of me on the sidestand)

Yet another video demo of TMut. This time I’m consuming most of the operations. Like creating, moving, renaming and deleting folders, sending an E-mail to a GMail account. Then seeing that E-mail arrive on the GMail IMAP server, utilizing the support for IDLE, making a reply and a forward, using a local Maildir folder, moving messages. Stuff.

The video demo also shows the recent new TMutFolderView that reuses Modest’s GtkCellRenderers in the GtkTreeView. These cell renderer reduces space and shows the E-mail header line in the folder summary in two rows.

All this TMut code is still hot, fresh and new. Be careful not to burn your fingers.

In my second guest editorial for GottaBeMobile.com, I explore Rich Internet Applications as an alternative to "waiting for software to be ported" on mobile internet devices. With the power of Mozilla on IT2008/Chinook, this is a "must read" for N800 and future N810 owners. Enjoy!

Applications are boring

Applications are not interesting. They are old-fashioned. But I still struggle and often think about applications. I think about applications such as emails, browsers, instant messaging applications, and so forth. How stupid is this. Especially in the mobile space.

It is funny that I never think about a “phone call” application, although from the software point of view it just an application; similar to an email and other applications. I bet my application thinking originates from the desktop world where I’m used to “install”, and ”purchase”, and “use” applications, such as word processors and spreadsheets. But such thinking feels increasingly stupid and I predict that such thinking will first disappear from the mobile world and eventually from the desktop, too.

Services should go straight and deep

So instead of applications that do things, let’s talk about services that serve users’ needs. So what are my experiences of mobile services so far?

A good service goes straight and goes deep. (Ari’s service rule, eh eh). An example of a straight & deep service is an old-fashioned phone call. It is straight: I just click your name on the phone book. And it is deep: It automatically makes all the necessary steps and gets you in the other end of the conversation. So an old-fashioned phone call is a service provided by my phone, my operator, and my friend in the other end of the conversation. It is straight: green button. It is deep: we’ll talk!

So let me introduce two services that are not straight or deep.

I subscribe to a portal service provided by my cell operator. I first open a phone browser and then select a bookmark provided by my operator. Then, I have a selection of things such as “Ringing tones”, “Pictures”, “Games”, and “Applications”. I select “Games” and the I select “Categories” and then I select “Fun” and then I get a screen that says “not supported by my phone”. After selecting different categories I finally find some games. And then, well, I need to figure out how to buy and download one! Not very straight forward.

I used a non-Nokia phone for a few months. It is good to use competitors’ devices ;-). The phone provided an interesting service that uses the technology created by Gracenote. This is how it works: I’m driving down the road an hear a nice song on the radio. I put the phone next to the car speaker and press a few buttons. In a few seconds I get a text message that tells me the artist, the song and the album. A marvelous piece of engineering --- but not very deep. I’d like to purchase the song, or listen it again, or something. But the service doesn’t go that deep. It just sends me a text message – almost like a teaser!

So, gimme straight and deep, please. The one that does, wins.

(Written with google docs on my N810)

Compared with the default image viewer provided in the OS2007, Quiver, aka quick image viewer has one big advantage, it has a very nice and handy slideshow viewer.

The current version is 0.1.17 and can be downloaded via the maemo website.

I have one remark, the default selected folder can be changed, but cannot be saved. Meaning that everytime - after startup of Quiver - you have to select you favorite folders again.

The 'One Install steps' are showed on the next page.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

MediaBox Media Center

Let me introduce MediaBox, a finger-friendly media center
for Nokia internet tablets, to be released in a few days.

This basically started some months ago as an experimental frontend to
mplayer
with physically correct kinetic scrolling for browsing the collection of
video files. But soon it was clear to me that this user interface could do a
lot more, so I added music playback and integrated the image viewer from my
Obscura project.

MediaBox can play video, audio, display images, features a desk clock with
large letters, and is open for new extensions. It will soon be able to use the
FM radio in the N800 with the pyFMRadio project.



Since the media player backend of MediaBox is mplayer, it will be able to play
almost anything you throw at it, including Ogg Vorbis.




PyFMRadio

The Nokia N800 has a built-in FM tuner and I wanted to be able to use this with
MediaBox. So far, the only FM radio application for the N800 seems to be the
closed-source fmradio applet by Nokia. It's good but it's not finger-friendly.

So I started diving into the kernel code and eventually came up with
a way to control the FM tuner chip with pure Python. This might
be useful to other projects as well, so I set up the offspring project
pyFMRadio.

The recent price drop on the Nokia N800 here in the UK really got me thinking how much I miss my 770 since I sold it around a month ago. I had become increasingly frustrated with it crapping out in the browser to the point that if I hadn't sold it I would of probably thrown it against a wall. Anyway, the N800 always tempted me but it was, in my opinion too expensive. Now that its at £149.99 from Play.com (on pre-order) it was just too tempting.

I guess my little rest from Linux isn't going to be for that long after all!

EDIT: Looks like its back up to £279.99! I hope they honor their pre-orders at the lower price.

PyMaemo has now two new modules: Cython and Storm. The first one is a fork of Pyrex, to generate code mixing Python and C data types. The second is an Object Relational Mapper. Both are available for OS2007 and OS2008 (Chinook Beta).

To install Cython you have to use apt-get install python2.5-cython, because it's targeted to developers. Storm is available through Application Manager. Hope you enjoy it!

After getting huge amount of letters from the world about "we'd like to have smth and smth more and ..."
... finally we've made a mailing lists for browser-extras project. Now everyone can participate in our project and have a talk with developers directly.

Click to subscribe:
- browser-extras-users
...for everyone who have some ideas how to make surfing the Internet better.
- browser-extras-devel
...for everyone who would like to be involved into browser-extras development.



See next to be in touch
Browser-Extras page
MozMobile page

I decided to do another Tinymail pre release. I haven’t yet run out of numbers, so this is pre-release v0.0.4.

Now that TMut is more or less (basic) feature complete, I’m thinking about doing a TMut 1.0.0 too. I don’t know when Modest will be released but I do think it’s almost the time of the Tny E-mail clients. If not Modest then I’ll make a few other E-mail client flavours … like TMut.

There are (probably) still small problems here and there in Tinymail. Mostly the kind of problems that can only be found by putting the code in the hands of users. There have been two or three API changes so the Python bindings are not synchronized (Python developers who started using Tinymail might want to stick with pre-release 0.0.3 until this is fixed).

Oh. I was taking a look at QAbstractItemModel recently. I think it’s doable to make a TnyList that also implements QAbstractItemModel in C++. Having convenient models for views like GtkComboBox and GtkTreeView is more or less what most of libtinymailui-gtk is about. Doing the same thing for QTreeView and QComboBox sounds like a doable idea to me.

I also identified all uses of the GMainLoop in Tinymail. I can easily abstract that (although I know the people at Qt are interested in having GMainLoop integration too).

If you want me to make Tinymail as easy to use with Qt as with Gtk+, fund me and I will :-). Technically it’s perfectly possible and not really hard.

I have been busy lately so I haven’t had much time to work on my little Last.fm client, but I finally managed to prepare a new release, so here is Vagalume 0.2!

First of all I’d like to start with an introduction because some people asked me about the name of this program…

So what does Vagalume mean?

Vagalume is Galician Portuguese for firefly.

The name has absolutely no relation to Last.fm and it doesn’t have anything to do with music either. I chose it just because I liked how it sounded :-)

How do you pronounce Vagalume?

This word is composed of four syllables and it’s stressed on the third one: va-ga-LU-me.

To pronounce each syllable you can follow these examples:

• va as in vast, vantage or varnish (*)
• ga as in garden, garlic or gasp
• lu as in lucid, luminary or lunacy
• me as in medal, melody or medical

(*) although we Galicians pronounce it as in bargain, basket or bathroom

(Updated 10 Nov 2007: as stated in the comments of this post, the Galician phonological representation of the word is /bagalume/ and the usual pronunciation is [bɑɣɑlumɪ]. Thanks Marcos and Cameron)

What’s new in this release?

There haven’t been many big changes, I basically added support to some parts of the protocol that weren’t implemented in the previous version. Here’s the quick summary:

• Support for recommending tracks to other users
• Support for adding tracks to your playlist
• Volume control for the Nokia devices using the hardware +/- keys
• A combo box to select a friend instead of having to type his/her name
• More visual feedback for some actions
• Some bugfixes and other minor changes

Now that most of the core features are more or less working, from now on I think I’ll begin to work on the UI. But beware! I’m not a good UI designer, so be prepared for the disaster :-)

Where can I get it?

You can get Vagalume from my page or from garage.maemo.org.

There are packages for the Nokia 770, N800 and N810, as well as a package for Debian etch (x86).

And that’s all for now. I’d like to thank again all of the suggestions and positive comments that I received these last days. Thank you all! :-)

UPDATE: It seems that this post has just entered planet.gnome.org. This is my first post there, so hi all! :-)

Hi Tableteers!
The second show was a great deal of fun. In addition to answering each others' tech questions, we had a lot of laughs and a couple guest callers over Skype.

I've started a new tip line to catch up on those little things I miss. For example, did you know there's an N810 Facebook group? The address is tips[@] thoughtfix[.]com. Remove the brackets, of course.

I just released TMut 1.0.0. I recommend using TMut with what you’ll find in Tinymail’s Subversion repository. It has been tested with Tinymail’s pre release 0.0.4 too.

In pre release 0.0.4 there’s one known bug about moving folders that has been fixed in trunk.

This version of TMut doesn’t come with an account wizard or account management screen. You’ll have to configure TMut using GConf if you want to use it on your GNOME desktop. TMut’s target devices are for example phones and other mobile devices.

gconftool-2 -s /apps/tinymail/cache_dir -t string .tmut
gconftool-2 -s /apps/tinymail/accounts/count -t int 1
gconftool-2 -s /apps/tinymail/accounts/0/name -t string "My GMail account"
gconftool-2 -s /apps/tinymail/accounts/0/proto -t string imap
gconftool-2 -s /apps/tinymail/accounts/0/type -t string store
gconftool-2 -s /apps/tinymail/accounts/0/user -t string user.name
gconftool-2 -s /apps/tinymail/accounts/0/hostname -t string imap.gmail.com
gconftool-2 -s /apps/tinymail/accounts/0/options -t list --list-type=string '[use_ssl=wrapped]'

Or just use this GConf dump. And change “user.name” to your user name on GMail (or change the hostname to your IMAP server etc etc). This dump comes with GMail’s SMTP server configured too (then you can also send E-mails).

gconftool-2 --load tmut.gmail.gconfdump

Some people may have noticed, but I'm confirming it for everyone else: MicroB has shipped as the only (and hence default...) browser with IT OS 2008.

It's true. They couldn't work out the details and threw in the towel. I'm going to ping my contacts at Sprint and see what's up, but I'm none too happy. *sob* [phonescoop via gizmodo]

N810 maemo submission accepted

Congratulations! You have been accepted to the N810 maemo device
program. We will send your discount and instructions as soon as the
device is available in your selected shop (soon).

Thanks Nokia!!! I can't wait to receive the discount code!

N810 maemo submission accepted

Congratulations! You have been accepted to the N810 maemo device
program. We will send your discount and instructions as soon as the
device is available in your selected shop (soon).

Hooray! I can't wait to put my hands on my new toy!!!

The main objective of the event is to get the

community and the developers together to

discuss the roadmap, correct bugs and dream

about new functionality. If you never

collaborated with Django, or with any other open

source project for that matter, and you feel

like doing so now is your chance!

To take part just add your name to the Wiki.

Lets' go!!

Pick something to work on and do it.

All sorts of tasks are available, from

hard-core hacking to improving documentation

to fixing small bugs.

I've just read in the Maemo site news The final Chinook SDK has been released, what means the N810 device is shopping in the next weeks. I haven't noticed it in the moment I received the email about the N810 discount program. Great news!!! I have already downloaded and installed the rootstraps which can be found here.

Personally, I prefer a manual installation, so it's just a matter of creating and setting up new targets, downloading the i386 and armel rootstraps, run a couple of simple apt-get commands and you're done.

We already have the new version of Canola running on Chinook. It is unbelievable how beautiful and delightful the new UI feels, thanks to our design team, which has been doing an excellent job. I can say it brings a totally new concept and you'll certainly enjoy it *A LOT*. We'll bring other hot news about Canola really soon!

Meanwhile, I encourage everybody to try to learn how to develop applications using the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, specially Evas and Edje.

Many people think it’s pretty amazing that I have been able to lay in bed for two weeks and not go out of my mind — especially knowing that I have 4 +/- weeks to go…

N810 maemo submission accepted

Congratulations! You have been accepted to the N810 maemo device
program. We will send your discount and instructions as soon as the
device is available in your selected shop (soon).

At least, this way, it'll be asier to accept the fact that I'm still unable to upgrade my E90!

BTW, thank you to everyone!

Me too :D

I'm too happy!!! Thank so much Nokia!!!

I hope to get it as soon as possible so I will write a good review about it and I'll begin to test some application :)

I only choose to spotlight those maemo apps that I truly love. If you’ll remember, a recent one was PyChord (you can read what I think about it here). Now, I must take some time to thank Alberto Garcia Gonzalez for developing Vagalume Last.fm Player for maemo.

Vagalume is pretty bare bones as far as the user interface is concerned. But, that is perfectly fine, since the app just works. Alberto has taken standard (and pre-existing) maemo/Hildon UI elements and assembled them into a functional and easy-to-use application. There are no frills here, but this is exactly how I would recommend any programmer who doesn’t want to deal with graphic design to begin (honestly, there is a lot of value to rapid development and not getting caught up in minor details). And, that’s exactly what the maemo SDK is for. (Anyway, I’ll stop myself here and just say that if you’re a geek for this type of stuff, I wrote a whole lot more about it here.)

Vagalume contains all of the functionality you would expect to find in a Last.fm client. It scrobbles. You can love and ban songs. You can tag artists, songs, and albums. You can play your songs, others’ songs, songs with specific tags, or songs by similar artists. You can play recommendations… You’re basically getting what you get on Last.fm.

As I say for every app, there’s always room for improvement. As a graphic designer, I would like to see a few more frills (even something as simple as an application icon). It’d be neat to see the Last.fm logo somewhere. It would be really cool to have a page where you could view user/neighbor profile avatars.

But, those are minor desires for an application that works as well as Vagalume does (and things that Alberto himself plainly admits) — not to mention that this project is still very brand new.

If your a Nokia Internet Tablet owner and a Last.fm user, I highly recommend installing Vagalume.

If you remember, we were figuring out the best way of rewarding community contributions to maemo. Well, the result is now out in the form of 500 emails to 500 fortunate people getting a substantial discount for a Nokia N810. The official announcement (including the list of winners) will be in maemo.org next Monday. We [...]

Here I am to join the lucky posts on planet.maemo.org about getting an N810 discount. Thanks to Nokia for choosing me again! :)

My new media center will soon be ready for the first release. It's already working great, only some rough edges to fix and some performance boosts to apply. When dealing with lots of thumbnail images in an resource-restricted environment such as the N800, you'll have to take special care about clean and efficient programming. And when I say "lots of thumbnail images", I mean that every video, every music ablum, and every image gets a thumbnail preview.

Another big challenge will be to get the app running fine on the Nokia 770. No, this device isn't dead for me yet. Since the video bus of the 770 is actually faster than that of the N800, kinetic scrolling works great there as well. But I'm still struggling with memory limitations and some mplayer issues on the 770.

Many heartfelt thanks from me to the maemo crew:

N810 maemo submission accepted

Congratulations! You have been accepted to the N810 maemo device program. We will send your discount and instructions as soon as the device is available in your selected shop (soon).

maemo team – http://maemo.org

So, what does this mean exactly? Well, I’m one out of 500 lucky maemo members/contributors who will get to purchase the new Nokia N810 Internet Tablet for under half-price! (When it’s released, that is.)

Wait a minute… Wasn’t I just complaining about not being able to afford one of these? Yes, but at roughly $150 US, I think I will now be able to! This is such a serendipitous coincidence — I am so stoked!

So, long time since I have blogged about work, but to let you know, things are progressing quite rapidly and I'm quite sure that you will all love the new Canola ;-) Still stuff to do, but christmas is coming soon... and if things go well, maybe there will be a nice present for all of you.

As most of you know I work at INdT, and I must say that I am enjoying it. It is a lot of work, but I work with a great team of talented people and we sure have a lot of fun at the office, especially due to my malpracticing Portuguese and my lack of shyness... but hmm.. let's not talk more about that :-)

Unfortunately, I didn't get accepted in the N810 device program, so for the time being I will stick to bora for developing Canola. It seems like a very nice device though, and I especially like that it has an integrated GPS now that I work a bit with that, but unfortunately I heard some people comment that the FM radio seems to have been removed. If that turns out to be true that is really a shame, as I used that in the trains quite some times.

A little while ago I registered for Nokia’s N810 device programme and yesterday I received an e-mail to confirm that my application had been accepted. Which means that I will soon be able to purchase an N810 at the heavily discounted price of €99.

I’ll more than likely leave the N800 running OS2007 and that way I’ll have devices running both that and the new OS2008. This will mean setting up a build environment for the new release, and I’ll have to decide whether I want to continue maintaining packages for OS2007 as well or just focus on OS2008. I’m hoping it won’t prove too arduous to maintain builds for both, and suspect this will be the case given that so far I’ve only done builds for curses applications. That said I really should soon take the plunge and have a go at building X11 apps.

And given that I already have two decent spec laptops with WiFi built in, and soon two internet tablets, it could be time to start playing with ad-hoc mesh networks via olsrd.

Fun times ahead!

Share This

I found the email when I got up this afternoon, :D, and so glad that I haven't read the news from maemo news Web site. Otherwise, I might think my application hasn't be accepted.

For sure, it's a great deal to buy such an amazing gadgets with 99Euro, and what also makes me happy is maemo thank contributors in this way.

Thanks, maemo.

I found the email when I got up this afternoon, :D, and so glad that I haven't read the news from maemo news Web site. Otherwise, I might think my application hasn't be accepted.

For sure, it's a great deal to buy such an amazing gadgets with 99Euro, and what also makes me happy is maemo thank contributors in this way.

Thanks, maemo.

I haven’t posted in a while, so some news first: I’ve joined the OpenedHand crew. So far it’s been great: interesting projects, smart people and a really nice and telework-approving atmosphere (I had some doubts about working several thousand kilometers and two timezones away from the office, but it’s been very smooth so far).

For the past few days Iain Holmes and I have been reviewing the geoclue API (for those of you just tuning in: Geoclue is a geoinformation framework/library that’ll make your apps location-aware, whether on desktop, laptop or Internet Tablet). Iain posted our proposal to the mailing list yesterday. Comments on the API changes are very welcome, especially from application developers interested in using Geoclue.

I feel like I should explain why we want to change pretty much the whole API — I know it might look like NIH syndrome if you just take a quick look… So here goes:

• First, we’re still unreleased*: if we want to change something, now is the time.
• The way functionality was divided among interfaces did not make sense to us: One data provider may provide position, but not address info; another may provide both. It makes sense that the first one implements Position-interface and the second one implements both Position and Address. These changes will make it easier to write a master-server that could actually select different data sources based on their availability and accuracy
• A few methods and signals had details that really needed to be changed: CivicLocation did not have timestamp on it. Position didn’t have real validity flags so it was hard to tell if a result was valid coordinate or not.
• At this point the milk had been spilled already. The API had to break in a major way anyway, so there’s little harm in fixing the small annoyances too: CamelCasing interface, method and signal names; changing method names to more meaningful ones (like CivicLocation -> Address).

*) I do have geoclue packages available for maemo, but they’re not widely used yet, as far as I can tell. I promise to help if someone’s done a lot of work based on current API.

As much as I love talking to all of you who contact me privately over instant messengers, Email, MySpace, Skype, Facebook and YouTube, I no longer have time to research and present the technical questions that hit one inbox or another on a daily basis.

In trying to expand my wiki, I created a page for users to post questions. I'll update it as often as I can with the answers to the questions I find. Once that grows, I'll break out the questions in to the other FAQ pages. The General Tablet FAQ is a good place to start.

The best place for answers, of course, is the forum on InternetTabletTalk.com. Chances are someone already asked the question you have. Search the forums and you can find your answers faster!

With that in mind, I am hosting another live show: This time early in the morning for my international readers. This Thursday, November 15th at 10:00 AM Arizona time. Add it to your calendar:

It seems the OS wars has been reaching new levels. After Windows Vista soft drink, we have also Ubuntu Cola.



More pictures on Flickr.

The Asus Eee is an embedded Linux featherweight notebook of sorts. I got to play with one briefly and posted that on ultramobilegeek.com. The pictures were taken on the N95 and cropped, resized, and posted with the N810. I love this duo.

The final version of Maemo SDK 4 is out. Like most other people I couldn't wait for the final release and I installed the beta version. The big question, when I did read about the final version was "how can I upgrade to the final version without installing it from scratch?!". Luckly one kind person helped me on maemo-developer mailing list, and suggested me to do a dist-upgrade from inside the Scratchbox environment. So, login into tour Scratchbox environment and execute this:

[sbox-SDK_BETA_X86: ~] > fakeroot apt-get update
[sbox-SDK_BETA_X86: ~] > fakeroot apt-get dist-upgrade

That's all! I don't know if this is the official method to do the upgrade, but it worked for me. I checked, after the upgrade, if I had the right packages installed, using this page: http://tablets-dev.nokia.com/4.0/4.0b_vs_4.0_content_comparison.html
and they were right.

I followed a couple of posts today in Planet Gnome and read about Reinteract. This project is freaking awesome!!! Watch the screencast. It worths every minute. Reinteract is something that fits like a glove in Maemo. I've started playing with it a bit and a few minutes later I got something really interesting:



Wooohooo!!! The patch is really small, about 60 lines. I have not tested it a real device, but it should perform well. Any one would like to try??

Better than surfing on the Web from everywhere is doing it all on your way ! On that regard, Firefox is really a pioneer: its robust Addon backend and online support make possible to customize your browsing experience in a few clicks. think that Browser-extras project is a way to go in order to get MicroB closer to Firefox.

From an user point of view, I see it as a really great and promissing initiative but how about from a MicroB extension developer's prospective ?

Some differences between MicroB's Addon system and Firefox' one make extension development for MicroB a bit more painful then it should: Firefox counts on some built-in mozilla technologies that are disabled in compile time in microb-engine:

• XBL (XML Binding Language): "an XML-based markup language used to declare the behavior and look of XUL Widgets and XML Elements".

• XUL: Firefox' UI language.

• Overlay: "XUL files used to describe extra content in the UI".
  

• XPI support: only .deb

• No debugging tools (DOM Inspector, Firebug, Error Console) available.

We lack manpower to improve this development environment specifically ... =/ But the project is on regardless that, work is being done, and some results are already out there.

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

My proposal has been selected by Maemo Developer Device programme for Nokia N810 device. This time (I’ve been accepted into 770 and N800 programmes as well) I’d like to concentrate on a bit different things than usual: geo-mapping.

Great, it seems that I will be getting a N810 anyway :-) as today I found the activation code in my email inbox!

Thanks you, Nokia!

I'm sure you won't regret, and to let you know, I already helped Marcelo Lira getting started with creating packages for Chinook.

So this post is really about Canola; it looks like all the lucky N800 owners out there is going to get themselves a Christmas present this year. Yes, about 5 months in the works, the new version of Canola is finally starting to take form and we are aiming at a Christmas release for the public.

Canola has been totally rewritten, using new libraries mostly developed jointly with the open source community and using our beloved python. And it is filled with nice new features, cool, usable effects, and not to forget, it is fast!

With the use of python and our new Canola framework, it is going to be easy to extend Canola in many ways, by writing plugins. Actually, Canola is just a framework and a bunch of plugins, tied nicely together.

Some might say that you could compare it to Google's Android ;-)

Doing the last months I have been writing plugin for interacting with automobiles, more or less providing what Carman provides, but integrated with Canola, using the new framework. I have also worked on GPS navigation, and map exploration, so it is now possible to use Canola for getting around the city :-) This will not be on the December release, but shows our explorations and the possibilities of the framework.

To show you all what we are working on, I will try to post some videos one of the days.

I will keep you posted!

Several interesting news reached my sensory organs today:

Gypsy released
Iain Holmes just released Gypsy, a more elegant GPS daemon for a more civilized time. Full API documentation, a tutorial and even experimental packages are available (shocking, I know).
Gypsy is a good match for mobile devices if you ask me, and to that end I’ve tested it with N800 and a Nokia LD-3W bluetooth GPS — works fine.

Experimental user position support for Pidgin
I haven’t tested this proof-of-concept yet, but it is interesting: Geoposition sharing for pidgin on maemo. Doesn’t use geoclue but doing so might save several hundred lines of code…

Jaiku client released with source code
Henrik Hedberg released Mauku 0.3 (Jaiku client for Maemo) a few days ago. The source code is now available at Garage. Hmm, I smell a small geoclue project here… stay tuned.

Anroid has been released: Following last week’s announcement of the Open Handset Alliance, today we’re happy to offer an early look at the Android SDK. We’re eager to get feedback from lots of developers in our discussion group. We’re also providing developer documentation and this blog to help you get up and going. It’s looking pretty good: Here [...]

Thanks to Stefan at IntoMobile again, we get the tip that ACCESS will be offering a PalmOS Garnet virtual machine available on the 770, N800 and N810. This confuses me a bit. Perhaps Nokia wanted to get a huge application compatibility influx on the tablet. Perhaps ACCESS feels the death throes of the PDA but still wants to keep their OS alive.

In any event: It's good for us Tableteers. More fun for us! The long-awaited PDA features will come to the tablets with all the richness, experience, and style of Palm OS. While the business model confuses the heck out of me, I'm pleased.

World Usability Day, Recife, originally uploaded by MarceloEduardo. Picture by: Fábio Caparica from UXRecife Talking about User Centered Design (in Maemo) at World Usability Day using Canola 1.0 x Canola 2.0 as case

The ACCESS Garnet VM is the familiar interface for Palm devices, so there are already stacks of applications available for them. When I put up my last post moments ago, I didn't realize the downloads were already available.


For an example of the interface and functionality, take a look at the video above.


Installation was simple: Visit the site, enter in your name and Email address, and submit it. Instantly, an Email is dispatched with the EULA and download link. The download itself is a .deb so it can go right to the tablet. The .deb is about 1.4 MB. Installation reports at 3.9 MB. The package name is garnet-vm and installed on the N810 without errors.


The first thing to remember is that it is a virtual machine. It isn't a simple Garnet OS application base and installer. The Virtual Machine has dedicated storage and does not interact with the rest of the tablet.

Just as I was waiting for the video to finish YouTube's processing, reader "Andrew" posted a comment in the last post on the subject:

Looking at the whitepaper, it seems to be a technology demonstration for their Linux platform; targetting ISVs, OEMs and other third parties.

Selling to end-users seems to be a piffling triviality compared with what their business model actually is.

Andrew has a point. This first release is a good step forward for Internet Tablet enthusiasts and Garnet developers. There is a great deal of potential for improvement in the future. I hope future releases of the VM allow for full screen use and rotating modes as well as the desktop sync client and companion software. For now: It's an interesting toy.

Two reminders: My next live show is this Thursday morning and the video entries to the Nokia N810 Giveaway Contest are due Friday night at midnight.

Some Greasemonkey scripts can help those who use to watch youtube videos from the MicroB Browser to get a better experience on that:

• Download Video: download current video (in .flv format) in one click.
  

• BlockFlash2: blocks/unblock flash.

Video download in yellow and blockflash2 in red.

• YousableTubeFix: let you resize video for better view.

YousableTube options in green.

Btw, to install Greasemonkey itself on MicroB just tap here.

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

Our UI expert Marcelo recently went to the World Usability Day, here in Recife to talk about usability and the upcoming Canola release. If you pay close attention to the photo below, you will see a part of the new Canola photo view - enjoy ;-)



See ya!

As promised, I just posted a video demonstrating a part of our Canola framework. Actually, I'm demonstrating a plugin that is not scheduled for inclusion in the first public release, but it shows some of the possibilities.



It is a car module showing RPM, average gasoline consumption, etc, using the python-obdlib from the Carman project (Another INdT project). It communicated with the car using the OBD-II protocol or, as in the demonstration, simulates.

The plugin was written in about a day, excluding the time spent by the designers.


Next up, some mapping action...

One of the contentious points in the user community is the Internet Tablet’s support for Ogg files. While this is not something I’ve been personally looking for, I’m still quite happy to share that Ogg Support is now just a click away!

For the time being you can use UKMP to get your OGG on…

It has come to my attention that a handful of InternetTabletTalk users pulled the MAC address from the dmesg output to snag the MAC address and use that as their own Device ID to get an N810 image from Nokia's site. They're using that image on their N800 tablets.

Clever thinking, but I request in the future that people try not to use the information I post like this in the future. You see: It's now my fault that the N810 flash image leaked to the public before it was ready. Sure, it's possible some people found the MAC address a different way, but we all know that Nokia treats the Internet Tablet's MAC as a serial number and it's unethical to use someone else's serial number to get software.

Nokia: I apologize for being careless about posting the dmesg output. The file in question is pulled and I hope the users are kind enough to obey their EULA's and serial number representation in the future. I hope this doesn't damage our relationship too much.

*edit* A couple readers responded and showed me other locations people have posted N810 MAC addresses, so I'm not the only sucker here. Still: it's a good idea to hold off until an official release/announcement. You never know what may be bricked or fixed.

p.s. Happy Birthday, Quim Gil!

Ok, so admittedly, something very cool just happened for our maemo community: the ACCESS Garnet VM (virtual machine) was just released. Garnet (formerly PalmOS) is a one-click install that instantly provides access to the over 30,000 applications available for Palm devices on the maemo platform.

I'm no phone blogger, but I stayed awake for the N82 launch event and have to say - Sexy phone! Too bad it doesn't have US 3G or I'd seriously consider it. It has a much faster image processor and a Xenon flash on the camera. Wow.

The absolute best part of the event was the live chat Q/A with FOUR Nokia Product Managers. Lots of questions were asked and answered. I'd look for Stefan, Ricky, Darla and others to post their reviews shortly.

I'm proud to introduce my new, non Maemo specific, blog! eth0: ifconfig realworld up!. It will host italian translations of Maemo related posts from MaddRaves, as well as my other rants and raves about online and offline world.

Even before the N810 is shipped, I’m able to to announce MMPC packages for the new Chinook 4.0 (OS2008) release. Untested in real production environments, of course, but I see no reason why it shouldn’t work outside my ARM development environment.

Packages are here (including libmpd). Please report any issues you might encounter.

Now I’m eagerly awaiting the availability of the N810 in Germany to finally get rid of my discount code. Thanks Nokia!

On a related note: I’m still looking for designers creating some nice, “Play”, “Stop”, “Pause”, “Backward” and “Forward” buttons. These are just too ugly in the current state. Nobody willing to help out?

As a follow-up to my video post yesterday, our UI-guru Marcelo, shares some insights on the ideas behind the redesigned Canola menu.



If you are into user interface design, this should appear to you. The blog post can be found here:

http://www.marceloe...user-interface-design/canola-with-carman

Click the image for more info. INdT giving sequence to it's software tech days is going to make another on november 20th and 21th in Joinville. This is a great opportunity to get in contact with Maemo development. Not only you will have introdutory course on developing for Maemo but ...

While there is no public release yet, I though to give a heads-up on a project we're working on with Jerry: Ajatus is a distributed, or peer-to-peer CRM system built on top of CouchDb.

What makes Ajatus so special is the approach we're taking with it. Having with OpenPsa found the traditional, hierarchical CRM approach unworkable we wanted to solve the problem in a different way:

• Local, rich AJAX client everybody can run on their laptop or internet tablet
• Replication to allow sharing data with partners, customers and the employer
• Simple base data types (note, event, contact, ...) that users can customize and extend
• Possibility to build integration tools and plug-ins in almost any language (with CouchDb's restful JSON interface)
• Speed

To help us stay on the right path we even wrote an Ajatus Manifesto to guide ourselves.

Currently the software already runs and does pretty much all the basic things needed. Once we get it into state where we can dogfood it (in interoperation with the company OpenPsa) we will make the first release. Until then, stay tuned, check the Git repository and join the talk!

Technorati Tags: ajatus, couchdb, openpsa

I've upload a Debian Vmware image for Development Chinook!
Download it!

Chinook Vmware Image

File is 1,5Gb !! User is "maemo" and password " maemo", root password is the same... "maemo" :D

I wanted to write a few words about the tools released last week with the Chinook SDK.

It seems lots of people got interested in Reinteract. Owen Taylor has started a new project page and integrated the patches people sent him. Guess what? The maemo patch was integrated to the branch master as well. It was slightly different from the first patch I provided in my previous post since I had forgotten to add support for hildon file chooser dialogs. We also agreed provide a way for the user to select which UI to run, the standard or the hildon one.

I was able to run Reinteract in a N800 device and it performs really well. In a small talk I had with Osvaldo and Luciano, they showed interest to provide packages for Reinteract in next PyMaemo releases. Great news!

By the way, I have to say: Python rocks! Git rocks even more!

Giving sequence to it’s universities cooperation program, INdT is going to make more two Tech Days. The first one on november 20th and 21th at Sociesc in Joinville, SC - Brasil, and the second one on november 26th and 27th at UFAM in Manaus, AM - Brasil.

Click the image to more information about Joinville’s Tech Day.

INdT team (Openbossa Lab) will present:

• Python for Maemo;
• QEMU for Kernel Linux development;
• Application development with mozilla;
• Developing microb extensions;

INdT is offering too (for free!!!) a twelve hours duration course on developing for Maemo Platform.

Enjoy it!

As soon as possible I’ll post more information about Manaus one.

You're all welcome to drop in, talk tablets, ask for help, or request demos!

*edit* LIVE NOW! Click!



*edit again* It's over. 2 hours of fun, two guest callers (Thanks Ricky and Steve) and a lot of applications shown off. Thanks, viewers!

Sorry, Mr. Applegate, I do play the guitar and I do compose music, but Valencia is a bit far for me and my music isn't exactly Christmas style.



But anyways, thanks for inviting me...

I just got off the phone with Nokia's sales department in the US. The number is 888.665.4228 Option 1, option 2, option 1. Here are the details:

The N810 is shipping.

The fine print:

• It was available for direct order for about three hours before it was sold out.
• They are still taking orders, but it is now on backorder with an expected ship date of Nov. 27 as per this writing. *edit - A friend and reader just ordered his. $404.99 and was told it will ship tomorrow!*
  
• The official direct price is $479.99.
• There's a secret coupon: $75 off! Except you have to ask for it and see if it's still valid. It may not be by the time this is published and the units are back in stock. No promises on that one, but worthy of the extra couple seconds asking about it.
• The sales rep had some internal training on it and got to play with one. She wants one now too.

All three internet tablets there are mounted with (or partially with) things I've received from ProClip USA. The N800 is mounted using the N800 mount, a vent clip for the Yaris, and a Move Clip to swap spaces. The N810 is mounted with a Yaris angled mount and a Move Clip attached to the car mount that comes with the Yaris.

Here's a nice long video showing the mounting plates and options. I go nuts with it. Really. What's wrong with YouTube and thier predilection to make the first 5 seconds of a .mp4 upload washed out in gray? No more .mp4 for YouTube!

The N800 holder has three options: Standard holder, holder with tilt swivel (the one I show) and a holder with a vehicle charger adapter attached.

If asked what I thought about these products as a reviewer: If I didn't love them, I'd have shut up about them by now. These products are well molded, perfect device fits, and perfect car fits. The end result of a single device and mount is a "near-factory" look, but the set is extensible enough to make a full array of gadgets available at your fingertips.

Those who are using Javafoil might be interested my little command line tool (easy to use though) called Fixfoil that I decided to release as someone else too might find it useful (I created it to fix the broken airfoil files (broken from Javafoil’s point of view) to be able to simulate them in Javafoil). It may not work in all cases because it is not the most elegant possible converter, but it works for me, I hope it works for you too.

Fixfoil is used to fix airfoil coordinate files which are broken in Javafoil. Some dat-files have the first set of coordinates in reverse order. The program reorders the coordinates.

The program is available in source and binary format along with instructions. Binary files are provided for Linux (Ubuntu) and MacOSX Leopard 10.5.1.
Download your fixfoil from here:
http://www.karoliinasalminen.com/fixfoil/

I’m proud to announce that Mamona 0.1 has been released.

You can run the Mamona linux distribution 0.1 on your Nokia Internet Tablet (N800 or N810) or use it as a SDK in your PC running emulated over qemu.

Current Features

In this first release we have:

• Glibc - 2.5
• Gcc - 4.1.2
• Full Python 2.5 support
• Enlightenment Window Manager
• USB Networking - As mainly input method.
• Bluetooth support
• Wireless - Open and WEP support only
• Noemu Packages
• ARM EABI Version 5 and QEMU (user mode emulation) 0.9.0 for Mamona SDK

You can check for other features under Mamona 0.1 - Package List.

You can run it on:

• Nokia N800
• Nokia N810

What’s planned?

Next release is planned to have:

• Mamona SDK for Maemo (Chinook Compatible)
• Full ARM EABI Version 6 support
• Wireless with WPA Support
• Usefull virtual keyboard and more applications for E-wm

Acknowledgements

Thanks to everybody who helped making this release possible.

Bug reports, as always, should go to Mamona’s Trac; check out http://dev.openbossa.org/trac/mamona/wiki/Contributing#Bugs for links to posting and querying bug reports for Mamona.

About making my blog feed to planet.maemo more interesting to you

Since Os2008 for N810 is out, a lot of people were asking about the possibility to install it on their N800. Nokia will relase Os2008 for N800 too, but at the moment they don't offer the possibility to download it since the N810 firmware it's not 100% compatible with the old N800.

The only way to download a Nokia tablet firmware is being the owner of a tablet. The user has to enter it's own MAC-address to be able to download the file. To download a N810 firmware you need to have a valid N810 MAC-address.

A post on News.com describes the exact procedure to follow if you want to try this in your N800:

1. Go to the N810 software download page.
2. Enter the serial number for a valid N810 device. To get one of these, pick any number between 001d6e9c0000 to 001d6e9cffff. Pick any random 4 digits (between 0-9 and a-f hex) as the last 4 digits.
3. Download the file named "RX-44_2008SE_1.2007.42-18_PR_COMBINED_MR0_ARM.bin."
4. Download the latest firmware-upgrading software, "flasher-3.0".
5. Now that you have the firmware flasher and the 2008 N800 software update in the same directory, open up a terminal (on a Linux desktop/laptop), and type:
   
   chmod a+x ./flasher-3.0
   ./flasher-3.0 -u -F RX-44_2008SE_1.2007.42-18_PR_COMBINED_MR0_ARM.bin
   
   
6. That will unpack the software, and it may take a few seconds. Once that is done, plug the N800 into your computer, using the included USB cable, then reboot the Nokia device while holding the home button. Now execute the following commands:
   
   sudo ./flasher-3.0 --enable-rd-mode
   sudo ./flasher-3.0 -k zImage -f
   sudo ./flasher-3.0 -n initfs.jffs2 -f
   sudo ./flasher-3.0 -r rootfs.jffs2 -f -R
   
   
7. That should be it. Your device should now boot up with the new 2008 version of the Nokia Maemo operating system.

Note: Nokia DOESN'T SUPPORT this procedure in ANY way. You can follow this procedure at your own risk. Neither me or Nokia have the responsability of any damage caused to your device.

Oh yes. I released Tinymail pre release 0.0.5 and TMut 1.1.0 yesterday evening. The reason is that a specific series of bugs got fixed shortly after Tinymail’s pre release 0.0.4. I adapted TMut to leverage those fixes. The fixes also include moving folders and making the TnyGtkFolderStoreTreeModel automatically update. I also fixed a few embarrassing reference count fixes on the accounts and folders. The instances that where leaked where not consuming a lot of memory, but it’s not nice to leak entire objects of course. Especially not if you claim to focus on mobiles, like I do. Refdbg helped me a lot with solving this. Thanks Josh!

Last week, we at the office were discussing how we should integrate the maemo keyboard with the new Canola. After some time studying how Input Methods work, I decided to implement a framework for pluggable IM on Ecore, called Ecore_IM.

Ecore_IM is based on Gtk/Qt Input Method frameworks and works with pluggable so called immodules. So after writing the API for Ecore_IM I wrote a plugin hildon-input-method for accessing the maemo keyboard.

I already integrated it with Etk, so all Etk applications running on the device will automatically show the keyboard when requested. I intend to implement support for E widgets, so Mamona that is shipping with E can use the maemo keyboard.

If you are interested in using it or integrating it in your application you can grab it from here. The Etk support can be found here.

I hope this get integrated in Ecore really soon, so stay tuned.

Well, it's now mid-November, so here's an update on the current situation: In short, we will be back doing tutorials very very soon, perhaps within a week or two. We really want to do them, but as was explained in the previous post we can't do any tutorials until the new N810 internet tablet goes on sale and/or the new OS 2008 update is made available for the N800. We're going to get hold of

As you may already know, there is unfixed critical bug in all OS2006 firmwares causing random memory corruption during WLAN use. Symptoms may be random application or system crashes, corrupted data in RAM or files and even reboot loop if you are extremely unlucky.

Further details here:
http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11824

All Nokia 770 users are advised to check it and consider installing this bugfix for better device stability.

Lets hope there are no other bugs added and this fix is really effective ;-)

To install Frothing you need to compile it inside
a Hildon compatible desktop environment.

To create such an environment have a look
at the Moblin site or the Maemo site.

Frothing was originally created for the Ubuntu
Mobile Guide as an example of how to port an
application written in C to the Ubuntu Mobile
Edition.

This guide is available online here and is good
to read for background information.

Compiling from Source

Either check out the source from svn or

grab the tarball to compile

The source can be checked out from the
repositories by:

svn checkout http://frothing.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ frothing

The tarball can be downloaded from
the project page and extracted by:

tar zxvf frothing-0.1.tar.gz

After unpacking/checking out the code, run the standard autotools commands inside your target:

./configure --enable-hildon
make
make install

Dependencies

On Ubuntu the dependencies can be satisfied by:

apt-get install build-essential libgtkhtml2-0 libgtkhtml2-dev libxml-perl libxslt1-dev
libglade2-0 libglade2-dev libsqlite3-0 libsqlite3-dev
libhildondesktop-dev xulrunner

This project is also registered on Launchpad

Using Scratchbox and in particular the Maemo SDK with ARMEL target, very often when we try to execute some application we can get into this kind of errors (for example):

sem_post: Function not implemented

This happens because not all the functions have been implemented in the emulated environment. Lauro Venâncio has created a patched version of qemu-arm called qemu-arm-eabi.

Thanks to Marcelo Lira, we have a simple howto to install the patch into the Scratchbox environment. Note: you have to execute these commands from outside the Scratchbox environment and you should not be logged into the environment at the same time.

1. You need gcc 3.4, SDL dev library and Zlib dev:

sudo apt-get install gcc-3.4 libsdl1.2-dev zlib1g-dev

2. Get the patched qemu-arm. Notice that the patches are already applied, everything is here, and you don't need to get the qemu sources.

svn co https://qemu-arm-eabi.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/qemu-arm-eabi qemu-arm-eabi

cd qemu-arm-eabi

./configure --target-list=arm-linux-user --static

make

3. Copy qemu to the cputransp dir on scratchbox

sudo cp arm-linux-user/qemu-arm /scratchbox/devkits/cputransp/bin/qemu-arm-eabi-sb2

4. Add it to the list of cputransp methods. Open the file

sudo vim /scratchbox/devkits/cputransp/etc/cputransp-methods

and add this line:

qemu-arm-eabi-sb2

5. Configure the target to use the patched qemu as transparency method. Edit the file:

vim /scratchbox/users/USERNAME/targets/CHINOOK_ARMEL.config

and change this line:

SBOX_CPUTRANSPARENCY_METHOD=/scratchbox/devkits/cputransp/bin/qemu-arm-eabi-sb2


That's all! You're now ready to log again into your Scratchbox environment

This version works only with OS2006 (only tested in gregale) and OS2007.
OS2008 will be possibly next week.

New features:

• Interface reorganization. I think that with this the screen space will be better utilize.
• Added Help to the preferences and tags dialogs. Many people don’t know what’s the URL that should be added in the settings dialog and they shouldn’t know. The preferences dialog now has a help option (aka ? icon). Also in html tags dialog, explaining each one.
• Menus finger-friendly. Very finger-friendly. Menu screenshot.
• Added new menu icons from Gartoon iconset.
• Option for delete articles already published. Now only downloads the last five published articles, but there will be an option to choose this in the future.
• Save settings in system backup. When you do a backup to reinstall the system Maemo WordPy retain their preferences.
• Image size now with preserving aspect ratio.
• More html tags: abbr, superscript, subscript, and so on.
• Show/hide toolbar. You can hide the toolbar to get a better vision of the article entry. In fullscreen mode and without toolbar, all space is for writting.
• New way for save and load articles. Now xml files are used to store the articles. Feature for WordPy desktop version.
• Options for ’save’ and ’save as’ articles. Before you could only ’save as’.

You can see the full changelog.

Maemo WordPy has a new page more complete than the previous one (though not much more).
From there you can see the documentation, and instructions for installing Maemo WordPy.

I updated the Roadmap, so you can see the new features to come. The next version 0.6 will be a inflection point, especially for handling images. There will be a small image editor in Maemo WordPy.

As always I am open to any comments about Maemo WordPy, good or bad.
And please don’t forget to report bugs you find.

Finally thank everyone who has asked me to improve Maemo WordPy, which features lacks and good use they had given it. Special thanks to Karl Petermichl.

Nor I missed all the good reviews it has been over the Internet, and even those articles that said only ‘testing with maemo wordpy’. These are things that make you smile.

BTW, thanks also to maemo team.

Thank you very much.

Well, this article is for Maemo WordPy 0.5, it isn’t a thanks article

Technorati Tags: wordpy, maemo, wordpress, blogging, 770, n800, internet tablets, maemo wordpy

Wow.

Really. Wow.

Thanks to everyone who submitted a video for the Nokia N810 Giveaway Contest. Judges are currently conferring on the five finalists from over thirty submissions. Judging this thing was HARD and I had to keep reminding myself of the judging criteria I set for myself at the beginning of it all. I am flattered to be in the company of peope with such talent for information, entertainment, filmmaking, and more.

p.s. TabletBlog.com is now on Facebook too.

we are now working at full speed in order to release canola 2.0. a lot of new features are being implemented, and unfortunately we are not having much free time to report back to the maemo community our work in progress.

I have been working since the beginning of the project with the download manager, the new canola media player, code-named "atabake" and more recently with the UI of the photos screens.

next week we will start posting some screenshots of the features of canola 2.0: podcasts, media player and photos browsing have been through a major "ramp up"

and despite the new look and feel and the features added, canola 2.0 keeps the original spirit: a simple, yet powerful and sexy portable media aggregator.

hope you enjoy the outcome of this project!

A fellow sushi-lover MacSlow was blogging some time ago about various cool things that can be done with OpenGL and video. Mirco writes:

The Nokia N800 has a built-in FM radio which can't currently be used in Japan since Japan uses a different FM band (76 MHz to 90 MHz) than Europe and the US (87.5 MHz to 108 MHz).
Thanks to Kenroy Harrison for pointing this out.

The TEA5761 FM chip on the N800 supports the Japanese band by setting the BLIM bit but this is not supported by Nokia's driver code (Nokia doesn't sell the N800 in Japan anyway). So I have built a patched kernel enabling setting the BLIM bit.
The new release of pyFMRadio adds support for this kernel and allows switching the FM band.


If you have a N800 and are currently in Japan, please test this Python code and report if it's actually working:

from FMRadio import FMRadio
import time

r = FMRadio()
r.set_fm_band(r.FM_BAND_JPN)
for freq in r.scan():
    r.set_frequency(freq)
    r.set_volume(50)
    time.sleep(3)
r.close()

IT World is running an article that says many businesses will likely bypass Windows Vista and wait for Windows 7 before they upgrade. Personally I'm taking a different approach.I agree, Windows Vista is a bust. I've got software I wrote for Windows XP that should work perfectly fine in Vista, but ran into obscure issues with the way it handles user data for restricted accounts. I've got proprietary software in-house that will work in Vista, but there's a whole knowledgebase section on the vendor's site about how to fix problems.

For travelers who I haven't had time to train for Linux, I'm ordering laptops with Windows XP Pro.

For users who need small mobile Internet access (aka, PDA) I'm getting them the Nokia n800, and soon n810. These little gadgets are allowing those of us who only need e-mail and web on the road, plus access to our internal web based inventory system while in the warehouse to do our jobs. Oh, and it's Linux based.

For both desktops and servers, I'm slowly switching them to Linux. Well, less slowly on the server side. I have one Windows 2003 Server, still a throwback for a proprietary software we run, and I have six Ubuntu 64 bit servers. For desktops, I've already converted three of them, plus a laptop, over to Linux. Our Exchange Server and Sharepoint was replaced with eGroupware. Our Outlook clients replaced by the eGroupware web interface.

My Linux servers have been up for anywhere from 180 days to almost 700 days, which is when we relocated our datacenter to the new facility. My Windows server had to be rebooted last week, yet again. I believe my Windows server all-time record without a reboot is somewhere around 45 days.

I already replaced Windows for about 80% of our production process, simply because it couldn't handle the volume. We move around 100 GB of data across our network in any given 8 hour shift, and the Windows software with all it's RPC, Windows file shares, and other overhead just couldn't take it. As it is now, I would estimate we can produce around 8 times the volume of data on our primary Linux server than we ever could on the Windows server, even though the Windows server has much more expensive and robust hardware.

So far in server software I've saved:

6 Windows Server 2003 64 bit + 10 CALS            6,300

Server Antivirus software for all 6   at least:     720

6 NovaBackup Server Software Licenses               900

                                     Total:      $7,920

You'll notice I didn't mention Microsoft Exchange or Sharepoint, because I already have a license to that which is not being used.

Yeah, I think I'll skip Windows Vista, thank you very much. And probably Windows 7 at this point. In fact the last dual-boot machine just got reformatted without Windows.

TVersities Mission Statement

• Our mission is to empower individuals to organize and personalize their home and Internet multimedia collection (audio, video and images) and have universal access to it anywhere (at the home or on the go) anytime and from any device.

1) TVersity received some great press coverage recently within the UK, courtesy of PC Pro and specifically the October 2007 edition with the feature on The web's best 50 free downloads Where Tversity was included in the entertainment category.

Click to read 852 more words

The results of the last poll on TabletBlog are complete. Should the Nokia Internet Tablets also be mobile phones?

Yes 59 (19%) No 146 (48%) Offer both 103 (34%)
That's tough to call. 48% said no, so a majority think either they should have SIM slots and phone features or that there is a market for both devices in parallel. Since the votes turned out that way, I'm not sure how to react.

Third poll (visit tabletblog.com directly to vote) is:

Are you getting an N810? Options are:

• As soon as I can!
• Likely, but I'll wait for reviews.
  
• No. I have an N800 and OS2008 is fine for me.
• No. I will get an N800 instead.
  
• No. I'm just here because I am curious about tablets (or have an 770 and don't intend to upgrade.)
  

The Nokia N810 Giveaway Contest finalists have been chosen. Take a look at this InternetTabletTalk thread and vote for your choice to win!

This “Maemo (Eng)” category will only host english posts and translations about Maemo and Nokia IT devices.

I’ve always been a PalmOS entusiast, I decided to leave it only when Nokia 770 was released. So, it’s easy to understand how happy I was when I read about GVM. Being able to use Palm’s apps on my Maemo IT could fill the gap for PIM applications.
Installing GVM was pretty smooth, and using Addressbook on my N800 gave me a shiver of pleasure along my back, bringing me back in time ;).

At that point I decided to install Iambic Agendus, perhaps the application I miss the most from the Palm times. Well, that wasn’t a good choice, GVM crashed and refusing to start anymore.

I’m goint to remove the whole stuff and try a fresh install. We’ll se.

Italian at: http://www.eth0.it/2007/11/13/garnetvm-iniziamo-male/

Zerojay and Texrat from the Internet Tablet Talk forums and (more recently) Jaiku got to talking and decided it would be great to offer services specifically to the tablet community. And so Jablet was born…

While clearly in very early beta, Jablet’s focus is on the use of Jabber which is built into the Tablet OS. While out of the box, you only have direct access to Google Talk (unless you use jabber today), they are working to make it very simple to get the rest of your IM accounts also flowing.

There’s a nice piece on the Jablet forums which walks you through setting up an account. I used the web form and then used a cross-platform and free jabber client called Psi to show the available transports (other services enabled on the server). It was just a matter of choosing my IM services and adding my login info to get AIM, MSN, Yahoo and Gtalk added. Gtalk is actually redundant when you run on the tablet, but it lets me keep tabs on Jaiku as well as my main IM stuff via Pidgin on when I am using a PC which I do not have admin privileges. Once this is configured a quick shot into the tablet’s accounts control panel and you can add your new Jablet account to be up in running. The whole process took me about 5 minutes.

Once your account is configured on the tablet, you’ll be connected to the Jablet server with access to your IM accounts from within the Tablet’s chat client. This is a really excellent addition for me as it’s one less application to install (Pidgin) and I can see and set presence from one application. I also have full access to all my IM contacts from across services within the contacts application! System notifications work seamlessly with all services through jabber which is very cool!

The Jablet guys are very interested in giving back to the community and want to develop services which let people enhance their Tablet experience. I’m in complete support of this and think it’s a fantastic idea! Well done! Even in this early stage it’s absolutely worth getting your IM services connected.

Technorati Tags:
IM, Internet Tablet, Maemo, N-Series, N800, N810, Nokia, Presence, Jabber, Jablet, 770

My command-line video conversion script, 770-encode is very widely used; however its name is obviously something of an anachronism. So with the imminent availability of the N810, it was time to rename it. Welcome, tablet-encode. This new name also comes with a major new version, including a number of long-standing patches from people being applied, such as multiple-file support.

I've also put it, along with mediaserv in a new garage.maemo.org project: mediautils.

Finally, mediaserv has gotten a v0.05 release which fixes a number of small bugs (thanks to all those who reported them) and makes it aware of both tablet-encode and 770-encode as potential encoders it can use.

More information, and links to the Garage downloads can be found at: http://mediautils.garage.maemo.org/

Like many Nseries owners, I often wonder why Nokia keeps the USB port and charger port separate. My N800, N810, and N95 all have the same charger connectors but each has a mini or micro USB port as well. Time to go for third party solutions. I found the above package at my local Circuit City for $14.99. Since all my devices charge at 5 volts, using direct USB current should do the trick nicely.

I was up quite long on friday. Yeah, I know what you must be thinking: partying. Nope, I wish. I was duking it out with ukmp and maemo extras. I finally gave the decisive blow at around 4 AM. I got the ukmp uploaded to the extras repositories for bora and chinook!



I decided on friday that I won't rest until it's there. With hindsight it was a bad decision, as I was pretty wasted the whole saturday. Did manage to go partying then though. However, I'm very pleased that the update support structure is there now and that the new n810 owners will also be able to ge the new UKMP.

So, what is new with the 1.70 release compared to 1.6 series? Layout has been changed a bit, covers are bigger, reflection is done on the fly. Things just look a bit better. Also, the kinetic scrolling has been tweaked quite a lot and the progress bar (although a bit buggy) allows you to skip to correct place. I actually also had really wicked ligting effect at the place where your finger touches the screen for a while. As it was mainly eye candy, I dropped it for a while. It may be making a come-back soon, as it was really neat looking effect. I just want to add a bit more 'fun' to it.

Next up will be a few minor update releases that address the bugs and startup speed issues. And now that ukmp is in the extras repository, updating will be an easy operation for you - the users.

For developers interested in helping out, I've been switching to 'proper' practices and the svn is now up-to date all the time.

So, os2007 users can find ukmp from:
http://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2007/ukmp/

and os2008 users can find it from:
http://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2008/ukmp/

Simple, eh ;)

Amazon's e-book reader Kindle was launched today, and it looks quite interesting:

• eInk display, so it is easy on the eyes and can be read even in sunlight
• Long battery life
• Amazon stores backups of books user has bought
• Storage expandable with SD cards
• Ability to send in your own files
• Newspapers, magazines and blogs
• Automatic updates and downloads via cell network, no need to tether to computer
• Shame about the closed format, though

While the device is ugly it seems usable enough. Now the question remains whether the device will be feasible for use outside the US, as Amazon's Whispernet system is apparently tied to Sprint, a local operator there.

When I moved away from the Five Corners apartment I decided to de-clutter to support a more working nomadistic lifestyle. I digitized all my music so I was able to get rid of the CDs and gave my old furniture away and replaced it with rented ones.

But books are still an analog product. As no good e-book reader has emerged I've been stuck with a collection of big and heavy books that I have to move around. Only when I've run out of shelf space I've been reluctantly forced to give away or sell them. If the Kindle approach works, it could help me get rid of the dead tree editions and paper magazine subscriptions. But time will tell.

Of course, Kindle is not the only device in the market. My Nokia N800 tablet with FBReader could do much of the same stuff, but the screen isn't as nicely readable and the book and magazine collection supplied by Amazon just isn't available.

Updated 2007-11-20: Dive into Mark has very good points about the problems with Kindle's proprietary approach to e-books.

Technorati Tags: amazon, eink, kindle, rss, travel, workingnomad

Yes, finally I have buttons to play games in my nokia device. Ok, this not the best key layout to play games, and the display is not multitouch to implement a virtual controller, but it is possible to have fun playing games.

During the last weekend, I spent some time porting the snes9x[1] Zauros version[2], to n810 and integrating this with osso api to handle mime types by file manager, and create the maemo package[3].

Because of the lack of time, the current version has some problems: the sound is not 100% and you can get some screen flicks during the startup.



The current controller config is:


A = +

B = -

X = '

Y = L

L = K

R = ;

START = space

SELECT = chr



6 to 9 = state load

SHIFT + 6 to 9 = state save



RESET = SHIFT + R

QUIT = q



[1] http://www.snes9x.com/

[2] http://www.suhami.net/ez/?page_id=16

[3] http://www.renatofilho.com/files/snes9x_1.0-1_armel.deb

So Marcelo Oliveira posted a video to YouTube of him demonstrating Canola at the World Usability Day here in Recife. The video shows one of the concepts that we have used to develop the new Canola, more specifically the photo view and the new player view (including cover arts). It also shows our kinetic list, which has evolved a bit since our prototypes.


High quality version at Blip.tv

Most of what is shown in the concept is already implemented and fully working. I especially love the photo view, and when the concept was first presented to me, it rocked me away; but it also left me scared for a moment.


How to implement this in a way that it is usable and fast of the N800 device? Lots of problems came up as anticipated, but Leo Sobral has been working hard and has come up with a lot of clever solutions, and I must say that his work has been bearing fruit - the result is just astonishing, and it is now a joy viewing my photos on my N800!





The audio view is also quite nice, especially the cover view, which lets you view your music by album, showing tracks and album cover. The actual player has also evolved, and it now feels a lot slicker.

Though, it mostly looks the same, all of the code is new, and Artur Souza has been hard at work making sure that everything works smoothly and fast, but he will tell you a lot more about this in an upcoming blog post.



During the last week, I have been busy working on adding support for podcast, but now I'm back at working on the mapping view for at least a week. Afterward, I will try blogging about the podcast support.

Oh, and now to forget...



...our new framework provides scaling with very little work; imagine what the future might bring ;-)

Nokia have launched the Internet Tablet Video Converter which is, by far and away (IMHO), the single best video converter for Windows for owners of the Nokia Internet Tablets.

Interface

The interface is powered by Mozilla, and is a smart, black GUI looking vaguely reminiscent of the Hildon desktop:

From here, videos can be dragged and dropped on to the window; or added explicitly by clicking on the "Add" button. There are also buttons in the top-right (corresponding to the status bar on a Maemo device) for an about box and to bring up the settings.

Interestingly, the far-left hand side contains the button "Video", suggesting that future versions may handle DVDs or other media sources. There's no sign of that in the app, yet, though.

Converting a video

Videos are converted into MP4 files (rather than all the other media converters which target DivX/Xvid). This is only of technical interest, as the user experience remains the same.

Multiple videos can be converted simultaneously, with the total progress and time remaining, and each video's progress and ETA shown in the interface:

Once converted videos can be copied one at a time, or many together to a connected tablet through the interface; as well as deleted etc. Converted videos are kept over a number of instances, but a maximum number of videos can be specified which, once reached, will result in the oldest converted videos being deleted.

Settings

The settings button brings up a simple UI, from where the quality of the converted videos can be set on a slider; and more advanced settings like where the converted videos should be stored:

As with my own tablet-encode it uses a preset-based system with options ranging from "low" to "best".

In summary...

For Windows users (who don't want a scriptable program such as tablet-encode), this is definitely the best media converter available.

It does, and it is really smooth :-)

Have a look at this video. It is not the latest version, but it demonstrates the responsiveness of our user interface.



High quality version at Marceloeduardo.com
High quality version at Blip.tv

A new PyGTK, with glade support, is available at chinook extras repository. It was generated using libglade2-0 (2.6.2-1indt1) (2.4 provided by Maemo SDK). Just refresh application list and update python2.5-runtime package.

Other bugfixes and unstable modules, like python-launcher, will be released using the new "extras-devel" repository. This way we can test it widely before official release.

Apparently the N810 is on shelves somewhere. I’m not going to frusterate myself by trying to order it from NokiaUSA however, that would just be stupid. But it’s supposed to be in Best Buy and CompUSA. Neither of the online systems for those stores know what an N810 is. No one I’ve managed to reach in the corporate office or at any of the branch locations in the Bay Area for either of those stores know what an N810 is, and when asked to check everyone comes back saying it’s not in stock. They don’t know when it will be in stock. Call back later. Anyone sighted the thing in the wild? I really want one now, like right-now-this-very-second now!

Apparently the N810 is on shelves somewhere. I’m not going to frusterate myself by trying to order it from NokiaUSA however, that would just be stupid. But it’s supposed to be in Best Buy and CompUSA. Neither of the online systems for those stores know what an N810 is. No one I’ve managed to reach in the corporate office or at any of the branch locations in the Bay Area for either of those stores know what an N810 is, and when asked to check everyone comes back saying it’s not in stock. They don’t know when it will be in stock. Call back later. Anyone sighted the thing in the wild? I really want one now, like right-now-this-very-second now!

Thanks to Mohammed Hassan now I know an alternative (alternative to the official howto) way to generate a .deb package for Maemo.

If the package already exist in the Debian repositories, you can get the .dsc file (for example in an ftp like this: http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/non-free/s/spim/ ) and execute the following commands:

dget -x DSC_FILE_URL

It will download the package and will unpack it in the current folder. You have to enter in the created folder and edit the debian/* files to personalize settings, mantainer data, add deps ecc...

When you're done, you can generate the package with the usual command:

dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

As may times I said somewhere else, one of the advantages of Nokia’s Internet Tablets, on the old 770 as well on the young N810, is the extreme openess, being able to experiment and expand them, basicaly the opposite of what happens on the iPhone ;). And this is a good point for Nokia.

In the wait for my N810, and the release of N800’s firmware upgrade to IS2008 I decide do to some tests. One of the criticisms against to IT graphic interface is that it’s kinda too “constricted” and limited (you cannot move windows around, you cannot have more windows shown at once, etc.). I have to admit that’s (partly, at least) true, but the overall usability is overall more than acceptable (IMHO). (more…)

Daniel Yerga was able to sort out the issues in running Maemo WordPy in chinook thanks to an update in Python as well as some solid dilegence. And perhaps the desire to stop my harassment on Jaiku. It’s hard to really find fault here sice he was not only incredibly responsive but without a machine on which to test. The python release before today’s had some issues we’d discovered previously and today we (I feel a part of the process) sorted it and Daniel got thing working!

If you have a wordpress blog and a tablet this is a must have killer app. Menus and the ui in general are considerably more finger friendly which ties really nicely into the update for OS 2008. Mobile blogging from anywhere is really handy and something I expect to do quite a bit with the N810 and my N95.

My first, ahem… feature request would be for multiple blog support. I’ve got two and I know a few tablet owners in the same boat.

Technorati Tags: Maemo “internet tablet” nokia chinook python wordpy n-series N810 N800 blogging mobile N95

So after creating the framework to allow different input methods for Ecore and added Maemo Keyboard support for it, I decided to try a fancier thing.

It took me a few hours to get the amazing work done by Gustavo, port it to C and create an Ecore Input Method for it.

You can see the result on this video:



I would like to clarify that this video is just to demonstrate how easy is to create your own input method for Ecore. It doesn't mean that Canola will use it.

So that's it, I hope you enjoy.

If you are interested you can download the code from here.

While I’m not lucky enough to try this on my own N810 yet, Marcelo (aka Handful) has shared a few preview videos to show off the amazing progress that’s been done on Canola. When we last saw things it was still in sketch mode… but seems we are getting close to a public release!

I have not gotten any of the media player applications to work yet on the N810, and am standing by with my 6GB microSD (and adapter)!

So our Canola posts yesterday created a long thread on InternetTabletTalk.com and Marcelo has been really busy answering most of the questions that have come up.



Artur wrote a blog entry giving a bit of light on our new media framework Atabake, as well as posted a screenshot of Canola playing back an episode of the Office (screenshot above).

Last evening there was a little hackaton here at work. Andre had spend the last week writing a new input framework(*) for EFL, much in the spirit of, and inspired by that of GTK+ and QT, and just couldn't resist trying to port Gustavo iPhone like keyboard to it.

It is currently only possible to write input methods in C, so Andre ported Gustavos code and made it into a real input method. Later, together with Gustavo and with input of a lot of excited co-workers we modified the interface and hooked the keyboard up in Canola.

Though, we are not going to use this exact keyboard, it shows what is possible, and if we find it worthy we might consider develop a new Canola integrated keyboard based on this code ;-)



(*) This work was done, in order for us to use the Hildon keyboard from within Canola.

I’ve just released Vagalume 0.3, the Last.fm client for Gnome and Nokia 770/N800/N810.

Canola's team have been busy during the last months trying to make real Marcelo's dreams and thoughts. Now the first results are being exposed and it's a good idea to explain it all ;-) Kenneth mentioned on his blog about the picture viewer and album's art view. He made an overview of ...

A new version of MMythTv has been released today, the main changes in this new version is the support to ogg format to play transcoded videos and code updated to the new OS2008.

With ogg we get more stability with gstreamer components and no changes are needed in the current version of ubuntu gutsy.



Installing on device:



* Add this repositories on your application catalogue:

   OGG Suport:
  ==========
  Web address  : http://tuomas.kulve.fi/debian 
  Distribution : chinook
  Components   : maemo

   Mobile MythTv:
  ==============
  Web address  : http://www.renatofilho.com/apt 
  Distribution : chinook
  Components   : main

* After that search for mobile-mythtv on Multimedia category and install.



On Ubuntu gutsy:



* Append this line on "/etc/apt/sources.list":

deb http://www.renatofilho.com/apt gutsy main



* Install gmyth media server (GMS):

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install gms



To get more information visit the project page:

http://gmyth.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Zerojay’s just found that N810’s release date was pushed back to Dec 19th, at least on NokiaUSA. Not a good news for me, and the other 499 dev/users who received the discount code. To be honest, N810 doesn’t even show a release date on www.nokia.it, and shop.nokia.it doesn’t even know about it. In the meantime [...]

By requesting the BODYSTRUCTURE you can get a preview of the structure of a message without having to download it. Most E-mail clients parse this structure to the point of what they need from it. I did some searching and as I expected did few of the opensource E-mail clients do a complete parse. Some just scanned for some words, others did a reasonably well job but skipped information that they are simply not interested in. And that’s fine, if you don’t need it.

The Chinook SDK has been out now for a while and it feels like a good time to highlight some of the tools that were released with it. Like mentioned earlier, a set of previously closed tools was made open source with the Chinook SDK release. These tools were made in-house by and for our developers. [...]

The FOSK Certification will be a single low stakes entry level exam to test the FOSS knowledge and competency level of technical and non technical staff who are responsible for the day to day computer needs of Not for Profit organizations. This professional may work as a technical person, a circuit rider, account management or technical sales, executive positions or any other role that is responsible for recommending and/or choosing FOSS solutions for an organization.

Peter Seebach from Wind River has written an interesting article in IBM’s developerWorks explaining how to get started with the Maemo SDK in a very simple and straightforward way. From the products’ introduction to well picked references, going through scratchbox, R&D mode and techspecs; this is probably the most hands-on introduction I’ve seen, and yet more [...]

Today i’ve packaged QT4 for maemo devices such as nokia n810. Jean Luc is testing them on OS2008, because i haven’t got a Maemo device yet.

We’ll upload them on garage svn soon. Stay tuned!

Hunspell is an open source spell checker engine and has been added to Firefox 3 development code replacing previous MySpell engine that currently ships Firefox 2.x. It provides advantages including support for Asian languages, Unicode support, morphological analysis and support for complex compounds and Agglutinative languages including Basque, Estonian and Finnish.

The spell checker extension for MicroB is now available for OS2008 users (OS2007 and earlier are not supported). Get the installer here and check the features:

• Misspelled words are underlined in red just like they are in Firefox.

• Double tapping on a misspelled word provides a list of suggested corrections. In addition, user can ignore the current word or add it to the dictionary.

• User can also choose the dictionary to be used by the spell checker.

Dictionaries

Firefox dictionaries are fully compatible with Hunspell and can be easily packaged into a MicroB dictionary extension (see this howto). I have already packaged the following dictionaries:

• Danish
• Dutch
• Dutch (nl-nl)
• English (British)
• English (US)
• French
• French (fr-fr)
• German (de-at)
• German (de-ch)
• German (de-de-alt)
• German (de-de)
• Italian
• Norwegian
• Portuguese (Brazilian)
• Portuguese (Portugal)
• Russian
• Spanish (Argentina)
• Spanish (Spain)
• Finnish
• Swedish

If you have any problems with creating your own dictionary package or issues in general, contact our development mailing list.

Setting preferences

• layout.spellcheckDefault controls whether spell check function is enabled for multi-line and/or single-line edit controls (more info).

• spellchecker.dictionary: selects the spell checker's current language or locale (e.g., en-US, fi, ru, or pt-BR) (more info).

The preferences above can be found in the MicroB about:config page.

We as the team behind the latest maemo 4.0 SDK (Chinook) would like to hear from you! Please give us your comments on the SDK and its tools and documentation. You can drop an anonymous comment here at this blog or send your feedback to chinook-feedback@maemo.org. Feel free to be direct, love us or hate [...]

In search for Bertrand Russell on video.google.com, I found two video clips that I wouldn't have expected, one is a clip from an old bollywood movie where the hero is given an opportunity to conduct an interview with Russell and another is video of the song 'Jihad' by Singing Fools. The former is a bit surprising but I didn't quite catch the jihad song and it's connection with Russell. Also
I knew that americans were supporting Jihad in the 80's but didn't know they were so loude and active in that.

According to gbuergisser, Nokia Europe have told him: "the N810 will not be available for a few weeks (December for sure) in Europe."

This fits with the NokiaUSA.com date of 2007-12-19. As zerojay's said, we're getting stuff cheap so shouldn't complain (too much), but it is frustrating. Users are getting N810s from retailers in the US, but no-one on the device programme have been able to get one yet. This is frustrating to end-users as they've got no software, and it's frustrating to the lucky 500 watching people get them before them and then moaning there's no software.

Fortunately Quim Gil's recognised this, but we're still pretty much in the dark on actual dates and why it's been delayed in some markets from the original mid-November date.

* Yes I was one of the 500.
* Yes I have been checking in and applying my code daily to see if it would take.
* Yes I have become worried that I missed a critical email regarding the availability and search my entire gmail archives.
* No I am not mad and outraged at Nokia for this.

Am I disappointed, yes, I want it now now now. I want to be the first techogeek on my street with it.
BUT I also remember the mess with The N800 discount codes. LetsTalk.com ( the US Nokia online distributer) is crap.

Before everyone jumps to conclusions of Nokia profiteering for the holidays at developers expense, let's just think for a moment that there may be some logistical Snafu here causing online delays.
So lets think for a moment. Nokia cell phones have had a very small market in the US. With the provider mess in the US, Nokia USA does not have a direct.nokia.com store in the US. Instead it chose an online distributer, LetsTalk.com. They probably have a silly contract making it such the Nokia cannot open a portal for direct online purchase. Now brick and mortor is different. Enter Flagship stores. The discount codes for US people are not really Nokia discount codes instead they are a letstalk.com code, thus no discount at BnM stores.

I know Quim has hinted that they are desperately working on the issues (just quietly). The Dec 19th date is currently our best guess.
Quim, any chance a *little* information can flow out regarding codes?

A side rant. b2evolution (meamoepeople hosted blogs) is crappy. The # 1 issue is I still get all the SPAM people try to post to my blog. It fills up the same list as real comments (sorry if I missed publishing any) SO I will probably be moving to Wordpress soon. At least then I get akismet and wordpy.

ps. Build instructions for everything, here. No I don’t know whether that will work with your 770. Yes it’ll work with your N800 and your N810.

I did put our Mac to download the latest beta-version of X-plane yesterday (over 1GB download). That was worth the wait every minute. The new X-plane is awesome. The texture detail, world detail is all better than ever before. If you thought that X-plane 8 Global Scenery looked great, this will blow you and all MSFS fans away. I was just test-driving the new default aircraft - the Cirrus Jet.

Linux version is coming soon. Once it comes, I’ll order the DVDs (our simulator PC is running Ubuntu Gutsy). X-plane now comes in 8 dual layer DVDs full of scenery. Also the detail (3D cockpit on Cirrus-Jet) is something I haven’t seen on any other simulator to the date. The 3D cockpit is in this version usable and not just a fancy looking feature which really does not work, in this version it works and gives a feeling of sitting in a real aircraft.

Surprising thing is that the sim is usable on Macbook with the relatively low spec Intel GMA950 3D accelerator. Of course turning roads, high detail world, volumetric fog, reflections on water and trees on makes it slow, but by tuning down some parameters, it is flyable without a high spec machine (we have Geforce 8800GTX on the Linux machine and 30 inch display, I can hardly wait to see how it will look like on that) allthough in X-plane the processor speed plays a huge role - the Core 2 duo processor in the Macbook is potentially faster than on our living room desktop PC.

The Cirrus-Jet cockpit:

Learn more at: http://www.x-plane.com/beta.html

Thanks to some great work from Chris Malley, frothing now runs on armel Nokia Tablet devices as well as Intel lpia architectures.

It was a little jumping through hoops because libgtkhtml2-0 and libgtkhtml2-0-dev are not available (yet?) in the maemo repositories so he need to apt-get the source from debian/ubuntu and build it inside scratchbox with

 --disable-accessibility

Also he added:

AC_CHECK_LIB(gthread-2.0, g_thread_init)

into configure.ac and did a

aclocal/autoconf/autoheader/automake

For more info check out the project home page

Users are starting to get their N810s from their suppliers and mine got picked up to cross the pond today. I have a bit of a gap between now and the next time I'll have an OS2008 tablet in my hands, but I'll offer ten tips for users and their new tablet (or OS, when it arrives.) OS2008 now backs up and restores application lists. I tested this (Thanks, Jonathan, for the idea) and it worked

Just got a comment from Quim Gil on my previous post about Nokia strategy. I think it’s worth giving more space to what he says.

Quick post: a new firmware (OS 2008 version 1.2007.42-19) upgrade has been released today, it should address some stability problems.

Could it be a prelude to N810 long awaited release? We will see.

• I’d like to learn: Haskell
• I’d like to use: Python
• I end up using: C

While the N810 is just starting to become available (depending on who you ask) the latest 2008 OS slipped into the wild and I finally got the chance to check out an official release on my device. There’s nothing immediately new, but it does seem that there are some fixes and adjustments which smooth out the whole experience. I don’t see a changelist anywhere…

I’m finally able to run some apps that had given me issues from the initially loaded OS which is nice, though not everything works as you might expect. I actually think this last detail is more a factor of the developer community working on scratchbox configurations than on actual devices in the wild, so this should improve greatly in short order.

As you can see from these two screen shots, I was running a few versions back compared to the active release.

Initial OS:

Current Version:

One key difference existing tablet owners will certainly appreciate is the restore function from backup. I did a backup (61MB) just before I flashed, and after setting my date and time, received a prompt to restore as you might usually expect. The tablet now supports the ability to restore repositories and even applications (from the restored repositories) and it absolutely worked - and worked well! The main issue for someone like myself is the number of apps I’ve installed as straight .deb files. These files must be reinstalled manually again for the time being.

I should note Skype is no longer working for me, in that it is not installed or able to be installed. I should have seen this coming since people I know running 2008 on their N800’s have yet to see Skype actively, but that’s OK for now. Just be warned if you are running a pre-release OS.

There’s been talk about fixing the repositories as well as how firmware updates happen in subsequent OS releases. I look forward to that certainly but welcome today’s changes wholeheartedly. I still need to spend some time re-tweaking my device, but far less than I had to do with previous updates and not having to hunt things down (for the most part) again is just great.

The Nokia N810 Internet Tablet User Guides are available for download now !

The exact download locations of the English and Dutch versions can be found below:

- Nokia N810 Internet Tablet User Guide in English

- Nokia N810 Internet Tablet User Guide in Dutch

Remark, currently the N810 isn't available yet in the Nokia NSeries Online shops (for example Belgium). The availability is foreseen somewhere in December, however no official date has been given yet. For those of you interested in a low priced N800, please checkout the Online Shop - Belgium.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

For people who aren't familiar with the Nokia Internet Tablets yet, but who are interested in the device, there is now an interesting How To section available on the Nokia website.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

A good half of my readers are already subscribed through this method, so it's no secret. For the rest of you: My RSS feed here is syndicated on planet.maemo.org along with dozens of other Nokia Internet Tablet fans, developers, enthusiasts, and even the official maemo team members. If you want to know everything that's going on in the Internet Tablet world, exchange my feed in your reader with

That's right! I don't even have time to flash before I head to my new job, but stay tuned this evening for the full review. I don't know if it's available through the updater, but it's official on the firmware download site.

Finally, the first version of MediaBox has been released. This is an extremely finger-friendly media center for the N800 and N810 internet tablets. The Nokia 770 should be supported with a later release. Let the screenshots speak:

Is it possible to use N810 as a bluetooth GPS module? For example GPS might be needed on a laptop, or to test a cellphone application. At first the idea seems a bit stupid, but I’m sure someone somewhere might appreciate the functionality.

I’m pretty sure it won’t work out of the box, but creating an application that acts as BT SPP server that just outputs data from gpsd might work. I’m not familiar with BT-programming, so would this be possible or even “easy”?

If you’ve been waiting or wondering how to get the new OS2008 release on your N800, today’s your lucky day… Thoughtfix notes that it is finally official and can be downloaded right away! 

I can’t test this until tonight so please report any issues you might find.  Good Luck and have fun with the new OS!

Technorati Tags: Maemo, Nokia, N-Series, N800, OS2008, Firmware

At last! ITOS2008 landed on N800!

Actual release is a beta specifically aimed to developers. Announcement here. This release basically answers all my questions in previous posts.

So, perhaps, I’m not going to get an N810 in the next few weeks but, at least, now it will be possible to start working on a “stable” OS2008 device, avoiding using any trick

Some remarks:

1) OS2008 upgrade for N800 and N810 releases were originally planned to be done simultaneously.

2) OS2008 upgrade for N810 was released last week.

3) Discount codes *should* be fully functional Dec 15th.

Then: N810 release aproaching!

Anyway, and that’s what really counts, now developers can use a “stable” device for development purposes filling the gap I was highlighting in my previous posts.

I couldn't have said it better. What made me really pissed is his lying tactics. I once mentioned on the gnome foundation ml about me waiting for his replies for more than an year (literally) and I got a quick reply from him telling me that he has sent me replies. I believed him (after all he is the director of gnome foundation), assuming that his mails must have ended up in spam folder for some reason but all of a sudden my spam filter started see his mails as not spam. After a little conversation, he promised to put my hackergotchie on the planet and after that I started to receive complete silence from him again. I send him reminders from time to time but I never got any response (it's been 2.5 months now). I am sure, he'll tell me that he has been sending me responses if he reads this blog entry or if I make it an issue on the gnome foundation ml again but I see no reason to believe his word anymore.

P.S. If the 'reply-to' header of an email only contains the addresses of the receivers only, I won't blame my spam filter to treat the email as spam. :) I notified Jeff about this and this was his reply:

>>P.S can you please set the correct reply-to header in your emails.

My client does what it's told to do.

My post this morning was a bit premature. OS2008 on the N800 is officially BETA and not a full release as per the announcement on maemo.org. It's also so incredibly popular that even 15 hours after it was posted the download crawls. Someone even posted a torrent on Pirate Bay. I'll keep seeding.

I was going to do a review/overview, but it appears the community at InternetTabletTalk said everything I was going to say already! Yay community!

Since this is a release "for developers," I think it's high time the users yell about our wishists again. Ricky already did this on tablet-guru. My wishlist is as follows:

• Flash support for the webcam so users can stream directly to YouTube or uStream.tv
• More desktop management software including a bookmark manager and music sync application.
  
• Desktop status screensaver kind of thing - rolls by RSS feeds, gives Email alerts, etc. for when the OS2008 tablet is next to the computer and charging.
  

p.s. My backup from the N810 is restoring beautifully on the N800 with OS2008 - including applications!

 Updated Dec 01 2007: good news, seems like Skype installation is now working straight from Application Installer.

Just got Skype running on my N800, after flashing latest OS2008 (it was supposed to work on N810 only).

I tried installing it from Application Manager but it failed (”Download failed” message).

So I decided to give a try to apt-get

First of all you need to become root on your N800. Apparently the ssh way is not working anymore (password used to be “rootme”, but I wasn’t able to login, I’ll try to investigate a little bit) so you will have to use the gainroot script. Use flasher-3.0 to enable R&D mode, open a xterm session and write: “sudo gainroot”. At this point I also suggest you to create a new password for root account (using passwd), so that in the future you will be able to use ssh to login onto your device. While root write:

apt-get install skype

Apparently worked fine, but when installing Skype package I got an error, complaining about not using latest N810 software (are you kidding me?! )

What now? Simple enough. I had the package, only need to have it expanded:

dpkg -x /var/cache/apt/archives/skype_1.7.62.48.2_armel.deb /

beside not being canonical it worked and I was able to make and receive calls!

Please remember that beside everything seems to be working fine, this is a hack. Do it at your own risk So, basically, don’t blame me if something goes wrong!

Just writing this blog entry to make my gratitude to dobey for putting my hackergotchie on planet.gnome.org, very public. :)

Murray writes about GNOME mobile:

The is currently most obvious in the GMAE (or GNOME Mobile) group, which Jeff insists on controlling, which the board allowed despite knowing what would happen. After almost two years it has produced nothing more than a press release announcing its existence, and that happened six months later than the members wanted.

I don’t think Jeff is to be blamed here first. I don’t know about other players involved but I personally feel that we at nokia simply didn’t put enough effort into GNOME mobile.

This is to be read carefully. We did put a lot of serious work (directly and indirectly) into GNOME and various GNOME mobile components. A lot of those efforts are invisible. Where we so far failed is to make this work standardized, reusable and transparent — what (if I understand correctly) was the original goal of the GNOME mobile.

Hopefully this can be changed. But I don’t think it’s fair to blame Jeff for this particular issue.

Just a quick follow-up to this am’s news… I’ve just flashed my N800 without issue using the venerable 770Flasher on OSX. If you are a Mac user, this is really the way to go for flashing the tablet.

If you have not started the download today allow me to recommend the very unofficial torrent which took my estimated 7 hour download from Maemo down to about 5 minutes.

Boingo Gizmo and Rhapsody installed without issue. Rhapsody refused my credentials, but I think it’s because it is already activated on my N810 … and you can only have one remote client according to the license. Rhapsody activated just fine after entering my password with the stylus, not thumbs. Skype started to download but then told me I need to update my tablet software to the latest version for the N810 (on the N800). I did not really expect it to work after hearing the reports this morning, but it was certainly worth a shot. Soon enough …

One bug I’ve found and confirmed via Jaiku is that passwords entered with the thumbboard do not seem to take. The same phrases entered via the stylus seem to work just fine and I’ve had this issue with IM, Rhapsody and Modest so far… This is apparently a known bug and can be voted on here in bugzilla.

Technorati Tags:
Firmware, Gizmo Project, Internet Tablet, Maemo, N-Series, N800, N810, Nokia, wireless, Boingo, OS2008, Rhapsody

A few brave men announced software and hardware in a fashion and openness I have never see before. I can not understand that we as community can even think about complaining about "Delays and Discount codes". We are informed in an unusual open fashion. With the it2008 beta for the N800 we even get a software preview. What more do you want?

Please have some respect for the people that offer such openness and think about what it means for a developer to be working against such an open deadline with open kitchen beta's

Thanks to Murray, Jeff and others we are seeing now explicitely that critique and self-critique is not necessarely easy in open environments populated by volunteering freedom lovers. You think you are in an open environment where everybody can speak out, until you try to challenge the boundaries. Starting with yourself and your inner boundaries. Are [...]

It seems that the gconf Python bindings are not available on every installation of pymaemo. Thus many users (mainly OS 2008) were not able to run the MediaBox media center. This release is for you!MediaBox 0.90.1 falls back to using gconftool-2, if no gconf bindings are available. As a side-result, version 0.90.1 will now also start on the Nokia 770 with OS 2006 and sorta works (kinetic scrolling

A PPA gives you:

• An APT repository of up to 1 gigabyte

• Binary packages built for x86 and AMD64 architectures against Ubuntu.

• A web front-end where Launchpad users can browse and search for your packages.

I uploaded the mobileguide for hardy and it seemed to build OK.

I hope that the MOTU guys think the deb is OK ;)

I have also submitted it for REVU (a web-based tool to give people who have worked on packages a chance to "put their packages out there" for other people to look at and comment on) so fingers crossed it is accepted!

There has been some discussion on the maemo-dev lists recently about implementing a similar system for armel and this would be great I think. I have just packaged the liferea 1.4.4 sources with a hildon.dpatch which I am testing at the moment so anyway to have this automatically build for both armel and lpia would be *awesome*

Interesting times ahead in mobile if it all comes off.

As expected, the N800 at Play.com is, and I quote, "Temporarily out of stock. This item will be dispatched as soon as it arrives". There were rumors that the great price that play was offering wasn't going to be honored and I suppose that in this case the rumors were true.

So what now? The Asus Eee PC looks like a promising acquisition but it's becoming harder and harder to find, even at it's retail price! Anyway, I'm off to hunt for a Linux gadget.

Russ pointed out a different version of Ruby for Maemo than I had tried before. This one has a hildon library and GTK support, w00t! I tried out a few of the examples but haven’t dug into it too much. Requiring the hildon module throws a bunch of warnings, but the module works perfectly once it’s in.

For those of you hounding me for completing it - thanks. I would've put it off until the weekend otherwise ;) I am still doing a little copy-editing and clean-up, buy you can read my Nokia N810 Internet Tablet vs. Asus Eee 701 article over on UltraMobileGeek.

No video that I can see, but Skype works on both the N800 and N810 using the latest OS2008 updates for each device. I used the shortcut from the My Selection panel which asks whether you’d like to install. I’d had issues previously with the installer in Applications Manager and thought this might do the trick - though I gather the real reason it works today is that the application is actually in the repository! Enjoy!

Technorati Tags:
Internet Tablet, mobile, N-Series, N800, N810, Nokia, Skype, VOIP

Well, it's nearly DECEMBER and no new tutorials, so here's yet another update on the Internet Tablet School's situation: - We're still waiting for the N810 to become available through Nokia's UK online shop, but they're not even allowing pre-orders yet. We have absolutely no idea when the N810 will be available through this shop, and it's all the more frustrating because the N810 is freely

While the new OS2008 is the most user friendly and simplified experience we’ve had to date, there are things I’d really like to see both Nokia and the developer community do to keep / make things consistent and easier to use. These are not in any particular order, but are all things I’ve been thinking about regularly since first getting the N810. Each one will add to the list of improvements we’ve already received. I look forward to hearing your comments and seeing what else you think should be added to the list.

• Every device does not have a keyboard, but every application should support basic shortcuts for Close (CTRL+W) and Quit (CTRL+Q). Enable additional keyboard shortcuts as well … this has not been how the tablet has worked to date, but the keyboard is a such a compelling way to control the N810, I am always looking for more ways to keep my thumbs driving.
• Scrolling in menus (system or application) should let me move all the way around whether I decide to go up or down.
• The menu button should work or not work in an application, rather than only work on the main screen. (i.e. Modest message view vs. Folder)
• Finger taps should be the preferred and optimized mode for things. I can still use the menus when they are smaller, but icons and general UI widgets should be designed for fingers.
• Use a repository for your application. I’ve installed plenty of .deb files but these do not restore today when you backup and update your device. Applications installed from repositories, however are able to re-install easily. Repository based applications can also provide an update notice within the Application Manager. Early stage Garage apps as debs is OK, but as things progress we really need a repo system. Perhaps the Maemo team can help create one the community can manage.
• There are system UI alerts as well as a programmable LED on the N810. Take advantage of these things to let the user see what’s happening with applications that provide notifications I would really like to see either an application based preference or a system level control panel that lets us define how we want to see notices for applications by type. (email, rss, im, voip, mauku, etc…) The N800 has an LED as well but I am not sure it’s programable in OS2008.
• Let us set default applications for things. I thought I read that the release of Modest will have a setting to replace the default email application in the same way we chose the browser engine when MicroB was released. I should be able to also choose a default voice app (I have three + a SIP account enabled now), IM and RSS reader for starters.

After much struggling with branch merging and fighting with incompatible scratchbox rootstraps, an alpha version of Glom is now available for Maemo’s new Chinook SDK, in the extras repository. Thanks to Armin and Johannes.

This is a nice feature already implemented on gtk but not integrated on svn trunk yet, this is very important to get gtk widgets on gtk canvas like libcc[1] and clutter[2].


Clutter + Gtk offscreen rendering patch from Neil Patel





Video from: macslow.thepimp.net


[1]http://live.gnome.org/Criawips/CriaCanvas/

[2]http://clutter-project.org/

While researching articles for my other blog, met a new blogging friend. She's a hacker/geek like me and wicked with a soldering iron.

Anyhow - she just got and unboxed her new N810 so you can expect the same level of geekery from her on this device as well.

A while ago we were curious about how would be the performance of the new version of Canola running on a Nokia 770 device. After a whole day building packages and compiling stuff, our mate Renato Chencarek was finally able to make it run on the device. We thought it also deserved a video, just like others we posted.



It's a Nokia 770 device running OS2006 (gregale) and you can see it performs surprisingly well! Actually, it feels like the performance is better than on N800/N810. As we don't have that damn tearing effect, you can see the UI elements just move smoothly. Unfortunately, the screen is not as sensitive as the N800 or N810, so some tasks like dragging and panning will demand more effort than in the other devices.

Reader "dfndoe" dropped a message asking which phones are good matches for Nokia Internet Tablets. Over the years, I've used:

iMate SP5m

Motorola Q

Nokia N95-3


The SP5m was decent on T-Mobile's EDGE network, but EDGE didn't do it for me. The Motorola Q worked after some hacking on Verizon's EVDO network, but then Microsoft pushed a firmware update that removed Bluetooth DUN entirely. Bye bye Windows Mobile! I got some extensive time with the N95-1 at the Web2Summit and loved it so much that I bought an N95-3 and use it with AT&T's HSDPA (3.5G) network. If you can afford it, get an N95 with your Internet Tablet. They're a fantastic pair.

What I am asking you, dear readers:

1. Do you use your Internet Tablet with your phone for Internet access?
2. What kind of phone do you have?
   
3. Was it easy to get working?
   
4. Who is your service provider?
5. How affordable is your data plan?
6. What else should users know about that phone/provider/plan?

My answers are currently:

1. Constantly
2. Nokia N95-3
3. Very.
4. AT&T
5. I pay an extra $19.99 for the unlimited MediaNET (mobile web) service.
6. the N95 and N800/N810 browse beautifully on it, but for some reason I cannot stream certain things like m.youtube.com to the phone.

On my last plan with Verizon:

1. Constantly
2. Motorola Q
3. I had to install a registry hack, but it worked.
4. Verizon
5. I paid an extra $39.99 for unlimited data plus a $15/mo "tethering" surcharge.
6. Verizon's Terms of Service, at some point in my contract said it "may be used with wireless devices for the following purposes: (i) Internet browsing; (ii) email; and (iii) intranet access. Services cannot be used: (1) for uploading, downloading or streaming of movies, music or games; (2) with server devices or with host computer applications, including, but not limited to, Web camera posts or broadcasts, automatic data feeds, Voice over IP (VoIP), automated machine-to-machine connections, or peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing." They will also change these as they so desire - which happened to me twice (first stating the 5GB cap, then stating the 5GB limit until the connection gets throttled) in the course of my year with them. I never got written notification of these changes. (update: My quote above is also not the "current" terms of service either.)

So, dear readers, tell me about your phones and how you get online. I created this InternetTabletTalk thread to track responses and disabled comments on this post. Thanks for the idea, dfndoe!

In the latest MikroPC-magazine (14/2007) there’s a small article by Veli-Matti Jalovaara about WiMAX.

“Nokia will be using Intel’s WiMAX-chipsets in the upcoming N-series tablets, which are meant to be in the market next year”

For me this was news, but after a quick session with google it seems that this in an old story. Anyways, linuxdevices.com makes an interesting notion: “Intel and Nokia partnered on WiMAX as early as 2005 — months before the launch of Nokia’s original Linux-based 770 Internet tablet.” Maybe the goal has always been to make a device that can connect itself to a long-range network like wimax. Will this change the way we see these tablets? For me they’re not yet always-connected devices by nature, even though I theoretically could keep the DUN-connection to my phone always on.

An IMAP server is smarter than a POP server. This, I hope, comes as no surprise to most people. An IMAP server has a MIME parser and can give you the BODYSTRUCTURE of a message. This is useful because that means that you can individually request the parts of a message, rather than always fetching the entire message. In future you can also CONVERT those to for example thumbnail versions. (I already started implementing support for CONVERT in Tinymail)

After having spent last three days with OS2008 on Godot (my N800:-) ) it’s time to draw some conclusions.

Speed

For sure OS2008 is hella fast! Using it on N800 is a pleasure. CPU speed management’s improvements are there, and you can feel it. Opening menus and launching apps is a pleasure, well even more thant what it was before!

Menus

Talking about menus, first time I saw new larger OS2008 menus I wasn’t sure I was going to like them but after getting used to the new look I have to confess that, after all, they are not as bad as I thought. Perhaps it would have been a little better being able to freely choice your size, you know: size matters!

Application Manager

In one word (and a half): it works! On OS2007 it was a pain using it. Everyone remembers having continuously to scroll application list after every install/remove action. I mean, that sort of things that make you ask if people really use the program they write.

Now, at last once an application has been installed/removed, AppMan will remember our position. Ins’t it great?

And again: speed! Browsing applications is very easy and comfortable. (more…)

A few weekends ago I updated my system from Fedora 6 to Fedora 8. I did a fresh install, as opposed to doing an upgrade. Here are a few of the problems I encountered, along with solutions:

MTBlog is now waite blog. So I have finally moved my blog from b2evo. Thanks madller for setting up the maemopeople WordPress acct for me. Maybe now I won’t spend time whacking spam comments and instead well… blog.
And now I can even try out WordPy for some nice remote blogging.
Until next post….

Peas out!

As I happen to be a gadget-lover (Am I? 3 x Nokia N810, 5 x Nokia N800, 5 x Nokia Nokia 770, (okay, most of those aren’t mine but they are Kate’s or actually Nokia’s in the end) couple of computers, cameras, all kinds of stuff), I am happy to announce that we have a new gadget in our household, new gadget now and then keeps one happy:

I’m a fan of the WebbAlert show and finally Morgan mentioned the N810, with a very positive light In this episode she is basically showing of some cool gadgets and comparing them. Check it out.

Getting Started

So with all the eepc vs N800/laptop/… I thought I would create my own comparison. So lets take a look at my first Linux handheld and my current.

Agenda VR3 Nokia N800

Processor 66 Mhz NEC VR4181 400 Mhz TI OMAP

Memory 16 MB DRAM 128MB DDR

Intrenal Storage 16 MB FLASH 265MB FLASH

Display 160×240 monochrome (16 bit grayscale) 800×480 16-bit color

Display Size 2.25″X3.25″ 4.1″

User Interface Touchscreen
stylus/finger Touchscreen
stylus/finger Buttons 7 buttions Dpad + 4 buttons Connectivity IRDA
2XRS232 802.11
bluetooth
usb Audio Microphone Jack
buzzer Stereo speakers
Microphone
Audio Jack Text Input On screen keyboard
Handwriting recognition On screen keyboard
Handwriting recognition
Bluetooth Keyboard Operating System Linux v2.4.0 Linux v 2.6.21

Well I guess they N800 is the clear winner. To be fair my VR3 has sat dormant for 6 years now or so, but it is still fun to reflect. It was a nice piece of hardware with 2 fatal flaws that Nokia could have, but did not, hit.
1) It released a developers edition with almost no apps expecting the devels to provide pretty much all the apps a real user would want.
2) It was not invested in the Community at all.

And hey if you want to compare youself, pick up a VR3