I need more experience building my Chordite keyboard. So, I will build two custom keyboards for two Nokia Internet Tablet users who send me a letter with a photocopy of their hand along with an explanation of why they should get a free keyboard. Note that this keyboard only supports Linux, and it's only been tested for the Nokia N800. Send the letter to:

Free Chordite Offer Crynwr Software 521 Pleasant Valley Rd. Potsdam, NY 13676

Include your return shipping address, and email address so that I may notify you of your acceptance. This offer closes September 10th, so if your letter may take that long to get to me, send it now. I considered doing this on a time priority basis, but I want to get the keyboard to the people who want it the most, not the people who happen to read it first. Plus, I need the hand scan no matter what.

[Tags bluetooth, chording, keyboard ]

Yes, we're back! If you've been following the internet tablet world you may have heard that Nokia is bringing out a tablet called the "N810 Wimax Edition", and here's our guide to what you need to know about it:

What is conduit?
Conduit is a synchronization solution for GNOME which allows the user to take their emails, files, bookmarks, and any other type of personal information and synchronize that data with another computer, an online service, or even another electronic device.


This weekend I spent some time on this amazing project and create a simple module to keep you updated with the latest youtube videos which was already integrated in svn code.

Some of the ideas I have for conduit include integration with N800 device to synchronize contacts, playlists, bookmarks, musics, photos, videos, and much more. Part of the work has already started with the network module writen by John Stowers, which uses avahi to publish the synchronization service over the network.

You are welcome to join us on conduit project

You can do a lot of good stuff with the Python/C API. However, bear in mind that Python has exceptions and so you have to deal with them even when you’re using its C API. If you’re using the Python/C API and forget to check and handle exceptions I can say your program will probably crash with some weird exception at some weird place (believe me, been there). And what it’s worse: it won’t be easy to find where is the problem! (you can find how to do exception handling with Python/C API here).

Most DVD players sold today have DivX support, I think. So, it is a good choice to convert videos to DivX and enjoy thems in sofa.

The free version of any video converter do the job quite well.

You may want to test the video converted with DivX Player before burning CDs.

With our fifth child on the way (yeah, I said fifth) that leaves me with finding a way to entertain my five year old while waiting at the doctor's office every two weeks.

After a bit of searching, I found a pretty good implementation of Connect Four using Python that was GPL licensed. It didn't take a lot of modification to have it ready for packaging for Maemo:

What gets me is that his code plays sounds fine on Maemo where I couldn't get the mixer to init in my own software. That warrants a bit more investigation...

Check it out on my download page.

Etrunko posted a picture Daniel found in Amazon:

Link for the IMDB entry.

Aza Raskin writes Never Use a Warning, in which I count him as agreeing with my assessment of the Connection Manager's warnings.

IT2007 has added the signal strength to the connection menu (underneath the 'world' icon on the applets). Yay! But why isn't the IP address listed there as well? Why do I need to bring up the Connection Manager, and then use its "IP Address" entry to tell me the IP address? It's not like the connection menu is full or anything. It's not even a variable-length menu.

A few years ago, I got a comment back from someone about CheckBook Tracker, the personal finance software I wrote for Linux. He had learned I wrote it in Pascal and wondered "Why didn't you use Python?" I snickered to myself "a scripting language for a personal finance application? You've got to be kidding me!"

Aza Raskin writes Never Use a Warning, in which I count him as agreeing with my assessment of the Connection Manager's warnings.

A couple of emails in my inbox this morning from Ed Colligan, Palm CEO, saying the Foleo's been cancelled:

http://blog.palm.com/palm/2007/09/a-message-to-pa.html

I think the reasons are threefold:

1. A distinct lack of excitement from the existing Palm userbase (apart from some real zealots) - in fact, real hostility from both their base and columnists.


2. A mismanagement of the launch and bringing in software developers: obviously some people were getting devices and SDKs, but no-one in the open source community was (AFAICT). All the software announced to date has been rewrites/ports of existing Palm software. Hardly a paradigm shift.


3. The announcement of the Asus Eee PC and the Via Nanobook platforms killed any chance the Foleo had of success. They're cheaper, more flexible and more open.

(2) is an interesting one: it shows that despite all of the mistakes Nokia made with Maemo, they could've got it so much more wrong.

Yesterday’s talk on WebKit/Gtk+ at LinuxConf Europe was well received, and I was particularly impressed by the turnout considering that it was scheduled against Linus’ git BOF next door. The audience had more questions than there was time for, but those that I was able to answer were split mostly between questions about mobile performance/footprint and standards compliance.

The talk covers some of the history of both the WebKit browser engine and the WebKit/Gtk+ port, looks at the ethos of the developer community and explores current and planned features, such as SVG, Canvas and audio/video. It goes into detail about work involving the Nokia N800 internet tablet and Maemo as well as a brief look at integration work being done by the OpenMoko project, the state of play with OLPC and, of course, GNOME’s Epiphany web browser and Devhelp documentation browser.

Download WebKit/Gtk+ talk slides

Sometimes I feel like I’m part of a miniscule group of Christians who, for some reason or another, have never found the section in the bible that discusses the good news of war (or, even, the good news of nationalism for that matter). Read the following excerpt from a NPR report I heard this morning…

It’s a quote from a gentleman who lost his son in the current war:

“You have to understand, John was raised in a church, on the Bible. That’s where he got his character; that’s where he got his convictions; that’s where he got his concerns. And that’s what he lived and died by. Now, that’s different than most of the world, you have to understand,” Smith says. “We believe that’s why we love our country and serve our country, die for our country if need be.”

(Read the entire story here.)

Even with my disdain for prooftexting, I’d like to challenge anyone to find a passage in the bible that substantiates this mindset.

Anyway, nationalistic quotes aside, I do recommend reading (or listening) to the story. It is pretty heart-breaking — and, hopeful at the same time.

I touched on the N800 and how the browser soundly spanks the iPod Touch in this special edition of Coffee with ThoughtFix. Hop over for the video.

Why does the N800 have a unibutton and a hidden button on the top? The 770 had three separate buttons on the top. The left button is now in the middle on the N800. The rocker switch (press left, press right) is now split into two buttons, on left and right. The power menu button on the 770 was arguably too easy to press, so I count the hidden button on the N800 an improvement.

But to merge the two buttons into one unibutton which is practically impossible to distinguish?? Why? The only way to distinguish between the buttons is to slide your finger back and forth a few times, trying to feel the subtle slope from the left to the middle and back down on the right. Only then can you take a guess at which button your finger is on.

Going back to the 770's buttons would be an improvement. Let's hope that the N830 (or whatever) makes that change.

There are so many things going on these days. I wish I had more time to blog better posts. Anyway, here goes a composite of two unrelated thoughts:

Thought A

Apple announced yesterday the iPod Touch. Apparently it is being called the iPhone without the phone. You can also call it an iPod with multitouch, wifi, browser, contacts, calendar... I'll call it a tablet, as I'm calling also tablet what Intel is trying to bring to the market with Ubuntu Mobile inside. It just makes things easier to understand.

Thought B

I'm seeing these days some bloggers telling shamelessly to people to go to their Amazon wishlist and put the credit card to work on their behalf. I'm not precisely an introvert but I reckon not having the guts to get to those levels of extrovertism. I couldn't avoid coming up with a personal (not connected to my job) wishlist, though. They are just free software maemo ports (no credit card needed and not exclusively for me): WebKit, Gnash and Mugshot (and/or whatever is being prototyped for GOD).

I find this rather funny marketing by the Nokia team.

Angry iPhone user?

No no no this is not a marketing move against the iPhone price :-)

I borrowed an iPhone a couple of days ago and play a bit with the thing. Well let's call it iPod Touch instead as the phone didn't work :-) And because it is only for one day and I was also pretty busy that day so I couldn't explore much.

read more

As promised in GUADEC, today we release the Hildon Input Method (The HIM) suite.

The components released are:
* Hildon Input Method Framework: This is the glue to the GUI framework, consists of the protocol and the HildonIMContext
* Hildon Input Method UI: This is the main UI which hosts all the plugins.
* Hildon Input Method Plugins Example: This is already released in Maemo Bora but now we also moved the source code repository outside.

Just like other Hildon projects, it also runs not only in Maemo platforms. Sorry my Ubuntu Mobile environment is a bit broken so no screenshot for today :-) But packages for UME are here,

read more

Ok, maybe now that Apple released it’s products (iPhone, iPod touch) with incredible hardware power (cpu, gpu, … and a smaller screen, or less things to paint) Nokia will think a bit more for the next devices. We (developers) need more power to do the fancy stuff, or at least non-bogus hardware.

We already have to work on missing infrastructure bits, having us to work around these technical hardware problems is no fun!

(Interested in post-Planet scenarios? Keep reading)

Three weeks ago we released a revamped maemo news section. It's still in beta stage, some functionality is missing and there are known bugs, but in its essence it works and provides an idea of what we are pursuing here.

There are some bits that are still not obvious and not explained, though.

We want the maemo community to have a control over the public maemo agenda and memory. Favoriting news items, users currently push these items to the top of the news highlights, and make them stay there more days (increasing their visibility and allowing more people to see the news and favoriting it more, keeping them in the top rank). Note that external factors such as del.icio.us links or Technorati karma also help those items go up, and stay there more time.

One day only the items receiving n favs will jump to the highlights, the rest will run only in the latest block. Items getting too "minus" votes will even disappear from that block (off topic, redundant, offensive... the community decides). You will still be able to get all these items through their source pages.

The highlights will have an own RSS feed for those willing to get only the best news of the day. These news will be the only ones appearing in the maemo.org homepage. The difference of visibility to favorited items vs those not favorited will increase notably.

But there is more, have a look at http://maemo.org/news/best. Now this is only an accumulative experiment, but already works as a proof of concept. The social news system thinks that these are the items *really* relevant since we started with the social news. Just 10 in more than one month, of course according also to the community favs.

The plan with this feature is to release something like a monthly maemo digest targeted to those willing to get an overview about the maemo platform and also for the busy people not able to follow everyday what is going on. Add here your preferred IT manager interested in mobile open source stuff (including Nokia managers), tech journalists, popular bloggers, etc. I even wish to see at some point a Best of maemo 2008 with only the top 24 stories of the year (or something like that).

Your click on a white heart to turn it red will make all this happen. And you will also get more karma yourself, but this is flesh for another post.

Maemo CJK Support project provides excellent support for Chinese, Japanese and Korean input and rendering.

I’ve installed the 4.0 Beta Release of maemo CJK on OSSO 1.0 with the latest version of the Mozilla based browser for maemo.

Here are the results:

http://www.google.co.jp/   without fonts with fonts http://www.google.co.kr/   without fonts with fonts

See installation instructions here:

It took a lot of sweat and tears, but I finally converted the Kagu kinetic scrolling selection widget to work with GTK.

Check it out.

A new version of the OS 2007 hacked edition for the Nokia 770 is now available for download

The hacker edition is not a end-user ready release. It’s a tool to allow developers to continue working on the 770 moving on to the OS 2007 software platform, bridging the gap between 770 and N800.

This latest version updates the software to the level of the latest feature upgrade release for the N800 to the extent possible. Joni Valtanen is still working on improving it but he has already done a great job covering the basics.

Unfortunately it was not possible for us to provide in the Hacker Edition these new developments coming from third parties:

• Skype client support
• Adobe Flash 9 browser plugin

This is due to licensing and hardware constraints.
In the case of the Flash plugin the Hacker Edition is shipping without any version of it.

We’re still using the OS2006 initfs so the kernel and device drivers are the old ones.
There is no support for larger memory cards.

On the up side, all the user space libraries have been updated as well as all the applications, so we expect application portability across N800 OS2007 and the 770 hacker edition as long as code is not compiled specifically for OMAP2.

Here are the main things that are still broken or not available:

• Internet call has problems
• Boot process might not work every time
• Bluetooth keyboard and file storage connectivity

These things have improved since the latest Hacker Edition release:

• Filemanager can handle files properly
• Certificates work with browser
• Working Media player, though still with some bugs
• SDL sound
• Correct device information
• Device locking and starting with or without powersupply

We’re continuing to work on the hacker edition. New releases will follow in the coming days.
These are our current goals:

• Update to Chinook release
• Further bug fixes

Over the next days we will populate the bug tracker in the OS 2007 Garage Project with the bugs carried from OS 2006 (many of them now fixed).
Problems with the hacker edition should be reported there.

Seems like I had too much ignored this project - now I have tried vala and what else could I say that I am very impressed. It is truly nice language which has lots of potential. And great thing is that it is a compiled language and is not resource-hungry like interpreted languages in general are.

I edited one example a bit and created a simple UI (nothing special), but just wanted try it out:

using GLib;
using Gtk;

public class Hello : Window {
construct {
title = "First window with vala";
create_widgets ();
}

public void create_widgets () {
destroy += Gtk.main_quit;
var hbox1 = new HBox(false, 0);
var entry1 = new Entry();
var button1 = new Button.with_label ("Hello 1\n");
var button2 = new Button.with_label ("Hello 2\n");
var button3 = new Button.with_label ("Hello 3\n");
button1.clicked += btn => {
title = "Hello";

};

hbox1.pack_start(button1, false, false, 1);
hbox1.pack_start(button2, false, false, 1);
hbox1.pack_start(button3, false, false, 1);
hbox1.pack_start(entry1, false, false, 1);
add (hbox1);
}

static int main (string[] args) {
Gtk.init (out args);

var hello = new Hello ();
hello.show_all ();

Gtk.main ();
return 0;
}
}


Incredible how effective it is, few lines of code and it can do as much as Python with PyGtk and Vala seems to be a language I have used to with brackets and semicolons on the places they belong to

Totally cool thing is also that there are clutter bindings for vala (for those who don’t yet know clutter, go and have a look, it is very cool)

Two different processes have been completed coincidentally today:

• Nokia releases the Hildon Input Method Framework as open source. This step removes an obstacle in the way of Hildon to the GNOME Mobile context upstream and the collaboration with Intel/Ubuntu Mobile.
• New Internet Tablet OS 2007 Hacker Edition released for the Nokia 770 owners knowing what they do. It took longer than expected but here it is - and expect another one to integrate whatever possible from maemo Chinook.

There are more things in the kitchen but still not ready. Next week.

Ok, when it comes to media players, the Internet Tablet has them coming out of every corner of the earth from every kind of person in existence. But, there are three main third-party media centers. We'll go one by one through each and see what they're really about, and which is right for for. Let's get to it!

First, the big dog, Canola



Ok, this program is pretty freaking sweet. Everything is very well organized into simple menus, and everything is pretty well supported. Music, Pictures, Videos, and Internet Radio.




The interface, which is beautiful, is completely finger driven, which... is awesome. This release is pretty cool, but, there are some downsides. Main thing I don't like it that you can't scroll through your lists except for one song at a time. Which is a pain in the ass. But, overall, pretty nicely down. It's got a huge user base (comparatively) and it's future looks bright... sorta like this:






Next Media Center: Kagu



Ok, another awesome program. Big features here.

+ AD2P Support

If you install the bluetooth sound packages for the n800, you can stream it to your headphones with any further mussing with your system.

+ Kinetic scrolling

I absolutely love the scrolling style used here... BUT, it's really unresponsive and I really find it a pain compared to, well, we'll get to the next player in a second.

What I don't like about Kagu is the UI. I hate the colors and it's just damned ugly. BUT (what is with these buts??) they have built in a theme system into Kagu, so... if someone takes the initiative, it could be pretty decent looking!


And our last player, UKMP



Pretty sweet program, in my opinion. This has the best of both world (Canola and Kagu). It is as simple and intuitive as Canola, while retaining the, ehm... "coolness" and functionality of kinetic scrolling. Like Kagu, it will automatically catalog your songs and download the covers for each of the song's albums.



Which, if you just want to show off... is perfect ;)
iPhone scrolling with a crapload of cool looking album covers.

OK!

Summary:

I love all these players, I do. But... at the moment, I really do prefer UKMP. It's got a decent UI, kinetic scrolling, automatic album cover fetching, and themeability.

(In the future, though... Canola is starting to really shape up ;) )

Today it was announced "videocenter" for maemo. Videocenter is an application to receive video streams, download videos and also manage your videos on the platform.You have services like Internet videos (rss), Internet TV, Remote EPG and soon you will also have Video Remote. Ow, and there is also one tab ...

Probably some of the people have been wondering how come I've been laying so low for the past two weeks. This is due to the fact that I began working at Nokia on monday. I've very excited about it and people at Nokia have been really great. I am sure I can contribute even more to the device now that I'm part of the process as an insider.

As requested, here's a short demo video of the Kagu media player for the Nokia 770 and n800.



Link for 770 users:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnlO3-pDVRY

Anyone knows that creating transitions (animations) using GTK+ is not the easiest thing to do. So after some discussions with Renato we came up with a API to make it easier.

So today I sat down and wrote GtkTransition, a class written on top of GtkTimeline [1] that allows you to create transitions as natural as it can be. It's similar to what Flash does to create animations, but with some small differences.

Basically you create a transition with an interval (eg. 2 seconds) and add states for this transition. States work directly on objects properties, so you can say for example, create a state that will complete when the transition reaches 50% that will set the label angle from 0 to 360 degrees. After that create another state that will complete on 100% of the transition that will set the same angle from 360 to 0 degreess and depends on the first state (it will start after the first state has completed).

The code looks something like:

transition = gtk_transition_new (2000);
gtk_timeline_set_loop (GTK_TIMELINE (transition), TRUE);

state1 = gtk_transition_state_new (G_OBJECT (label));
gtk_transition_state_set (state1, "angle", 0.0, 360.0, NULL);
gtk_transition_add_state (transition, state1, NULL, 0.5);

state2 = gtk_transition_state_new (G_OBJECT (label));
gtk_transition_state_set (state2, "angle", 360.0, 0.0, NULL);
gtk_transition_add_state (transition, state2, state1, 1.0);

gtk_timeline_start (GTK_TIMELINE (transition));

The code is not complete yet, but you can grab it with:
$ svn checkout http://andrunko.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/gtk

There is a test1.c that shows the code to rotate the label, and test2.c that translate and resize a GooCanvasItem (you need goocanvas [1] to compile it)

Patches and ideas are welcome!

Hope you enjoy

[1]
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=444659
[2]
http://sourceforge.net/projects/goocanvas

Edit: updated code snippet

After running the UME as root, finally I could get my environment working again, dunno why :-)

And here is more than a screenshot (visit my website to see if your planet doesn't show the video):

Sorry for the video quality :-)
And the bottom part of the browser is clipped, well that text on the browser are typed using hardware keyboard. HIM is not yet working there. Feel free to make Firefox to work with HIM :-)

read more

This is the application I’ve been waiting for. But it has abug (or a feature) that needs some knowledge to bypass.

So the idea of this program is to be able to watch vidcasts & live TV easily on the go. A feature that I almost decided to implement myself But because this program uses the internal mediaplayer for videos, it doesn’t support all the shows I want.

Luckily there’s a option in the settings to use external player.

To use mplayer for example, just enter this path to the box:

/usr/sbin/mplayer -cache 1024 %s

The “cache” is optional but it’ll make mplayer stream those videos much more smoothly.

The tricky part is to use that external player. If you just press the “>>”-button, the video will start in the internal player even though external is selected. To launch the stream in mplayer you’ll have to go to internet videos screen, select the video and go to “menu->file->stream video”. That’s all there’s to it.

Thanks again for the great application.

Videocenter is an application to control your podcast, videocast, watch internet TV, and much more, using your N800.

I have been working on this application for a long time, now you can dowload this application from videocenter gararage site and try it.



Another links about Videocenter:
http://maemo.org/midcom-permalink-196663a45df611dc8a6d030dad1d56f656f6

This week I and Andrunko had some discussions about a light implementation of Gtk components to use in applications with animations like fade, transitions, resizes, like QT uses QGraphicsView.

On Gtk a big discussion already started on gtk-devel mailing list, about a new GtkCanvas implementation. Some studies about the current canvas states can be found at [http://live.gnome.org/ProjectRidley/CanvasOverview].

While nothing is decided we (I and Andrunko) using the free time, started a implementation of transitions based in GtkTimeline[http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=444659] .


With this new component you can create animations very easy using GObject properties, like this code above:


transition = gtk_transition_new (2000);

gtk_timeline_set_loop (GTK_TIMELINE (transition), TRUE);



state = gtk_transition_add_state (transition, NULL, G_OBJECT (label), 0.5);

gtk_transition_state_set (state, "angle", 0.0, 360.0, NULL);

state = gtk_transition_add_state (transition, state, G_OBJECT (label), 1.0);

gtk_transition_state_set (state, "angle", 360.0, 0.0, NULL);



gtk_timeline_start (GTK_TIMELINE (transition));



I already have this running on my n800 and my desktop, I will be posting a video later to show you this.

So I decided to start working on getting a GtkCanvas implementation on GTK+.
I believe GTK+ is really missing a good canvas implementation to make it easy to create rich UI applications such as Plasma, Canola, ....

Plasma is using QGraphicsView framework, a really good canvas framework, that enables you to create really nice UIs with nice animations/transitions. As already stated in some blogs [1], Canola will be using Evas for it's next version. So why not have a GtkCanvas? As i said in the previous post, I together with Renato already started creating a GtkTransition class. Together with a Canvas implementation you can create really nice animations really easy. I will be posting a video of an example application soon.

So if you are interested on this topic see this thread on gtk-devel mailing list

[1]
http://www.marceloeduardo.com/blog/mobile-applications/canola-development-update-or-we-are-not-dead

Since my last post, MaemoCJK has been released for beta-testing with support for Japanese/Chinese handwriting recognition, together with a few new interesting features such as switch between input methods at runtime.

Ugh...

For some reason... Nokia seems to hate 770 owners.

The recently released program titled "Video Center" is supposed to be the killer app for the Internet Tablet. Add video feeds, manage your onboard videos, and add new video "repositories" with one click from Nokia's catalog. Sound too good to be true? Well, sorta.

It doesn't work, for me. See that screenshot up there? That's my 770, which has a few videos and about five DVDs on it so far. (Which are in the extremely bland and common .avi format.) None of them come up. There's also the empty feeds space next to it. (I tried to use Nokia's catlog, but, nope.) Nokia no longer even wants to be bothered to port their stuff to the 770, much less design anything original for it.

And, some N800 users are having the same luck as me. Several bugs (ok, lots of bugs) have been found in Nokia's app. ("File Format not supported" errors and it won't even install for some.)

Those who have gotten this damnable thing to work somehow, though, are a bit impressed. It's features sound really awesome. You load a feed, it downloads the videos for it and you get to watch it whenever and wherever you want. And, it organizes your video collection like none of the other media centers do. The interface is actually doesn't make you want to pull out your eyeballs. either ;)

So, if any N800 users that have had positive experiences with thei new app want to drop me a line, please do leave a comment! (I've heard way too many unhappy, though, so don't worry about it if you don't like it.)

If Nokia gets this thing ironed out, it could be extremely useful for n800 owners. But, until then... Just use UKMP or Canola.

Have fun ;)

Yo!

Another little how-to for your n770 and n800, custom icons!

I had posted a pic of my 770's home screen:


and a few people had asked me about the navigator icons. (On the left hand side of the screen, see the cool fox, the faceless people, and the folder with a CD?) Well, I've seen a few little posts on how to do this on different forums, but never a real tutorial, so... Here's how I do it and the pictures I used. (No, I didn't create them, they are GPL'd and I modified them, so I have to re-release them anyway ;) )

Firstly, this tutorial is for Ubuntu and Debian-based users only, sorry everyone in Gate's and Job's world :( BUT Windows users can do these steps using Putty which I have no experience with... Sorry :(

Let's get to it!!!

1. Install this on your Debian/Ubuntu computer.

2. Install openSSH on your tablet. (If you have Dropbear, get rid of it first.)

3. Shut down and then power up your tablet, making sure it is on the same network as your computer.

4. On your tablet, go to Application --> Tools --> Connection Manager

5. In the connection manager, open the menu, or use the hard button with the menu icon on it. A small menu will now appear in the upper left hand corner of the screen, click Internet Connection --> IP Address

6. On your Ubuntu/Debian box, open gFtp. As the username, type in root and as the password, type in rootme. As the "host", put in the IP you got at STEP 5. And make sure to select SSH2 as the protocol instead of FTP.

7. Your IT's files should now be pulled up, navigate to /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/hildon.

8. Ok, from here, you can transfer these files over to your IT, you MUST keep their filenames exactly as they are. (You can create your own images and just give them these names, too.)


9. Shut down your IT and power it back on. Enjoy!

Hope that little tutorial helps!

Yo!


Another way to cutomise your Internet Tablet, splash screens for your n770 or n800. No more nasty Nokia logo and those weird hands. This is just like custom icons on your IT. Again, this is meant for Ubuntu and Debian users. (Windows users can actually do these steps by using Putty. Which I have no experience with :( ) These are the splashes I use on my 770, but if have some you'd like to share, drop me a link in a comment and I'll try and put them up for the world to see!

Let's get to it!

1. Install this on your Debian/Ubuntu computer.

2. Install openSSH on your tablet. (If you have Dropbear, get rid of it first.)

3. Shut down and then power up your tablet, making sure it is on the same network as your computer.

4. On your tablet, go to Application --> Tools --> Connection Manager

5. In the connection manager, open the menu, or use the hard button with the menu icon on it. A small menu will now appear in the upper left hand corner of the screen, click Internet Connection --> IP Address

6. On your Ubuntu/Debian box, open gFTP. As the username, type in root and as the password, type in rootme. As the "host", put in the IP you got at STEP 5. And make sure to select SSH2 as the protocol instead of FTP.

7. Your IT's files should now be pulled up, navigate to /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/hildon

8. Transfer these splashes, or make your own if you want ;) Just remember to keep the names and resolutions exactly the same.

These instructions are from the genius mind of Millhouse! The original instructions can be found here at the amazing Internet Tablet Talk Forums and you may want to check there for updates if something goes awry ;) This is only for n800 owners, though :(




"Full instructions for downloading and installing A2DP software can be found here. The instructions listed here offer a simplified and largely automated installation methodology that should work every time.

Jump to step 5 if you have xterm and wget installed, root access and have already paired your Bluetooth headset.

Pre-requisites to be satisfied before installing A2DP

1. xterm must be installed

* Install xterm via the one-click install file on this page:


2. "Becomeroot" package must be installed or device in R&D mode

* Install the Becomeroot package by adding the following repository to application manager:
Quote:
Web Address: http://eko.one.pl/maemo
Distribution: bora
Components: user
* Alternatively see the maemo.org wiki for details on how to enable R&D mode.


3. wget installed for downloading web-based files from the command line


* Open xterm and execute the following commands in xterm (you must have satisfied pre-requisite #2 before continuing):
Code:

sudo gainroot
apt-get install wget
exit


4. Pair your Bluetooth headset with your N800

* Pairing instructions will vary from device to device. A pairing code of 0000 will typically allow the headset to pair automatically once set into pairing mode.



Once all of the above pre-requisites are satisfied continue at step 5.


Installing the A2DP software

5. Download and execute the A2DP software installation scripts

* The following commands will create a temporary working directory, download two shell scripts using wget then execute those two scripts in turn.

As user "user"

Code:

mkdir ~/a2dp
cd ~/a2dp
wget http://www.nmacleod.com/a2dp/btscan.sh
wget http://www.nmacleod.com/a2dp/install.sh
chmod +x btscan.sh install.sh
./btscan.sh
./install.sh 00:11:22:33:44:55

where 00:11:22:33:44:55 must be replaced by YOUR Bluetooth Headset address as identified by btscan.sh.

As user "root"

* Switch to the root superuser and again execute the second script install.sh. This step will install the A2DP packages and finalise the configuration. Reboot.

Code:

sudo gainroot
./install.sh
reboot

* Optionally remove the temporary directory ~/a2dp with the following command as the directory and it's contents are no longer required:
Code:

rm -fr ~/a2dp

* Enjoy A2DP audio when using the Kagu audio player. "


Hope that helps everyone out! Thanks again, Millhouse!

I'll be posting a gallery of user home screens soon. I already have a good half dozen and some of them are simply spectacular. Send me a screen capture or good photo to my Gmail address (take a guess what the name there is) and let me know your applets and how you would like to be credited.

So after reading this blog entry from Gustavo, I found it interesting and decided to do the same for Vim, as I would never use Emacs :D. So I found this script and did some small changes to make it fit better the GTK+ coding style.

To use the script first copy it to ~/.vim/plugin directory, then open a file with vim and run one of the commands:

• GOBGenerateH

To generate the class definition.

• GOBGenerateC

To generate the class implementation.

Both commands will use the filename as default for the class name. You can change it, by typing the class name manually. It will replace "-" with "_" and also try to apply Camel Case to the filename. For example a file named test-object.h will generate a class named TestObject.

If you are interested, you can download the updated version of the script from here

Yo!



Another amazing compilation for the Internet Tablet (n800 and n770).

KDE and all it's supporting programs have been compiled for the Internet Tablet, and it works b-e-a-utifully. I've installed this sucker on my N770 and it purrs like a kitten, believe it or not ;)

This huge project was undertaken by another genius at Internet Tablet Talk, guy goes by the name of Penguinbait! This is for slightly more advanced users than my usual tutorials, but it is extremely simply if you have ever worked with Linux before. Oh, eh, by the way, you'll need a spare mmc card lying about to install this on, it won't fit on the flash ^^'

So, here are the directions...

1. Do this. (Warning: This will erase ALL data on your MMC card! Be careful to save anything you wish to save!)

2. Follow these instructions.

3. Boot from the MMC card.

4. Download this and place it in "/" "root" on your tablet. (Ubuntu and Debian users can do this with gFTP)

5. Now, open an X-term on you tablet or an SSH session connected to it. Sign in as root, either through "gainroot" or through SSH.

6. Run these commands...

apt-get install bzip2

cd /

/tar-temp/bin/tar jxvf KDE356FINAL1.tar.bz2

7. That will take... forever. So, let it go for a while. You may have to re-do the last command of step six, sometimes tar goes awry ;)

8. Restart the Tablet and boot fomr the MMC, there should now be an option under "Extras" for KDE




Thanks a lot Penguinbait for this great contribution to the life of the IT! The original post can be found here. Hope you guys have enoyed this little how-to!



OH! And just a little personal message. This site will be updated as often as possible (usually daily on week-days and bi-daily on weekends, because being a student sucks ;) So don't think I've just gone and quit!) And... I am amazed by the amount of people coming to this site and I would just like to say THANK YOU! It's so awesome to have everyone here! Please, if you think this site is even half-decent, leave a comment, or better yet, Digg it and write a little comment on Techorati maybe ;) Thanks again you guys!

If you always missed some good video management tool for all you internet video needs, here's a good solution : The videocenter application. The application is a hub for internet videos, local stored videos and in the future for other video sources, like mythTV (explained in arthur's web site here). You ...

Why does the N800 have a unibutton and a hidden button on the top? The 770 had three separate buttons on the top. The left button is now in the middle on the N800. The rocker switch (press left, press right) is now split into two buttons, on left and right. The power menu button on the 770 was arguably too easy to press, so I count the hidden button on the N800 an improvement.

But to merge the two buttons into one unibutton which is practically impossible to distinguish?? Why? The only way to distinguish between the buttons is to slide your finger back and forth a few times, trying to feel the subtle slope from the left to the middle and back down on the right. Only then can you take a guess at which button your finger is on.

Going back to the 770's buttons would be an improvement. Let's hope that the N830 (or whatever) makes that change.

YO!



Penguinbait's KDE went over so well, so I thought I'd tell you guys about another huge project he's undertaken: XFCE on the Internet Tablet.

" I compiled all of XFCE, all of it compiled without incident... Aterm and Xterm from my openbox tar work fine though. Thunar is also working nicely." (That's Penguinbait, not me talking ;) )



So... lemme see... I'll quote a list of everything he's porting for XFCE on the IT aside from the base desktop environment, window manager, and default programs ;)

" Its working very well, but I have been slowly adding functionality, menus, fixes. Its very close...

Additions,
epdf (pdf viewer)
sylpheed (email app, menus for setup are somewhat difficult to negoitiate but it works well)
mousepad (editor)
xdesktopwaves (toys/eyecandy)
explosions (toys/eyecandy)
xpenguins (toys/eyecandy)
root xterm menu entry (just handy sometimes)
osso calculator menu entry
hildon keyboard start/stop entries
added volume control to WMdock (Mixer)"

Penguinbait's a genius :)

It'll be here soon!


*Personal note:
Holy crap, you guys, I couldn't believe the numbers for this site when I got home... Insane! Thanks so much everybody for tuning it! RMUG will be sure to get you XFCE first, once Penguinbait has gotten it perfected! Diggs are always appreciated! See ya' next time, guys!*

Yo!

Russ has raved about FBReader, an ebook reader for Maemo, in the past. I had installed it before and tried it out, but had problems with the format of the books. He walked me through the stuff he was doing and gave me his FBReader config files, I’ve been trying it out since. I still have format problems, unordered lists in HTML seem to become just mashed up text without and formatting. Which was what really turned me off about it before cause it’s normally the first thing I see. But I’ve grabbed a few HTML based books and read a ways into them (seeing as how I’ve spent the last week lying on the couch rolling around in some half conscious state of delirium, it seemed like a good use of time). There are still some formatting quirks later on, but normally most of the nastyness is up at the start.

Here’s a shot of FBReader running on my N800, with the screen rotated and all so that pretty much the equivalent of a “small paperback” worth of text fits on the screen. It works out pretty well. I’ve grabbed a few online novels from random places, but most of my downloads have been from Project Gutenberg. The site is pretty usable from the built in browser. I select the compressed HTML version of the book whenever it’s available, and compressed plain text when not. Lots of them have three or four pages of unformatted cruft before the book starts, but once you make it past the table of contents the books are pretty readable.

Adam Curry, the famous dude has talked about our babies in his latest episode! check it out here Canola Overview after the launch Very relax launching. I said that because in the beta 1 we had a LOT of problems, and we stayed in the office for almost 8 hours in the ...

So, I was reading Murray's review on Canola and after that reading also comments mainly from some guys in our Canola team, mainly trying to justify some of the things Murray thinks are without reasong. Simply ui design errors. As he was not the first one to talk about that, ...

Nokia's phones often appear as if their hardware and software were designed by completely different groups and slapped together at the last minute (because, in many cases, that's exactly what happened).

Advised by Marcelo, I've just read Michael Mace's post about the imminent "war" between Nokia and Apple. It's really worth reading.

The subject line tells the features and the video above shows it all in action. The popular site break.com is featured prominently as an installable module.

Take a look!

Yo!

To get the most out of this tutorial, please watch the video above and then read the text below. If you have any questions or comments, please click on the "comments" link at the end of the text below. However good the on-screen keyboard of the N800 is, nothing can ever completely replace the speed and accuracy of a real full-size keyboard. Well, the N800 is actually compatible with many real

This assumes you have the development environment set up as explained here

Developing maemo and Internet Tablets has always been a learning journey for us at Nokia. We have learned a lot about using mainstream open source technology in mobile devices, about integrating big company and open source culture together, about shipping open source based products, and about working with communities.

An important learning case happened during the last spring. We made some mistakes. No doubt about it! And on top of all, we underestimated the passion people had towards our work and products.

We launched the N800 in January. People loved the product. But some of you simply didn't accept that we didn't promise to provide new features and hacker support for the old 770s any more. Back in January -07, we got a lot of comments that eventually made us re-evaluate the 770 software situation. And now, as you know, a few days ago we released an Internet Tablet OS 2007 Hacker Edition for the Nokia 770. Not perfect, but we are learning.

So thank you. Your enthusiasm, positive comments, good reviews, criticism, sarcasm, and doom's day predictions prove that we are doing something right. Actually, I have not received any 770 software comments with f words for my posts recently ... so wake up, kids! Something's wrong?

Another thing we put out recently was the Hildon Input Method Framework.

And next week I gonna go out myself and fly to Madrid.

Yo!



For the N770 and the N800, there was only one Desktop to use, and that was the nasty Hildon interface. But, then came along a guy named Penguinbait.

KDE and XFCE are now both available for the Internet Tablets, but... which is the better experience for the user? Well, here's my take.

The first time I had ever tried anything too grand on my IT was back in March, when PB first released his arm-compiled KDE. It was freakin sweet. I loved (love) using this desktop environment on my 770. It looked so damned awesome on that high-powered and high-pixel screen the IT is packing that I adopted the thing immediately and did all I could to stay away from the default "desktop" *cough* Desktop? Heh, if only.

And then another amazing step, a lightweight desktop environment designed to run on full PCs, but still very small. I installed this on my 770 and gave it a whirl... Well, compared to KDE, I was a bit disappointed. The bar was set extremely high and it just didn't match the elegance of the K Desktop Environment. But, this release of XFCE by Penguinbait did have some huge perks. It came with a VNC server, gFTP, and a full GAIM messenger. I found it hard to live with just maemoftp, and geez, was it amazing to see my favorite FTP and SSH client on the IT.

(If you guys love this as much as I do, please consider donating so PB can spend more time on awesome stuff like this. Send mail to 770@penguinbait.com for information on how you can donate!)

After using both of these amazing environments, I have decided to use only one permanetly...

I think maybe you guys should see each for yourselves, though.

Psssh.... But I use KDE ;)

There are some things that you just have to do differently when you're programming for a small device like the Nokia n800. The processor is just not as powerful as your desktop.

One of those things is how you draw graphics.I've been working on the Python GTK Kinetic scrolling widget to get it's speed enhanced and finally made a breakthrough.

The first thing I figured out was that since I'm not always letting the event call the realize handler, the standard GTK double-buffering wasn't happening on it's own. Once I enabled that, I was able to rip out all of my code related to double-buffering, and that improved performance somewhat.

Still, it was just too slow.

I did some digging and all of the documentation for GTK says "Use pixbuf's to store images". It's easier, they say. It's more feature rich. What they neglect to mention is it's also darned slow. On a desktop you'd never notice, but with a 300 MHz handheld with a slow screen, you notice very easily. Painfully slow.

Fortunately I found a simple fix. I convert all of the pixbuf's to a device-dependent pixmap that is tied to the screen depth and format. Drawing a pixmap onto the screen is lightning fast. So fast, in fact, that I had to tweak other aspects of the scroll widget to keep it from going too fast. Using a pixmap also gave me a drawable that I could use for pre-rendering pango text. This allows me to draw the button captions just one time and keep that cached on the graphic for later quick drawing. Drawing text all over the screen when you're going for 30 or 40 frames per second isn't really very possible, but with pre-rendering it one time it eliminates that delay as well.

I was talking with the Kagu media player developers in IRC and one asked me how it would do with 600+ entries in the scroll list. We were concerned that it would take too long to load and use too much memory. I made a quick test and found it to be extremely fast and use a _lot_ less memory than we expected. I'm quite pleased with it now.

Download the sources to use it in your own GPL licensed application.

Yo!



Today I stumbled upon one of the coolest programs I've ever seen. It's a media player called Songbird. This has beaten iTunes and Banshee, hands down.

For one thing, the interface is beautiful. Secondly, most media player do exactly the same thing. Songbird does that, and more. It's built off of the Firefox base. It allows you to browse MP3 blogs and sites directly from itself. Awesome stuff :)

I spent a little time with Songbird and I have to say that I am never going to use anything else if they keep this up.



Songbird is cross platform and it runs beautifully on my Ubuntu box. No command line needed. For Mac, it looks so smooth and shiny and it runs just as well as on my Linux box. I haven't had the opportunity to run it on a Windows machine, but I'm assuming that'll be just a amazing as my experience with it on the others ;)

I really think you should check out their site, which is extremely helpful and well-designed with movies and such introducing you to Songbird. And don't be scared by the "Developer Release" label slapped on it. It's more stable than most software out there already. (And whoever draws those birds is extremely talented and has been very busy, I see)

Hope you love it as much as I do!

DAAP vs UPnP MediaServer

While I believe that Lennart's work on free implementation of Apple protocols is very important for the wide-spread acceptance of free software, I fail to see any fact(s) that could support his claims like "I believe that DAAP is the superior protocol in comparison to UPnP MediaServer". When he was visited our office for his presentation on Avahi, he claimed that Zeroconf is better than UPnP itself, his argument being that Zeroconf uses simple ASCII text files and that makes it much more compatible with other Internet protocols, while UPnP uses XML (corrections welcomed). Here are a few points for him to consider:

• UPnP is much more than addressing and discovery: Zeroconf defines standards for the addressing and discovery of services on a network but do no define any means for description, control, event notification and presentation. While this allows the services to choose any mechanism for any or all of these, the point being that UPnP itself isn't really comparable to Zeroconf but only two of it's parts.


• ASCII is superior to XML?: how come? Just because MS supports XML or other Internet protocols didn't choose to use it?


• "Microsoft/Intel started to include a similar technology in UPnP, the UPnP MediaServer". Media Server is based on UPnP not part of it in any way.


• It's pronounced GUPnP, not gUPnP (thats the logo). :)


• GUPnP is *not* an implementation of any particular service or device but a framework to create control-points, devices and services on top of it.


• RAOP is obviously not superior to Media Renderer as it uses modified RTSP/RTP, while Media Renderer (and Media Server) standards allow you to implement any number of protocols for streaming the media, while it mandates the HTTP protocol so all devices have at least one protocol in common. Since these technologies target streaming of non-live media between devices connected to local LAN, I really don't see any reason not to just use HTTP.

Blog moved to blogger.com

I am moving my blog to blogger.com so that people can comment on my blog. Nothing should change for subscribers of my blog as advogato has blog syndication feature.

Finally, Pychord is almost ready!

All features (about 1.0 version) are working. Now I need to work in two different lines.

• Source Code improvement [1]
• Bug Fixes[2]

[1] I didn’t have enough knowledge about pygame when I started this project. So I need to change some parts of the code to fix wrong decisions that I made before.
[2] If you are using this application, please, give me a feedback and I will try to make it better!

Then I will start to develop the 1.1 version ( with some features that I promised before ).

In this version, I created a configuration file (/home/user/.pychord.conf), and this file has to have two simple lines:

db=/home/user/.pychord.db
datadir=/home/user/pychord/data

Where:
“db” is your DataBase file, with all your chords. Its a sqlite’s file.
“datadir” is the folder where pychord will get the chords to put into database file on update process.

You can edit these options by clicking on “i” symbol in PyChord’s first screen. You can also choose by what type of update you want: Full-update or Incremental Update. In Full-update you will lose all your database data. In incremental update pychord will get all files of your datadir and put into database.

All files in your datadir folder have to have the “.chr” extension, and have to be like this example:

Name: Music Name
Artist: Music Artist Name
D# E F
Your chords
D # E F
Your chords
D E# F
Your chords

(Two first lines are used like headers, describing the Name of the music and the name of the Artist. Followed by the chords)

Ok, its too easy right?!

So, you have to have a directory (datadir) and put all your files there. Default folder is /home/user/pychord/data. Don’t forget to update your database when you start to use this application.

So, Ok! Now you can download .install here!

If you have problems to install this application, try again by searching for it on ApplicationManager->Browse Installable Applications->others->pychord

If you have any problems after that (or suggestions), please, let me know!

[]‘s

EDIT/UPDATE

Penguin now has printing fully working and ready to download! Here!

Original Post:

Yo!


Again, Penguinbait is a freakin' genius. This is the biggest development ever for the internet tablets. He has printed across a network, using CUPS, to a networked printer. Amazing!!!

He is currently finding a stable way to release this to the public. It will be available within days/weeks. (It's kinda uncertain right now ;) Eh...)

I shall post updates as they come, but as we always have been able too... Expect great things from PB!

EDIT/UPDATE

Penguin now has printing fully working and ready to download! Here!

After making a deb package for maemo platform, and depolying it to a repository recognized by Maemo application manager, it is valuable to let application manager display a interesting icon beside the package name.

There are several points need to note:

1. encode a 26x26 png image into base64 format, this can be done by: uuencode -m xxx_26x26.png /dev/stdout . Then the encoded texts (between the 1st and the last line) will be used in package.
2. embed the texts into debian/control, in a section named: XB-Maemo-Icon-26. There must be a space before each line in this section.
3. run dpkg-scanpackages to generate Packages.gz, and make sure the XB-Maemo-Icon-26 section is also copied into Packages.gz

Actually, application manager display icon based on the base64 data found in Packages.gz.

However, I found dpkg-scanpackages of some versions dismiss the icon section. For these versions, here is the workaround:

change:

dpkg-scanpackages ....... > .../Packages.gz

to:

dpkg_scanpackages="/tmp/dpkg_scanpackages-$$"
cat $BIN_SCANPACKAGES | $BIN_SED -e "s/('Package',/('Package', 'Maemo-Icon-26',/" > $dpkg_scanpackages #this is for dpkg-scanpackage 1.3
cat $dpkg_scanpackages | $BIN_SED -e "s/Size MD5sum Section Priority Description))/Size MD5sum Section Priority Description Maemo-Icon-26))/" > $dpkg_scanpackages #this is for dpkg-scanpackage 1.4
chmod 755 $dpkg_scanpackages

$dpkg_scanpackages ....... > .../Packages.gz

MicorB for ITOS2007HE may be on the way, but who knows when will it finally arrive. Based on the waiting experience, I decided to reinstall minimo, while waiting it.

When I tried minino 1 mth ago, it is not stable on 770, but I also heard if increase memory buffer size, it can perform much better. So, I try to set the buffer size to 4096 or 8192, according to mozilla site.

On 770, just run: vi /home/user/.mozilla/minimo/prefs.js and add one line:
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.capacity", 8192);
trying google calendar/reader/gmail for a while, yea, it is much more stable, but an annoying bug is still there.
I feel if there is unknown errors happened in rendering a page, the corresponding tab can not be closed, or refresh, and it will affect other tabs.
If anybody know how to solve this, plz tell me. :-)
try: user_pref("network.http.max-connections", 8); and user_pref("network.http.max-connections-per-server", 4);

I am so happy about an application that has just been released for maemo. It is called PyChord and it has already changed my life…

“Seriously?!” You might ask?

As a musician, I have oft struggled with how I should write songs and efficiently store them in a way that I can always have them with me, easily accessible at any time. Likewise, when I do happen to have my (huge) notebook full of songs, written or typed on paper, I always have an issue of how I’m supposed to hold them while I play them and how best to flip the pages when I need to…

Most of you probably won’t relate, but if you’re a singer/songwriter who also possesses one of these said notebooks, you will agree: it’s not a very good system.

Of course, I have tried to keep all of my songs saved on a computer — which is definitely more efficient than wasting a bunch of paper — but how, then, do I take the songs with me? A laptop? Well, yes, that would work, but even with a laptop, a person is forced to reach down and scroll through the song as it’s being played. (And, honestly, a laptop is way too big!)

Enter PyChord, developed by Danilo Cesar Lemes de Paula.

But, what am I talking about anyway?

Take a look:

(Click it, it’s a YouTube video.)

Like all new apps, PyChord still has some things to work out, but it’s pretty much at a stable, useable state right now.

Thanks, Danilo!

To get the most out of this tutorial, please watch the video above and then read the text below. If you have any questions or comments, please click on the "comments" link at the end of the text below. The Nokia N800 internet tablet is best known as being able to connect to the internet through Wi-Fi hotspots and routers. However, it can also connect to the internet through mobile phones (also

Today we have released the maemo 4.0 beta Chinook SDK, and it feels good.

Chinook will be a major release with several enhancements, new features and an API break to get a better alignment with the contemporary GNU/Linux desktop (details). This beta still misses some components but it is good enough to port applications from maemo Bora.

We have chosen to release this beta SDK as soon as it has been technically possible in order to give more time to developers. We still can’t compromise to a final release date, but you will know it with a decent margin of time.

maemo developers will find a modular installer bringing some flexibility to your development environment. Try it out and tell us what you think, we have still time to improve it for the final release. This is a first step towards a next generation SDK to be developed during the Diablo and Elephanta release cycles, but this is another story.

I hope you enjoy Chinook’s fresh air!

It has been a while since I promised a post about Mamona booting on N800.

I haven’t post anything before because there is no beauty in a text mode booting. But now Aloisio has been done a good work to setup the Enlightenment in Mamona. He has been used OpenEmbedded to build the packages from Enlightenment’s cvs.

Check this out:

This is the boot of Mamona + Enlightenment on N800.

* Aloisio is a new INdT developer working on Mamona Project.

I’m about to hop on a plane to New Hampshire. Not a well planned trip, not really all that welcome, but it needs to be done. So just to make sure I could just zip thru what I needed, I cleared my email inbox down to about 40 messages a wanted access to on the road. A nice small inbox is necessary when doing email from the ‘executive model’ Nokia E61. Otherwise it gets confused and generally crashes, sometimes hangs.

Good thing too! Cause as I arrived I noticed that I had written down both the fake flight info for my flight and the real info (one of those ‘operated by’ flights) but forgot to note which was which. Never fear, I have that message right in the creamy middle of my 40 message inbox.

So I fire up the messenger client and wait. And wait. And wait. Listen to music for a little while. And then bing! Messages synced. Except the message I’m looking for isn’t there. Almost none of the messages are. Just a bunch of garbage I thought I deleted. Weird, I must have screwed up and not actually comitted the inbox changes? Could be.

So I fire up the N800 running the open source Claws email program. It’s a lot more tolerant. It can deal with my screw up. And I connect it via bluetooth to the E61. Get that? Cause its important. Using the network connection from the phone, so theres no network disparity.

Claws starts up in literally seconds, shows me my inbox list, which does indeed have the 40 items I expect it to. Including my flight info. Yay! Man I wish I could get a Maemo device with a cellular interface. Theres just no beating what an open community can do. I hope Nokia is learning from whats happening.

A

Yo!


Just wanted to let you guys check this out, I like it ;)

The iPod touch and the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet may seem like apples and oranges (Apples and Nokias?) from a consumer perspective. One is a mobile internet device that happens to play music and videos. The other is a mobile music/video device that happens to have a web browser. The purpose of this article is to accentuate the strengths and weaknesses of each device help people decide what's right for them. It's neither a review of the touch nor of the N800. People familiar with both devices don't seem to want to own both, which is sensible since the functionality overlaps quite a bit. Both, as internet and media devices, are similar in a notable way: neither are phones or intended to replace phones. The fact that both are intended to be a "second device" is the critical commonality. They're fighting for space in your other pocket.

If you want to read posts and see videos about playing games on Nokia's Internet Tablets, please visit the Internet Tablet School's sister site the Unofficial Nokia Gaming Blog, which has an Internet Tablet Games section: http://nokiagaming.blogspot.com/search/label/internet%20tablet%20games

Yo!



How's everybody doing? ;)

Ok, well, for the past few days I have been trying to rig everything up to compile packages for the N770 and the N800, then be able to create debs out of those programs. And, well, I finally got it.

One of my favorite apps that had been ported to the IT, but only in Penguinbait's KDE and XFCE, is gFTP. I have decided to compile and debianize it myself.

MaemoFTP is a lot prettier (gFTP is not currently Hildonized), but this has support for file transfer over SSH and all the other protocols MaemoFTP does not support. Well... here are the files. (I hope so atleast, if you can not download them, it means my server has died again ;) Heh..)

1. Download these files onto your Internet Tablet's MMC card. (Make sure it is number 1 if you have an N800!) ( /media/mmc1 )

gftp-common_2.0.18-1_armel.deb20-Sep-2007 21:05 714K gftp-gtk_2.0.18-1_armel.deb20-Sep-2007 21:05 170K gftp-text_2.0.18-1_armel.deb20-Sep-2007 21:05 125K
2. Install Xterm (Try http://770.fs-security.com/xterm/ ) if you are not sure how to do so on your own.

3. Open Xterm.

4. Log into the root account either by this method or through SSH, which I use.

5. Type in the following commands.

cd /media/mmc1

dpkg -i gftp-c*

dpkg -i gftp-t*

dpkg -i gftp-g*

6. You're done :)

7. To run gFTP, you must run this command

gftp

In xterm. (I am working on a menu entry!)

Expect better in the future ;)

I’ve swapped from Gregarious to OMGWTFBBQ a while ago, mostly because it rocks on the N800 when compared to the other stuff I’ve tried. And of course cause I named it, so I think it has a fantastic name. Give it a shot if you’re looking for a nice simple reliable multi-device RSS reader you can use from a phone, tablet, and desktop web browser.

A

Don't know if you noticed, but we've been building maemo's best music player. Works on both devices, open source, power management aware, tap sensitive user interface with playlist building/editing support and continuous updates. I won't be including any screenshots in this blog entry (one might say article) since I'm feeling tired after writing all this and there are some screenshots in the wiki anyway.

CouchDB is a very interesting evolution in open source data storage: an ad-hoc document database with replication support. I heard the first time about CouchDB when Jan Lehnardt was presenting it in FrOSCon a month ago, and became immediately very interested.

The database is available for various different platforms, and provides a RESTful JSON API, which makes it very easy to access basically from any programming languages. To make things even simpler, access libraries have emerged for various languages like PHP and Ruby.

This weekend Jerry Jalava released a jQuery CouchDB access library. This is an important step for us as Midgard is already making the jQuery migration, and we are considering to use CouchDB for a project.

So, why CouchDb? First of all, it is something new and interesting. And it is multiplatform and replicated, meaning that we should be able to get our data everywhere, from a web server to Mac desktop to an Internet Tablet. Besides regular database usage, some of the PHP code deployment ideas are also promising.

Technorati Tags: couchdb, jquery

MaemoMyth is a Maemo front-end to MythTv, with this you can watch live TV, and recorded files.



To make MaemoMyth work with mythv backend it's necessary to use gmyth streamer server that will convert your files to a format supported by the device. Instructions to install GMS and configure your environment can be found here[1].



More information about MaemoMyth visit the project page[1]. The source code is available on garage project[2].




[1] http://gmyth.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

[2] http://garage.maemo.org/projects/mtv/

Yo!



I. Form and General Overjoyment at Arrival

I finally got my iPod Touch in the mail... Apple actually went beyond my expectations ;)

The iPod Touch has just been misunderstand by all some Iternet Tablet user's as attempting to compete with Nokia in their market. It is not a IT. Let me repeat that, it is not, and was not meant to be, anything like the N800. This is a music (media) player, and the best one I've ever used.

Ok, well, here are a few photos I took of when I just opened it up.


(Love at first sight of this iPod ;) )


(Everything that came in the package.)


(Just so you know how small this device really is, I put it next to my beloved N770. The Form factor of the iPod is amazing. I absolutely love the balance it has when you pick it up. Apple mobile hardware is really coming to a peak with this design, I think.)



(Another side-by-side. The Touch is really, really, thin.)

Ok, we've got a look at the form factor. I love it. It's eye-candy and it's, well... touchable. It doesn't feel flimsy and it doesn't encourage you to drop it, either. I give the design a thumbs up.

II. Software and Interface

Next big part, the software. I might put together a little video for everyone.

But for right now... I want to get acquainted with my new gadget ;)

Finland and its 5,3M inhabitants keep surprising me, specially on anything relating to mobiles & Linux (both local inventions). This time is an Internet Tablet (aka MID / Multimedia Internet Device) called EB, manufactured by ElektroBit with Intel and Linux inside. Menlow processor, slide-out keyboard, 3,2Mb camera, GPS, Wlan / Bluetooth / Wimax / HSDPA… [...]

Quim wrote earlier on why red hearts matter in maemo news. The red hearts are important as they bring important news items forward in the maemo social news aggregator. But sometimes there are also news items that are not at all relevant to the maemo community. To solve the problem with them we've now added a burying option:

When you click the "Thumbs down" icon the item will enter a recalculation queue, and will soon disappear from the social news main page. It will of course remain in the news feed it came from, so everything for example coming from Planet maemo subscriptions will stay there.

The item will also be marked as buried for you:

Also related to the Social News service is that the best of maemo news highlights is now available for browsing. Go and check out the most popular items related to the project!

Technorati Tags: blogpaper, maemo, midgard

In my daily check for news, I spotted the "LJPRX-44" just filed today at the FCC's site. Sadly, everything is under confidentiality so we do not get to know more about this. Here's what we DO know.

• It's not too far off from the N800's LJPRX-34 FCC ID, By contrast, the 770 was LJPSU-17.
• FCC report includes Wireless LAN and Bluetooth.
  
• The FCC label includes a CNC-ID - not present in the N800.
• The general shape of the device is accurate to the N800

I have a doctor appointment RIGHT NOW so can't research this further, but expect more from
me in a few hours.

After the release of MaemoMyth, some people are having problems with GMythStream, then Melunko[1] created this page[2] to help us to solve the most common problems.


Another great news is about Totem[3] and libgmyth[4], Bastien Nocerap[5] is working on totem plugin engine and a plugin to MythTv using libgmyth. And now libgmyth is part of Fedora development project. You can find the rpm packages in this site[6].




[1]http://melunkodev.blogspot.com/2007/09/mythtv-at-nokia-n800.html

[2]http://gmyth.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/GMythStream

[3]http://www.gnome.org/projects/totem/

[4]http://sourceforge.net/projects/gmyth/

[5]http://hadessuk.blogspot.com/

[6]http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/fedora/linux/development/i386/os/Packages/

I call it 2NITS and a Pod. That's two Nokia Internet Tablets and an iPod touch.

Counterclockwise from the top:

• Nokia 770 Internet Tablet running Carman
• Nokia N800 Internet Tablet running Navicore
• iPod touch playing music
  
• Motorola Q
• Harman Kardon Drive+Play (attached to the iPod mini in the glove compartment - not used for the video)

I won't go into details on how I did it as that's all pretty much explained in this web album and the links above. Still... Here's a video of the biggest nerd you'll ever see in a Yaris:

We released some extra C++ bindings recently:

gtksourceviewmm-2.0

I updated Dodji’s gtksourceviewmm to wrap the new gtksourceview-2.0 API. Here’s the svn, and the tarball download.

libnotifymm and hildon-notifymm

Johannes Schmid created libnotifymm (svn, tarball) to wrap libnotify, and we also wrapped Maemo’s hildon-notify, though there’s no documentation to say what this does beyond regular libnotify. I suspect that Maemo should just use a port of libnotify without requiring use of special API.

There are lots of examples in the libnotifymm source code. It seems quite simple, and particularly useful for code that uses Gtk::StatusIcon.

Nokia ITT and WiMAX

Looks like there'll be a new Internet Tablet with WiMAX in 2008. Intel has the details...

Yo!

More amazing work from penguinbait, here is the announcement and instruction for install :)

"I have compiled cups and supporting software to be able to print from the IT, here is what you get!!

cups 1.2.12
espgs 8.15.4
openldap 2.3.38
openssl 0.98e
openslp 1.2.1
jpeg 6b
libpng 1.2.20
tiff 3.8.2
zlib 1.2.3
samba 3.0.25c
(kerberos support was not installed, cups 1.2 does not support it)


100MB uncompressed, with the majority of the data in /usr/local

Cups itself is installed in /usr

INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS

1) DISABLE DOCPURGE
docpurge is located in /usr/sbin (/usr/sbin/docpurge) I am not really familiar with docpurge, but I do know it will delete any files located it /usr/share/doc/ and this is where cups resides. Fix by running the following:

mv /usr/sbin/docpurge /usr/sbin/docpurge-disabled

If anyone else knows how to exclude the /usr/share/doc dir from docpurge, please let me know.


2) Download Tarball 30MB
http://penguinbait.com/CUPS12.tar.bz2

or
Special Thanks to debernardis
http://www.debernardis.it/n800/CUPS12.tar.bz2

3) Open xterm or ssh session
sudo gainroot, or ssh as root
cd /
tar jxvf /path/to/CUPS12.tar.bz2

4) Update libraries

If /etc/ld.so.conf contains /usr/local/lib the run (cat /etc/ld.so.conf)

ldconfig

If /etc/ld.so.conf does not contain /usr/local/lib then run

echo "/usr/local/lib" >> /etc/ld.so.conf
ldconfig



5) Start Cups
/etc/init.d/cups start
cups will start on boot, as long as /usr/local is available during boot.

6) Open Web Browser
http://localhost:631

INFORMATION
When you make changes in cups, it wll prompt you for a USER and PASSWORD. This is the root account on the n800, (or 770 untested) (default password is rootme)

I have been able to print the cups test pages, and if you set the default printer, you can print from command line also by piping to lpr.

For example:
cat /etc/hosts | lpr

PS this has no headers, so if you want to compile apps with cups support and you need the headers, PM me, and I will send you the full tarball."

- Penguinbait
EDIT/UPDATE

As it turns out, printing from applications within XFCE and KDE works! Amazing stuff!


*It's the magic of PB* ;)

Today I fell over this photo on Arstechnica:




Now back to working on the upcoming version...

There are many more people than I expected. The place is beautiful. The drinks are good too. It's nice to meet so many people from HowardForams and others.

There is a presentation going on right now.

Bill is talking about how the Nseries is a marriage
of mobility and content creation as well as content retrieval. Cameras, video, web 2.0 and more meet with these devices. This post is proof. I wrote it on my N800. More later.

To get the most out of this tutorial, watch the video above and then read the text below. The tutorial assumes that N800 owners have upgraded to OS 2008. If you want to find out more about upgrading, click here. If you want to comment on this tutorial, please post in the comments section at the end. If you have any questions or problems regarding your tablet, please post about them on Internet

First order of business: I want to thank WOM World and Nokia for making my trip down here possible and thank all of the wonderful bloggers, media and industry folks who made for fascinating discussion. An extra special thanks goes to Reggie, mastermind of InternetTabletTalk, for helping me make the connections I needed to get here. Stay tuned for all the pictures and videos.

Neat pool decoration.

Here are all of my photos

Videos forthcoming Others - if you have your galleries, can you comment with the URL?

In the video above, I gave Nokia's VP of Multimedia, Bill Plummer, a once-over about the FCC filings previously posted here. He was tight-lipped, but gave a few little clues and gave the community a pat on the back. Go community!

I announced yesterday that new documentation for the upcoming maemo 4.0, codename Chinook, has been released. In addition to updating the how-tos that give useful bits of information of maemo platform here and there, we have been busy with another goal in documentation. A completely new guide written for developers completely unfamiliar with maemo is finally getting to a beta stage.

So far, at least I have not been satisfied with the level of documentation of our platform. There is no easy place to start learning. Vast amount of information is available from the how-tos, tutorials, wiki, mailing lists and IRC not to mention the upstream projects’ documentation. However, even the basic definitions of “maemo”, “maemo platform”, “Hildon” etc. are lacking.

The “maemo 4 Quick Start Guide” strives to give an overall picture of software development on an open platform for Nokia Internet Tablets called maemo. The prerequisites for the reader of this guide will be basic GNU/Linux C programming knowledge. GTK+ experience will not hurt but it is not necessary, neither is previous embedded or mobile programming experience. This all might still be asking a lot, but the guide would not be a “quick start” if for example GNU/Linux would have to be explained in the scope of 30 pages.

Instead of publishing the guide right now I challenge you to give feedback on the table of contents of the document. Just comment this blog or drop a line to documentation@maemo.org. This is your chance of affecting what you think is relevant for maemo beginners to know. Thank you in advance!

- jtukkine

I have added a couple of articles to the
UME Guide

The first, Porting A Python Application to UME
shows how to port an application (gPodder)
to Ubuntu Mobile. gPodder media aggregator
is a podcast receiver/catcher written in
Python utilizing PyGTK for its graphical
interface. gPodder is very lightweight and
doesn't have many dependencies so it is a
great introduction for anyone looking for a gentle
introduction on how to get *your* application
running on Ubuntu Mobile

The second, Porting A C Application to UME
shows how to port an application written in
C (liferea) to Ubuntu Mobile. Liferea is an
aggregator for online news feeds written in
C utilizing GTK for its graphical interface.
For this you should be familiar with or have
the desire to learn C programming, including
the 'auto' tools suite.

I have also been invited to the next
Ubuntu Developers Summit at the end of
October in Boston!

I honestly thought it was a wind up until
the tickets arrived yesterday. It will be a
shock going from the poverty of Manaus
to MIT but the chance to hang out and
hack with the Ubuntu Mobile guys has got
me completely over-excited.

Thanks a lot Canonical and Ubuntu. You
guys *ROCK*

The third Internet Tablet FCC filings have been the source of much discussion since they were uncovered right here on TabletBlog.com. As promised, here's a complete and thorough analysis of the public documents so far.

Remember the photo above from Engadget? Click that link for more of them. Well - there's now a VERY good chance that it could be an early prototype of the third Internet Tablet. So this whole post was probably wrong.

A new document was made available this morning with this little tidbit:
"Slide Closed"
Mmmmmmm... Can't wait now. I will add this to my previous full analysis article.

The above image was taken from page 6 of this PDF. Note the two tables are labeled "slide open" and "slide closed."