The last version of Vagalume was released more than a month ago. And although it was dead for some weeks because I had many other things to do, here comes Vagalume 0.5, back from the dead!

As I said before, I’ve been busy lately so the list of changes is not as big as it might be, but thanks to the help of my colleagues Mario and Felipe we have some new things. The list of changes include:

• New buttons and other minor UI improvements
• New plugin for the Maemo status bar (IT OS2008 only) (*)
• Fixed a bug that made scrobbling fail under certain conditions
• A window to see the progress of downloads (and cancel them)
• A new setting to select the download directory

Here’s the new look of Vagalume under IT OS2008:

And for those interested, now we have a new vagalume-users mailing list.

(*) Mario has written a detailed post about the status bar plugin, including a screenshot. Check it out!

Go here to download Vagalume.

And that’s all. Enjoy!

After another heavy working week, we managed to deliver a new beta of Canola2, this time with lots of bug fixing (thanks for reporting!), features and optimizations. Also features 770* support, a new tool to merge albums (collections or albums with similar name) and lots of new media formats (wma/wmv and real media included!).

UPDATE: Since we replaced our download manager, previous packages conflicts! Please remove Canola2-beta1 before installing the new one. If you got it wrong, apt-get -f install from Xterm should fix it.

Hope installation will be smoother this time!

More information at: http://openbossa.indt.org/canola2/

* 770 support: gregale is regular install, but for Hacker Edition (bora ported to 770) you need a special proceeding (ain’t you hackers!?):

1. disable all repositories
2. add the repositories:
   1. deb http://repository.maemo.org gregale free non-free
   2. deb http://repository.maemo.org/extras gregale free non-free
3. update list
4. install canola2
5. remove gregale repositories

These steps are required because Hacker Edition kernel doesn’t provide inotify and we compile bora EFL packages optimized for n8xx (omap 2420, arm1136jf-s).

All started years ago — I was living in Wrocław then. Each Thursday groups of friends met in pub. About half of them used PalmOS powered palmtops. Due to them I started thinking about buying palmtop for myself.

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 your N800, 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

I’ve been playing with the latest beta for Canola today and it’s definitely worth updating. As you might expect there are a number of under the hood enhancements and fixes. If you’ve got a 770 you can finally get back into the game as well which I am sure will be a welcome to many!

Gustavo noted the changes on the Maemo Users list:

- 770 support [*]
- Settings->Media Library->Multiple album entries: utility to merge
various albums into a single one (or collection)
- Formats: real media (.ra, .rm, .rmv…), windows media (.asf,
.wma, .wmv, …), png
- Improvements to podcast, better error handling
- Various optimizations
- Force rescan utility
- Splash screen for faster feedback

Hope installation will be smoother this time!

More information at: http://openbossa.indt.org/canola2/

[*] 770 support: gregale is regular install, but for Hacker Edition
(bora ported to 770) you need a special proceeding (ain’t you
hackers!?):
1) disable all repositories
2) add the repositories:
2.1) deb http://repository.maemo.org gregale free non-free
2.2) deb http://repository.maemo.org/extras gregale free non-free
3) update list
4) install canola2
5) remove gregale repositories
These steps are required because Hacker Edition kernel doesn’t provide
inotify and we compile bora EFL packages optimized for n8xx (omap
2420, arm1136jf-s).

Be sure to reboot after the update …

I have recently acquired a Nokia N810 Internet Tablet and a N95 8GB mobile phone. Both have GPS capability but both have quite awful maps applications. It feels like a checkbox feature - a way to list GPS as a feature on the box, but not a way to do something useful, and not something that’s been thoroughly tested or thought-through. They suffer in comparison to the Garmin device that I already had.

I’ve been playing with a possible solution to the time-to-fix problems of the Nokia N810 GPS, and it looks good: Getting a fix used to require 5-15 minutes even in very good conditions. Today I have experienced fix times between 30 seconds and 3 minutes — even from the window which was previously almost impossible.

The solution? Don’t have a 86400 second error in GPS time keeping.

I’m not kidding: there’s a leap year bug in gpsd which makes it add an extra day to all timestamps between Jan 1st 2008 – Feb 28th 2008. All gps-related code apart from gpsd is closed source so I can’t tell for sure, but I’m guessing this false time is used when the gpsdriver is initialized with the “last known position data”.

The evidence is just anecdotal, and this could be just a fluke. If anyone else wants to try and confirm, my patched testing packages are available. The first fix after installing should still take a long time, but I expect the following fixes to be faster. Please comment if you do any tests.

EDIT:  Nokia osso-gpsd maintainer says this in the bug:

The analysis that the leap year bug would affect fix times is wrong.

Based on the comments here I’m assuming it’s not just placebo that we’re all seeing, so I’ll have to investigate a bit further.

EDIT  2: Well, not only was I probably wrong, but the package prevents system upgrade. I’ve removed the patched packages and have original 1.0-25 up, please install that if you tried my patched version.

As if finding myself with two Nokia N810 Internet Tablets wasn’t enough of a predicament. (I know: there are many of you scratching your heads, saying, “Yeah, right!”) But, honestly, there have been innumerable accounts over the course of my (what, over twenty years now?!) involvement with open source software and communities where I wished I could give back even a modicum of the products, support, friendships, et cetera, that I have withdrawn for my own use (and even profit).

The author of this site was engaged in a very interesting discussion over on the Internet Tablet Talk site's Newbie forum, which forms the basis of this mini-tutorial. An enthusiastic N800 user was annoyed by how badly and slowly their tablet rendered the nytimes.com website. They said it took ages to load the page even on a broadband connection, and when it loaded it looked absolutely awful

Developers: Time to stay up late. On Tuesday, Feb 12 at 9 PM Arizona time (6 AM Helsinki time on Wednesday or just check this page for time) maemo's own Development Platform Product Manager will be a guest over Skype in my next live show.

I will ask that any support questions be pertinent to his role as the guy in charge of the development platform. This guy knows maemo inside and out and we should focus our interaction on that - so questions like "Why can't we charge over USB?" don't belong here.Keep in mind that Nokia staff cannot comment on in-development projects that have not been announced.

Here's the link to the live show page. Start thinking of software and platform questions. We'll talk to Quim in one week!

Here's the Google Calendar button:

Warning, long. Executive summary can be found below from bold text, if you don’t want to read everything, just read the bold text

I just finished making Tinymail’s .NET bindings actually usable. To test whether the binding works I wrote a small demo user interface in C#.

I added minimal documentation too.

Because Tinymail does quite a bit more with the GTypeInterface GType than Gtk+, Mike’s GtkSharp code generator for this had a few problems. I expected it to fail a lot worse, though. Without any improvements it did already get pretty far by itself! Mike and me have been pushing its code to support even the most crazy kind of things that Tinymail is doing with interfaces in GObject-C. There is still a lot of room for improvement for both Tinymail’s resulting binding itself and GtkSharp’s Gapi parser and code generator.

With current trunk of GtkSharp and after applying two patches for its generator, it’ll make you a quite nice .NET API now. I’m of course working with Mike on getting proper solutions for what I had to patch upstream in GtkSharp’s Gapi.

I would like to thank Mike for his patience and help while I was making this binding work. I hope other library maintainers will use Tinymail’s one as knowhow-offset to get their own bindings working in .NET too.

Today I created package with Polish regional settings for Maemo OS2008. They are working and show as “Polski (Polska)” in “Control panel -> Language and region”.

I used glibc 2.5 locale data + Ångström localedef and generated locale files on my N810. To make them appear as “Polski (Polska)” instead of “pl_PL” I edited LC_ADDRESS file like it is described on “i18n add new languages” Maemo wiki page.

Download package.

When I will make more Polish addons I will probably create repository with it (another one ;(

---

Copyright © 2007 Marcin 'Hrw' Juszkiewicz
fingerprint: 0f080b8eedf12b5e8e493c4f341131f9

After getting feedback from osso-gpsd maintainer and some more testing, I think that I was probably seeing a placebo effect with the gpsd leap-year fix — the patch does fix the leap-year bug but I  believe the fix time improvements were statistical anomalies and placebo. Bruises the ego to admit I was fooled, but that does fit the evidence best.

Not only that but in my attempt to be a responsible (non-maintainer) packager I’ve also done a mistake: I made my testing package version 1.0-25-jku0 to show that it’s not the original 1.0-25 version. This installs just fine, but later on upgrading will fail because osso-software-version depends on the exact version 1.0-25 :(

I strongly suggest everyone who installed my testing package to install version 1.0-25 from the same place (I don’t think it’s actually available from anywhere official). Like the version number implies, this is the non-patched version so your GPS time will be a day off until March. Really sorry for the trouble folks and thanks to Owen Williams for notifying me about the problem.

If you're a fan of the TV and film series Star Trek, you may be familiar with the "PADD" portable computer tablet that many of the characters used.

FOSDEM 2008 is around the corner. Of course I’ll be there along with other igalians so I hope to see you there :)

If you’re a Maemo user/hacker then you’ll probably be interested in this wiki page where we’re trying to coordinate a meeting.

By the way, some people have suggested me to use GTK themeable icons in Vagalume instead of the custom ones that come with v0.5. Here’s a couple of screenshots comparing both (click on the images to view them full size).

I’ve just created a survey so you can vote which one you prefer :) If you don’t have a user at garage.maemo.org, just leave a comment in this post.

See you at FOSDEM !

Someone sent me an Instant Message last night asking me if I ever slept with my Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. The answer is yes - but nothing happened.

I took for granted a lot of the "switch time" when I had an N810 after the Web 2 Summit. Since the device was "new to me," I was learning and exploring the features one at a time. When I had to switch back to my N800 for a while, I fell back into my old routines. Now that I have an N810 again, I found myself accidentally using N800 methods on my N810. Here are some tips for those who upgraded from an N800 to an N810:

Use the "lock" switch. The power button is made to be tiny because it is not often used. On a related matter: Treat it like a phone: Don't turn it off - just lock the keypad when not in use.

Take advantage of your LED indicators. The N810 has that multi-color LED in the corner. The settings for it are in Control Panel - Display - LEDs.


Because the N810 is smaller and more slippery than the N800, you may be worried about dropping it. I remedy that by swinging out the kickstand and just keeping it between my fingers.

Re-learn stylus scrolling and navigation if you're used to the D-pad on the front. The N810's D-pad is smaller and behind the slider so acclimating to touch input makes fast look-ups even faster.


Try out the Map application. Even if you don't intend to use the N810 as a GPS, you can bet there will be one time you wish you had a GPS on you and could locate a specific destination.I need to keep reminding myself of these advantages, too. In fact - I know darn well the N810 has a sunlight readable display but still find myself remembering that I can use it outside.

On to other things: Remember - Next Tuesday night (or early Wednesday morning for the European crowd) we will have a live show with special guest Quim Gil (pronounced Kim Jil - I know I got it wrong a few times.) and he will be on over Skype to discuss the maemo platform and development. The live shows have an IRC chat room embedded so you are welcome to come in, ask questions, and discuss.

Final note: I have a back-log of unreviewed software that built up. What do you want to see that you haven't yet?

I started out trying to install the rtcomm update that gives all kinds of new protocol support to the built in messaging app. I was having install problems even with red pill mode on. Then when poking around in the app manager I saw an entry for gcc. gcc? Oh my dear, how pimp would that be? Hell yea:

There’s gcc, g++, and dev header installs for all kinds of stuff. Why was I not informed of this earlier?

I finally got around to looking at the problem tonight. The fix was very simple. My apologies for not addressing this sooner!

Get the updated .deb.

The problem was due to the volume range on the original Exaile going from 0-1. For some reason on maemo (OS2008) the volume range is 0-10. According to the gstreamer volume control docs the range should be 0-10, so I’m not sure why the original Exaile works properly on my desktop machine.

Anyway, I mainly use Kagu and Vagalume for music on my N800 these days. As a result I haven’t done anything on maemo Exaile for ages. I hope to one of these days, though.

Another release from the Canola team! Gustavo mentions working toward weekly releases now which is just awesome. Be sure to report any bugs on Garage…

INdT is proud to release Canola2 beta3, this is mostly a bugfix
version, with some optimizations and even a graphical cover selector
(in the case you used canola-tuning).

Highlights of this version are:

• Fixed playlist support;


• Fixed podcast downloading performance problem;


• Fixed “previous” button in player UI;


• Graphical cover selector: in Album view (Music -> Album cover ->
  Album view), click the cover, it will slide to the right and there it
  will show a list of possible covers. It is a list with kinetic
  scrolling, but lacks scrollbar/position indicator so far, so until we
  add it you should try to drag the list around.

Technorati Tags:
770, Canola, Internet Tablet, Maemo, Media Center, N800, N810, Nokia

Between exam and exam, I had time to launch Maemo WordPy’s new version.
Well it was almost finished and there was a beta in extras-devel repository and it seemed it was working well and it became slightly popular but I didn’t want to launch the final version until I wasn’t receiving the n810 to be able to test the OS2008 version.
So launching it today, I have time to rest and to enjoy tomorrow during my birthday.

Well, here there is a list of the new features for this version:

• Powerful image edition.
• New preferences with support for multiple accounts.
• Define images in offline and upload it when publish. Yes it’s possible now!
• Insert flickr images in an article.
• Upload images to flickr.
• Option for set font size.
• Zoom in text with hardware keys.
• OS2008: Preview article tab.
• OS2008: Option for finger-friendly scrollbars.
• OS2007-OS2006: Preview article in the browser.
• Wordpress: Categories sorted alphabetically.
• Wordpress: Option for allow or avoid pings.
• Blogger support: Write articles, set labels, upload local images to Picasa, publish/draft. Thanks to Jayesh Salvi.
  An explanation, the support for Picasa is only when you want to insert a local image in an article. In the future there will be major support for Picasa, especially if MS-love-Yahoo goes out forward.
• A nice easter-egg. It’s a small silly thing, but it can be funny. I am going to add a small easter egg in every new version. Please, python gurus, don’t look at the code

Known Issues:
Only for Blogger
If you have installed Erminig, you will have gdataclient 1.0.9 installed.
Maemo WordPy depends on the same library but I have called it python-gdata (taking Debian’s directives) and I have upload it to the extras repository.
I have uploaded the version 1.0.10, which has support for Picasa, this way if you have gdataclient 1.0.9 you will not be able to upload images to Picasa.
There is a solution, uninstall gdataclient and to reinstall Maemo WordPy, with what you will install the new python-gdata version and I think Erminig will be able to work with this version equally.

Unknown Issues:
Many
As you can see this version has a good jump in features, so if there is some problem, please to comment it. Feedback is welcome.

You can download the new version, following the instructions in its web: Install Maemo WordPy
Or it’s possible that already it’s available in your application manager.

You can see the roadmap as it’s changing with every version, since the people suggest ideas to improve Maemo WordPy: Roadmap.

Have fun.

I had a few days during Carnaval holidays to
update Frothing to the latest and greatest
version (1.4.10) of Liferea.
There are a bunch of new translations added as
well as many bug fixes so this is a recommended
upgrade.

This work was made easy because of a dpatch I
received from Steve Kowalik. Thanks to this I got
to party a bit too..so big props going his way.

Free software development rocks.

The tarball is available from:

http://code.google.com/p/frothing/downloads/list

If you already have a device running ubuntu
mobile you can get a deb from the Launchpad
PPA. Add this line to your sources.list

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mobile/ubuntu hardy main

and do an:

apt-get update
apt-get install liferea

The N800 and N810 contain a large number of built-in step-by-step tutorials and a complete user guide, but a lot of tablet owners seem to be unaware of their presence.

Here's how to find and access them.

How to browse through all the built-in help files

Very very simple, just click on the Applications icon (the green squares on the left) and then click on help. You'll then see a long list of all the topics covered by the tutorials. Double-click on the topic you want to know more about, then click on the specific tutorial you want to read.

When you've finished reading a tutorial, just click on the X in the top right hand corner to close it.

How to get help for the feature you're currently using

Again, easy-peasy. Just click on the menu for the application you're currently running (this will be a grey bar at the top of the screen). One of the options will be Help, just click on it.

Applications runs separately from their help files, so you can close a tutorial without closing the app it discusses.

How to find the hidden user guide

For some reason the manual for the N800 and N810 is tucked away in the Documents folder. Here's how to find them and read it:

1. Click on the Applications icon (green squares).

2. Click on Utilities.

3. Click on File Manager.

4. Double click on Documents on the right.

5. Double click on User Guides on the right.

6. The user guide is displayed in all its different language versions. Double click on the language version you want (the English-language versions are near the bottom of the list).

7. The user guide will be opened using the PDF reader application. To turn a page click on the small arrows at the bottom of the screen, and to zoom in and out click on the magnifying glasses.

Don't forget to add it to your calendar. Tomorrow at 9PM Arizona time (6 AM in Helsinki) I will have Quim Gil as a guest over Skype. To watch and participate in the show:
Hop over to the main show page. There, you will find the IRC chat room and the live stream. I'll be watching the IRC for questions and commentary and any pertinent links will be posted into the room too. I'll see if I can record the session as well.

People have asked me to do a podcast several times. This has been difficult before with scheduling guests and I think it would be boring to just have me chat for a half hour to an hour at a time. After some chatting and advice (thanks, antirelusionist) I decided on a format that may work. We'll try it:

Call me over Gizmo and leave a voicemail message. The voicemail messages will be the user or developer voices and get added into the show. I may occasionally do live recordings but the voicemail will be the primary way to do things as it allows me to be flexible in my schedule.

Want to be in my podcast?

Thank you all for reporting bugs and giving new suggestions for MediaBox Media Center! You help me a lot making this the best and friendliest media center for the tablets! Keep on reporting; you decide what's important!



So here is release 0.94 with a lot of small improvements.

The media scanner will now cache already loaded thumbnails so it will be quicker after you add or remove a media folder. You can also specify for each folder which kind of media you have in there. Thus you will be able to avoid getting all your album cover art listed in the image viewer, for example.



If you've always wanted to play the FM radio through the loudspeakers, you can do so now. MediaBox can finally switch from headphones to loudspeakers when the headphones are plugged in as FM radio antenna. The FM radio is only available on the N800, though.

The button on the Nokia headset is now also supported and you can press it to pause and resume playback.

I have also added a tag parser for FLAC tags and fixed some flaws regarding FLAC playback. FLAC is a free and lossless audio codec for high quality audio.

MediaBox is now powered by player backends for mplayer and the native osso-media-server. By selecting between two backends, more media formats can be played back. This especially adds support for real media and real internet radio streams (.ram), as well as MP4 and 3GP videos.

The new MediaBox release is available from the website as well as through the application manager in the Maemo extras catalogue. The package installs on OS 2006 (video playback not yet supported on the 770), OS 2007, and OS 2008.

First was Nokia 770. Then Nokia N800 was born. Both were keyboardless so ‘virtual’ on-screen keyboard was used. But then N810 came and it stopped being such easy…

On N810 there are 3 keyboards:

• on-screen one
• hardware one
• on-screen one which is displayed when ‘Chr’ key is pressed on hardware one

How to modify all those keyboards to add new language? Few ways exists but all have common part — on-screen layout needs to be present to allow to change hardware layout.

Simple way is to choose one which you do not plan to use and adapt it for own use. Bad part is that user has to remember that ‘Italian’ means ‘Polish’ (for example).

But there is other way — Jiří Benc wrote alternative control panel for keyboards. This one allows to select any layout available in system. User still needs to have layout for on-screen and hardware keyboards but at least is not limited to those few ones which are available with OS2008.

Too bad that both Shift keys on hardware keyboard works as Left Shift :( Otherwise one of them could be mapped as AltGr and be used for Polish keys… For now I will probably make Polish keymap as copy of English one + national chars on ‘Chr’ virtual keyboard…

---

Copyright © 2007 Marcin 'Hrw' Juszkiewicz
fingerprint: 0f080b8eedf12b5e8e493c4f341131f9

Kesäkoodi is a “Google Summer of Code”-like program for Finnish students (university and univ. of applied science).  Bergie just reminded me that the project plan deadline is Feb 20th — that’s next week.

The project areas are not defined beforehand, but some “areas of special interest” are mentioned:

1. social media
2. location and context sensitivity
3. mobile apps
4. system management
5. operating systems

About #2 and #3: I’ve got the feeling this summer would be a good time to work on Geoclue. We’ll have the new API finished Real Soon Now  (promise), and there should be lots more developer interest when we reach summer.

If you’re studying in Finland, have some coding skills and are interested in a location-related programming project, stop by #geoclue irc channel (on irc.gimp.org) or ping me on jabber. Do stop by even if you don’t have a specific idea — maybe we can figure something out…

 

I'm still looking for the holy grail of podcasting; software that will fetch my daily audio podcasts and put them in a sync directory. On top of this I want it to be able to download video podcasts and automatically convert them to the correct format ready to be synced with the Nokia N800. And to make matters worse, I want the N800 to 'wake up' at a predetermined time and sync with this said directory!

Is this too much to ask?

The first part of the equation is fulfilled with gpodder. A cron job to fetch all my feeds is set up for 4am with a:

gpodder --run

From here I'm unsure. Maybe tablet-encode could be run via a cron job but I'm not sure it would work with the file and directory structure that gpodder creates and how would it distinguish between audio only and video podcasts? The other problem is Canola, my player of choice. How do we inform Canola that new material is available to listen to/view? The video part should be trivial but how does the podcast section update itself to show newly available shows?

Lots of questions and we are far from the answers at the moment.

To give you a little background, I commute to work 3 hours a day; audio podcasts are essential! (I'm driving so audio only!). I also spend some time in gym where the mundane treadmill session can be made a little more interesting with something like the Totally Rad Show video podcast (vidcast?). These things are as essential as email to me. I can grab my email on the tablet before I leave in the morning, why not my daily entertainment?

Rest assured, I'm on the case! I WILL find a way of doing this, even if I have to program it myself. There, I said it, shame me if it never happens!

I recorded it all. Thank you, ustream.tv, for allowing hour-long recordings!

Quim and I talk about user experiences, wish lists, progress of the internet tablet platform, and more. One viewer summed it up nicely at the end of the show:

Faz1 : Nice to know someone with Quim's outlook is involved in the dev of our beloved tablets :)

Making a useful mobile Logic Analyzer is quite a challenge, but the basic needs are there. sump.org has a nice VHDL design and Java software for a 32 channel Logic Analyzer based on a Xilinx Spartan FPGA. The whole design is GPL licensed. The current VHDL implementation is available for several Xilinx FPGA evaluation boards and [...]

What inspired you to buy your Internet Tablet? Was it a specific feature (or several) or the whole package? Which tablet did you buy and what would you add to it?

 

As one of the driver behind the Jalimo project, I decided to enhance my blogging activity to give you an idea what we are doing. This one is about our toolchain!

We started Jalimo with the goal to bring free Java to cool linux devices and maintain it over the time. Since we are interested in multiple target platforms (especially maemo and openmoko ATM) the only way for us could be to have one build engine which is capable of producing packages for all the targets. The best tool I know for this is OpenEmbedded. As we started, OpenEmbedded lacked support for maemo, as well as proper Java support. We added both (done by Robert Schuster). So now we are able to build our Jalimo packages for maemo4 with the same command as our packages for OpenMoko: bitbake. The most parts are already committed to the OpenEmbedded upstream, but we are still maintaining an overlay in our svn.

For those of you, who know Mamona, I should explain the difference: Mamona is a complete OpenEmbedded based distribution for the n8xx which tries to align with maemo over the time. In contrast to that, the chinook-compat distribution we are using is far from being a complete distribution (e.g. no kernel), but produces packages which are compatible to the original IT OS images.

Beside our Jalimo related packages, this should be an easy way to build most of the ~5000 OpenEmbedded package for maemo. For us, this is one step to unify the development. When I’m looking at the upcoming fragmentation on linux mobile platforms, I hope, we get some more steps done.

Yea! I finally have a Nokia N810. I haven't done much yet since I was kind of busy the whole day. What I can say so far is: I like the keyboard.

More in the coming days.

Many thanks to my sponsor :-)

The Nokia N800 and N810 internet tablets can be attached to a Windows, Linux or Macintosh computer using a USB cable. In normal mode this lets you transfer files to and from the tablet's memory card (or memory cards if you have more than one). You can also use the same cable to update the tablet's firmware when it is in update mode.

I don't really get on with the supplied RSS reader on my N800. It doesn't work like I expect and it lacks mobile features like offline reading that I'd like. So, I'm writing a feed reader for Maemo called Nibbles. It's still very early stages, but there's enough for a development release now, I think. Below is a screenshot of the current preview version, 0.0.4:

It seems to cope nicely with a wide variety of RSS and Atom feeds, despite my proof-of-concept code somehow making it into the app ;).

Currently it's quite bare of features and can be considered the simplest app that could work (for example, the feeds update at a fixed 30 mins). It will likely stay that way until I get a few bugs worked out and 0.1, the first 'stable' version, released. After that, I'll work on some more interesting new features. I'm still very open to suggestions though and all feedback is welcome, so please don't be shy!

If you'd like to play along and help the development of a better feed reader for your internet tablet, use the .install file. Please report issues to the Maemo Garage tracker.

You can make Nibbles the default feed reader by editing /usr/share/applications/defaults.list. You need to set hildon-news_reader=nibbles.install. This will allow you to tap on the feed icon in a browser window and have the feed added to Nibbles.

I've only specified that the app will work in OS2008, but I'm pretty sure it'll work in OS2007 too. Since I only have an OS2008 machine, I can't test it easily. If anyone is still using OS2007 and would like to help, please do get in touch.

It has  been passed a long time since I promised a post about my dual boot menu.

So here it is:

I took this picture of my N800 that has Mamona on its flash and Nokia ITOS2007 (I used “Maemo” for simplicity) on a memory card.

I bet that your questions are: “How did you do it?” What have you done with kernel and initfs?”

Initfs: Unfortunately Mamona needs Nokia’s initfs to work properly (watchdog, wireless module, etc). But our initfs is obviously modified to have this boot menu. I took the idea and the binaries to get the input from Maemo wiki page.

Kernel: At this moment I’m using the 2.6.18-omap1 of Nokia ITOS2007 and flashing every time that I need a different kernel for Mamona .

There are some ideas to have different kernel versions on the same device, but I haven’t try none of them yet.

The first and stupid idea is to maintain them on /boot of rootfs and on initfs move (using dd) one of them to the kernel partition. The smarter one is to change the boot loader, but unfortunately we can’t do this one.

The people have spoken and the results have been overwhelming.

Vagalume 0.5.1 is out. More UI updates soon.

Thank you all for your comments and see you at FOSDEM :-)

 

This video shows the screen rotation on a Nokia N800. We have here an Enlightenment running on Mamona distro where each navigation button is associated with an xrandr command, e.g. LEFT: xrandr -o left.

I’ve implemented the xrandr support to Xomap (1.3.99) and the LCD controller rotation support on Linux-omap kernel. It is a very fast rotation since its made directly by the Epson LCD controller. The X is responsible to deal with mouse events and to change the resolution.

Lauro and Aloisio helped me with the Linux-omap patch that was already accept and applied to linux omap git tree.

Download patches:

• Linux-omap ( <  2.6.24-omap1 ) patch
• Xomap patch applied on xorg-server_1.3.99.0~git20070321-0osso20074202.tar.gz

 

I got networking going in my scratchbox install and was able to build my own minefield 1.9 Mozilla and get it talking to the intarwebs:

Pimp, I know, you’re jealous. Turns out Brad is way more pimp, and actually had debs packaged that I could play with and all.

I actually found his stuff before I did this, but I wanted to figure out how to build my own so that I could hack on it a bit. Unfortunately the extension developers extension didn’t install cause it doesn’t “provide secure updates”.. whatever that means. But Greasemonkey did:

I know, it’s hard to comprehend. I’ll give you a bit of time to catch your breath, I’m getting all excited myself.

Chumby, the open hardware and open software information/entertainment appliance, now allows users to create and play with a "virtual chumby." Chumby is an alarm clock sized embedded Linux device with a Flash widget player. The widgets are selectable, configurable, and automatically flip cycle. This is something I wanted on my Internet Tablet for some time as the tablet can still feed me information while I am at my main computer.

To turn your tablet into a virtual Chumby, follow these steps:

1. Register at chumby.com
2. Create a channel and choose/configure some widgets. There are a lot, so have some fun with it.
   
3. Create a virtual Chumby using the channel you chose. Keep in mind that interactive widgets ones that require clicking or shaking) do not work on the virtual Chumby.
   
4. Create a simple web page that displays the chumby. It's as easy as dropping the embed code into an empty html file and adding normal html and body tags around it. Centering it would be good too.
   
5. Put the web page somewhere on your own site and visit it from the tablet.

That's it! It's actually rather fun. I use weather, Facebook, The Onion, woot.com, a horoscope, and more.

My N810 runs OS2008 still. Today during normal telephone call with friend I was asked about Skype account. After call I grabbed tablet and looked at available applications.

Few minutes later I was logged into Skype account. But to get notifications application has to work… Same problem also exists with Gizmo… Both are available by default (as links to installation) in OS2008 but not integrated into system at all…

I wonder why that situation exists — user can add Google Talk, normal Jabber accounts and SIP ones and those are handled by Maemo Contacts application. Why Nokia did not made such integration possible for external IM/telephony applications…

Probably same reason as with i18n: lack of thinking on design phase…

---

Copyright © 2007 Marcin 'Hrw' Juszkiewicz
fingerprint: 0f080b8eedf12b5e8e493c4f341131f9

We're in Linköping, Sweden for the Midgard developer meeting, and I suddenly realised the Midgard community really likes Nokia's internet tablets. Not only does maemo.org run on Midgard (earlier this week "sideported" to MidCOM 2.8), but many Midgardians are also active Tableteers.

So no wonder over the course of the meeting we saw the maemo application manager display an interesting message: libmidgard2.0 successfully installed.

Expect some announcement about that soon. And about some other things, like MidCOM 3 as well. Initially it looks very promising.

Technorati Tags: maemo, midgard

I’ve just finished configuring new servers (Fennel, Cabbage and Chicory), that’s partially why I wasn’t updating blog as oftern as I used. By the way, this will basically means more bandwidth to be wasted ;)  It took a while to find the right ISP, and after some tests with both italian providers I ended moving [...]

Note, image has not much to do with this post, it's emacs22 running on my N810. More about that in my next post

Hello everyone. Today I want to proudly present you the first application, that was inspired by this blog: Andrew Olmsted’s Statusbar Clock I think that I don’t need to explain what it does. The main great idea of Andrew is to use two applets for more visibility of digits and it works pretty solid! I’m [...]

I have a N810 since Wednesday so here is my micro review.

Good:

• The Keyboard, I really love it. I noticed that I use it a lot (for everything possible).


• Hardware buttons. Screen maximize/minimize moved to the left. New screen-lock button. This is really improves usability, excellent!


• Look-and-feel, pretty awesome.


• Speakers, they make NOISE!!1

Bad:

• GPS fix time, almost unusable.


• Mini SD slot. Is there really not enough space to put in a normal-sized SD/MMC slot?


• Micro-USB, WTF?


• The keyboard layout, missing symbols (pipe and tab). See solution below.

In order to make the device hacker compatible one needs to modify the keyboard layout and at least add a PIPE and a TAB key. This can be easily done by editing the X11 keyboard layout. Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility had some small discussion in his blog. For now I made TAB to be Fn-Space and PIPE to be Shift-Minus. This way I don't loose either Euro nor Sterling/Pound.

Some must haves:

Configuration:

update-rc.d -f metalayer-crawler0 remove (this thing sucks!)

gconftool -s -t string /system/osso/connectivity/IAP/DEFAULT/type DUMMY (you need this to play with the network)

Software:

Statusbar Load-Applet (CPU and MEM usage)
IpHome Home Applet (show IP address)
Important command line utils: SSH, mtr, bluez-utils, nmap, socat, wireless-tools, dsniff, ...

New stuff I've been thinking about: Location Home-applet, shows current position (maybe with street name lookup). Temperature Home-applet (see internal-temp app). New hardware-keyboard-based version of xkbd-bthid, also I need to support Windows and MacOSX (this will take some time).

Any comments or ideas for applications?

I have a N810 since Wednesday so here is my micro review.

Good:

• The Keyboard, I really love it. I noticed that I use it a lot (for everything possible).


• Hardware buttons. Screen maximize/minimize moved to the left. New screen-lock button. This is really improves usability, excellent!


• Look-and-feel, pretty awesome.


• Speakers, they make NOISE!!1

Bad:

• GPS fix time, almost unusable.


• Mini SD slot. Is there really not enough space to put in a normal-sized SD/MMC slot?


• Micro-USB, WTF?


• The keyboard layout, missing symbols (pipe and tab). See solution below.

In order to make the device hacker compatible one needs to modify the keyboard layout and at least add a PIPE and a TAB key. This can be easily done by editing the X11 keyboard layout. Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility had some small discussion in his blog. For now I made TAB to be Fn-Space and PIPE to be Shift-Minus. This way I don't loose either Euro nor Sterling/Pound.

Some must haves:

Configuration:

update-rc.d -f metalayer-crawler0 remove (this thing sucks!)

gconftool -s -t string /system/osso/connectivity/IAP/DEFAULT/type DUMMY (you need this to play with the network)

Software:

Statusbar Load-Applet (CPU and MEM usage)
IpHome Home Applet (show IP address)
Important command line utils: SSH, mtr, bluez-utils, nmap, socat, wireless-tools, dsniff, ...

New stuff I've been thinking about: Location Home-applet, shows current position (maybe with street name lookup). Temperature Home-applet (see internal-temp app). New hardware-keyboard-based version of xkbd-bthid, also I need to support Windows and MacOSX (this will take some time).

Any comments or ideas for applications?

OMG ! Last Friday I published the new version of Vagalume and the same day the list of finalists of the Mobile Rules! competition was announced. Guess who is one of them …

Award ceremony in San Jose (California) next month.

Thanks Óscar for your words of support!

After getting an initial version of mobile Firefox (currently called minefield) compiled and running on the Maemo SDK, I compiled a version for ARM and put it on my n810:

If you’re attending FOSDEM (Brussels) next weekend, come along to my GNOME devroom talk on Web integration:

“WebKit/GTK+ is a brand new port of the WebKit content engine providing standards compliance, high performance and seamless integration with the GTK+ stack. I’ll be demonstrating some of the latest features and taking a look at the ways developers can adopt the WebView API and apply HTML5, CSS, SVG, canvas and AJAX to create location-aware hybrid Web/GTK+ rich internet applications.”

Update: You can now get the slides from the talk.

What?

The talk will be short and light (only a 1/2 hour session) but I’ll be around all weekend so feel free to touch base if you have more questions or ideas. This session will target:

• GTK+ developers
• Web designers
• Anyone looking to deploy online and offline Web applications
  • on the desktop
  • on mobile devices

When?

11:15 – 12:15, Sunday, February 24, 2008

Where?

FOSDEM GNOME/Cross-desktop Developer Room, H.1301

I’ve been using TrueCrypt from quite a long time now. I’ve always been impressed by its ease of use and, most important, the chance to use it both on Window$ and GNU/Linux systems, bot desktop and server/remote systems. So, when version 5.0 was released a couple weeks ago I was excited about the new release. [...]

Mamona now is runninng Canola. A lot of dependencies were necessary, it was a really heavy packaging and dependencies tracking work. All of the offline features are working very well. The performance is below expected yet I’m trying to figure out why… Further I’ll post the results. Actually just the launch and first clicks are [...]

Achilles had Patroclus. Don Quixote had Sancho Panza. Michael Jackson has Bubbles. And I have emacs. On my N810. A while ago, I already wrote about it. I even showed some screenshot of emacs running in scratchbox. But, I didn't take the final step - getting it to run on an actual N810. Recently, I tried to get that to work. Well, that was frustrating... Some hackish instructions follow. They may or may not work for you -- try at your own risk :)

• First I tried to simply rebuild the Emacs23-packages in scratchbox; that failed, because the compilation somehow crashes QEMU;
  
• Then I tried Emacs 22 instead... but the problem remained;
  
• So, I decided that maybe I should try to compile the package it on the N810 itself. Again, that failed. One of many problems: package building requires a real grep, and if you try to install it, it wants to remove the whole busybox environment; sigh. I fought the system - the system won...
  

But, all was not lost. There are prebuilt Debian packages of Emacs22 available; I took the armel-packages from there, and tried to install them. That almost worked. Almost, because the size of emacs is almost legendary. It did not fit on my root file system on the N810.

We're nearing the solution though; I copied the contents of the .debs to a directory emacs810 (with mc); then I copied this directory to the MMC-card of the N810 (/media/mmc2/). I set some symlinks, ie.

  # ln -s /media/mmc2/emacs810/usr/share/emacs /usr/share/emacs
  # ln -s /media/mmc2/emacs810/usr/share/emacs22 /usr/share/emacs22
  # ln -s /media/mmc2/emacs810/usr/bin/emacs22-gtk /usr/bin/emacs22
  # ln -s /media/mmc2/emacs810/usr/share/applications/emacs22.desktop /usr/share/applications/hildon/

Also, you'll need to install libungif4g. That should do the trick, and emacs should show up in your Extras-menu. And we can run emacs! Victory is mine!

Well, almost. In emacs, a very useful key is the Meta-key, usually mapped to the Alt-key of your keyboard. But of course, there's no alt-key on the N810-keyboard. Instead, I decided to remap the Chr-key. I'd like to remap it in my .emacs, but I haven't been able to do so.

Anyway, as a first start, I added these to /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/nokia_vndr/rx-44 (the xkb keyboard mapping):

   key <SPCE> {  [ space, space, Tab, space ] };
   key <COMP> {  [ Meta_L, Meta_L, Multi_key, Meta_L ] };
Click to read 202 more words
    

Thanks to Ricky for the flyer shots and this internettablettalk thread for the tip. Ricky thinks it's the WiMAX tablet.

We see what appears to be a Nokia N810 in black. A zoom in on the ad looks very much like it says N830. It is NOT the N830. Reggie fixed my perception. This image is from a Best Buy mobile ad but I cannot find the original. It appears to have already been pulled. Best Buy's existing listing for the N810 shows the steel color. Updated again: Found the ad.

An exhaustive search of FCC filings by Nokia between October and today does not show a new Internet Tablet, but shows that the N810 did get a redesigned Bluetooth antenna.


It's sexy. VERY sexy. I don't care if it's just another N810 dressed in a new color - I want one. I hope it is the WiMAX tablet with a better GPS sensor. I also hope it shows up at CTIA.

Great news! After waiting for some weeks, Nokia N810 is avaible on the first European Online Shop! You can Buy It from the spanish Nokia Online Shop! Happy shopping! N810 on Spanish Online shop

The iPod Touch has recently gained a location ability, despite not having a GPS. How?

A company, called Skyhook Wireless have driven around the US and Europe with a laptop and a GPS; recording the position and strength of every wireless access points SSID they detect.

A device, such as the iPod Touch, can have a database - or use the Internet - to go the other way: "I can see these APs with these signal strengths. Where am I?". A colleague tried this in the centre of London and it was accurate to within 20m!

The advantage of this on Maemo are obvious: for the N800, it provides a mechanism for knowing where you are (in built-up areas) without an external GPS. On the N810 it can be used to prime the built-in GPS for faster lock times, and get a lock within buildings etc.

Skyhook make money licencing their technology to OEMs etc., however their SDK is downloadable and, once you get through the signup process, you find they've got ARMEL binaries for Maemo 3.1 (i.e. OS2007).

Unfortunately, I don't have an OS2007 device, and trying to get it working on OS2008 ultimately resulting in a segmentation fault. They've yet to reply to the email I sent asking if they've got a Maemo 4.0 (chinook/OS2008) SDK available.

However, this is promising for two reasons: 1) they're aware of Maemo; 2) it might be something Nokia is looking at licencing.

All of this could be tied together with GeoClue and at some point we might take advantage of location-based services. That'd be a cool day.

In other news, I'm going to JavaOne in May, so if anyone going wants to meet up for a beer; drop me a line. Also, if you're planning on going, but haven't yet registered, my refer-a-friend code is W1054596: I'm only a couple of referrals away from a rather natty free gift! :-)

Doh! Just found OS2008 has been silently updated! :) I’ve just finished flashing my N810 and hunting for changes! As always, updated ITOS can be found at http://maemo.org/downloads/OS2008/ * Update 2008.02.20 This release fixes the power on (boot) problem only. If you are not having this issue you may as well keep using the 50-2 [...]

Screenshot06.png, by pancake There is something beautiful in here, somehow. Click to enlarge.

Some of the comments to my previous posts about Firefox mobile pointed me toward the packaged extensions to the Microb browser, which is the default browser on the N810. One of the extensions is a spellcheck extension that underlines misspelled words right in a text area. Fantastic! Now I can blog from my device without fear of looking like a complete eediot cause I spell worse than a 4th grader. Now if I can just find extensions to correct grammar, poor sentence structure, and boneheaded predictions and market analysis.

I have just released Version 0.94.1 of the MediaBox Media Center. This is a bugfix release and will help you if you experienced MediaBox 0.94 hanging on startup.

The new version also adds support for non-UTF-8 character encodings in ID3 tags, such as ISO-8859-1 and UTF-16.

Thanks to all users who reported bugs and made suggestions!

MIT Technology Review's 10 Emerging Technologies of 2008 report includes offline web applications as a rising trend. When developing Ajatus, our new P2P personal CRM the offline issue was often in our minds. We even wrote in the manifesto:

Ideas may come to you when you're sitting in a bus, boarding an airplane or visiting a hospital. For a CRM to work the data must be available and editable in any situation.

Having now dogfooded Ajatus for almost two months, I have to say this has been an important aspect. It is powerful to have all your customer and project data with you at all times, and still be able to use it via the familiar web UI.

Offline is useful. You can write your notes in every meeting, update them in train, report expenses as they incur. And most importantly, as long as your computer is running, the application is never down. And still, though replication your data will be safe with your peers or the corporate server.

This is aspect even more important when you start running the app on ultra-portable devices, or go outside the industrialized world.

Technorati Tags: ajatus, offline, web, replication

Finally did something useful for Open Source. It's 1:00AM now and I've just completed compiling everything I could find for my Nokia N800. Installing maemo chinook SDK was not without confusing things but I hope they will fix everything.

So the first application was of course Stardict. Just few fixes to code from trunk and it's ready:



Thanks to Gonzo for hosting. You can find 2 deb packages following this link. I'll commit my changes during next few days. In my To-Do list I have now Freeciv, my pacman game and mplayer's new GUI.

Just a quick short blog post

As requested, I packed in the weekend USBControl as a seprate package. I also upgraded it so that it works even after a reboot. LOL. the previous one actually only worked until you rebooted the device and lost the access to edit your USB mode after that. LOL indeed. I didn't realize that, as I really don't reboot my device too often. Kudos to nokia for the stable device.

Anyway, the new package runs as sudo, so it's able to edit the file even later on. (security people can now cry iik!).

You can install it from here (yo need to have python installed before though):
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/download.php/3443/usbcontrol-1.0_all.deb

I'll put it to repos in a few days time, but before that, try it out and let me know how you like (or dislike) it.

Current version also tells the status of the usb as well as the devices attached to your tablet.

It's that time again. Engadget's awards are always fun to watch.

The Nokia N810 is up against:

• Amazon Kindle
• HTC Advantage
• HP iPaq 210
• iRex iLiad
• OQO model 02
• Sony Reader

That's a weird category. Three eBook readers, a few "real handhelds" and an ultra-mobile PC. Was the handheld market so light that it decided to take full-power (yet super mobile) PCs like the OQO 02 and pit them against something that'll give you Harry Potter and the New York Times?

Still - Vote!

This coming weekend, a big part of our multinational modest-team (Sergio, Berto, Philip and Dirk) will be at the FOSDEM conference in Brussels. There will even be a presentation about the modest e-mail client. So, if you have any questions, suggestions or even some constructive(!) criticism, this is your chance! You can use IM if you're looking for me (diggler[at]gmail.com).

Last year, I had a great time at FOSDEM, with many, many interesting people as well as the nice atmosphere (food and drinks) in Brussels. Hope to see many of you there!

There are many N800 and N810 tablets with so called ‘Power on drama’. It appear as device which does not want to power on after shutting down or takes lot of time to switch on.

Few days ago new version of OS2008 was released to solve that. There was no informations about it on Maemo website. I do not know why…

But as usual all they did was release of one big flash image with no instructions other then “reflash your tablet and keep hope that it will restore all your changes from backup”. I decided to not check does “Backup & Restore” application will magically install xvinfo, gvim, powertop, custom kernel and few other modifications which I have on my N810.

So how to get fixed device? All you need is flashing bootloader. On Nokia tablets it is split to 3 parts: X-Loader, NOLO secondary bootloader and NOLO cold flasher. First you need to unpack FIASCO image (I am using N810 image in example):

$ flasher --fiasco RX-44_2008SE_2.2007.51-3_PR_COMBINED_MR0_ARM.bin --unpack
flasher v0.8.1 (Jan  5 2007)

SW version in image: RX-44_2008SE_2.2007.51-3_PR_MR0
Image 'kernel', size 1529984 bytes
        Version 2.6.21.0-200749osso2
Image 'initfs', size 1954560 bytes
        Version 0.95-70
Image 'rootfs', size 137625600 bytes
        Version RX-34+RX-44_2008SE_2.2007.51-3_PR_MR0
Image '2nd', size 8192 bytes
        Valid for RX-44: 0801, 0802, 0803, 0804, 0805, 0806, 0901, 0902
        Version 1.1.11-1
Image 'xloader', size 9216 bytes
        Valid for RX-44: 0801, 0802, 0803, 0804, 0805, 0806, 0901, 0902
        Version 1.1.11-1
Image 'secondary', size 99968 bytes
        Valid for RX-44: 0801, 0802, 0803, 0804, 0805, 0806, 0901, 0902
        Version 1.1.11-1
Unpacking kernel image to file 'zImage'...
Unpacking initfs image to file 'initfs.jffs2'...
Unpacking rootfs image to file 'rootfs.jffs2'...
Unpacking 2nd image to file '2nd.bin-RX-44:0801,0802,0803,0804,0805,0806,0901,0902'...
Unpacking xloader image to file 'xloader.bin-RX-44:0801,0802,0803,0804,0805,0806,0901,0902'...
Unpacking secondary image to file 'secondary.bin-RX-44:0801,0802,0803,0804,0805,0806,0901,0902'...

Then all needed is flashing N8×0 tablet with one command:

sudo  flasher --flash --reboot \
--xloader xloader.bin-RX-44:0801,0802,0803,0804,0805,0806,0901,0902 \
--secondary secondary.bin-RX-44:0801,0802,0803,0804,0805,0806,0901,0902 
--2nd 2nd.bin-RX-44:0801,0802,0803,0804,0805,0806,0901,0902

After reboot you will have your tablet with all your data in same places as they were (because rootfs and kernel are not touched) and it will behave properly on OFF/ON cycle.

---

Copyright © 2007 Marcin 'Hrw' Juszkiewicz
fingerprint: 0f080b8eedf12b5e8e493c4f341131f9

I was thinking about the WiMAX Internet Tablet and decided that a three-prong Internet Tablet strategy is perfect. Here's why:

1. The Nokia N800 is still a solid device with many of the features of the Nokia N810 but at a much lower price point. With dual full-sized SDHC card slots and the 800x480 widescreen display, it leads the pack as a media playback device. This is the tablet for people thinking of replacing their iPod and who want a better mobile browsing experience than their phone can ever offer but who do not want to justify the cost for the GPS, sunlight readable display, and keyboard.
2. The Nokia N810 is for those who spend a lot of time away from their computers. The smaller size, GPS, transflective display, and keyboard are all about mobility and, to that audience, justify the extra cost over the N800. This would be a mobile blogger's choice - especially those with tethering plans to their mobile phones.
3. The WiMAX Nokia N8?? is for those who want and need everything and need it fast. WiMAX allows the Internet Tablet to be always online and saves the hassle of phone dial-up, tethering rate plans, Bluetooth range and overhead, and custom phone configuration. With Skype and Gizmo, it allows the tablet to be an always-available phone as well.
   

Of course, these devices do not need to be phones at all - still. Who wants to hold their tablet up to their face?

Kate Alhola and Teemu Sorvisto from Forum Nokia, Nokia professional developers organization will be in Fosdem . If you have questions, ideas or proposals memo application developing, please come and talk to us.

I have in presentation " Controlling embedded devices with the Maemo internet tablet" in Sunday morning 10.00 in embedded in Embedded developer room AW1.126 .

I’ve been fooling around a bit with doing IUI dev on and for the N810. IUI is the javascript library behind those cool iPhone web apps. It does a menu style rendering and slides and all that. It actually works quite well on the Microb browser that ships with OS2008. Here’s one of my test pages for instance:

It renders well on the minefield browser at well, but navigation doesn’t currently work:

And kick ass, with VIM installed on the N810 hacking on the pages when disconnected even is possible:

That colorscheme is delek by the way, and I think it works great on the device.

Today I bought my first car. It is Opel Astra combi from 1997 year.

It drives very nicely and have lot of space for all things which we will want to take with us (pram/pushchair for Mira and other luggage).

As N810 came with some kind of car holder I unpacked it today and looked at it. There is no way to mount it in the car… From fast googling it looks like provided holder require another Nokia accessory — HH-12 Easy Mount ;(

So using N810 for navigation has to wait a bit… I need to buy HH-12 to mount it (or use other holder), then buy car charger DC-4 (or rather 3rd party replacement) and then get better GPRS plan to be able to use Maemo Mapper on the road. Map application which comes with device has very poor maps of Poland and routing functionality require additional payment.

---

Copyright © 2008 by Marcin Juszkiewicz
This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only.
The use of content from that feed on other websites may breach copyright.
(66.150.96.121)

Related posts:

1. Car navigation with N810
2. Maemo mapper
3. Online map services and routing

Bring it on… Canola is already killer on the N810, this just makes it that much better!

Technorati Tags: canola, maemo, nokia, n810, n800, 770, youtube

One of hard things of cross-platform development with WinForms is that you always need to test in both Linux and Windows. My second development environment is Cygwin running on Windows but when I need to travel somewhere, I also need to have this Cygwin environment available on my Windows Virtual Machine.

Andreia made a very good tutorial about how to create a Mono+Cygwin Installation and Compilation, and I've used it for years. However, sometimes I lose my environment or have problems when trying to compile a new Mono version and I need to install it over and over.

When I noticed that Gnome had GARNOME (a build tool that allows users to build the GNOME Desktop), I thought that it would be nice if we had one tool like this not only to build Mono but also to install some dependencies on environments like Cygwin. That is how GARMONO was born. GARMONO is based on GAR software and if you need moreinformation about it a good place is to check is this article in Linux Journal.

We can use GARMONO to build Mono on Cygwin, Linux, Maemo and also use it to generate packages (.deb for Nokia N810). So, I will start a series of blog entries about this, but today let us talk about Cygwin.

Compiling and installing Mono on Cygwin can be a hard task but I believe it is much easier using GARMONO. First, you must get your Cygwin environment installed and working. Also, make sure that you have installed automake, bison, gcc, gdb and libtool. These packages are necessary if you want to build anything.

So, now let us download and unpack GARMONO. For this, log into your Cygwin environment and type:

# wget http://anonsvn.mono-project.com/viewcvs/trunk/release/garmono.tar.gz
# tar -xzvf garmono.tar.gz
# cd garmono

Now we just need to build Mono:

# make cygwin/build

And that is all! GARMONO will download and install all dependencies and later will download and install Mono in your ~/mono. It will also create a bash script with all environment vars needed to use Mono. To call this script just type:

# source ~/mono/bin/monoenv

You could also put this line in your .profile or .bash_profile script.

Over the next several blog entries, I will give more tips about GARMONO and how use it in Maemo and Linux environments.

Hot topic these days: Mobile applications, RIP - Offline web applications. Of course the Web2.0 guys (let me put it this way) have an agenda, but the developers tied to native environments have it as well. What to believe? There are many moving targets these days. In the last years we have seen the omnipresent web [...]

Wayfinder, the company who does the OS2008 Map application, has a couple things going on now:

First - they're giving away a laptop. The contest is in the form of a video competition on YouTube where they encourage people to "produce a short video about one of Wayfinder's mobile navigational and location solutions." Here are the rules and details. There will be five winners, including a Sony VAIO laptop worth about $1,500. That's a pretty good idea to use YouTube to hold a contest - though it seems oddly familiar.

They also started a Facebook application called LocateMate which allows you to add your friends and your location to a shared map. I can see this as handy if you're looking to meet your friends for coffee, a movie, or other outings.

I completely forgot to talk about theme maker in my last post. Yes, I finally gave into the dark side. I moved to use Nokia official template for theme maker. This is good and bad. Bad in that if you had made something on the old theme maker, you'll have to port it to the new template. Good in the sense that you'll get all the features in exactly the manner god of this device intended (nokia).



Above, you can see the first test theme that I made with the new theme maker. It's there to also test out how 'light' themes look. As you've noticed, pretty much all the current themes are very dark. So, to balance the 'turn to the dark side', here is the latest (1.2) iteration of the nuvo theme.

So, many people probably don't know what theme maker is. It's an java application for windows/osx/linux that makes a theme out of an png file. So, you open the png in gimp or photoshop, edit it out, open theme maker, specify the theme name, font size and click on make theme. Wait a minute or so and you have a .deb file of your newly created theme. Current version doesn't set the bg, but you can't have it all on day one.

If you are interested in Nuvo, dl it from here:
NuvoPearl 1.2

and for theme maker:
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/download.php/3418/ThemeMaker1.1.2.zip

When you have new themes, please put them to the maemo.org/downloads for all the world to use!

Just to show the nuvopearl a bit more, here's a screenshot of file manager. Smaller font makes it much nicer looking as well. (and usable)

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 your N800, 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

Matthew Stevens, posting on Darla Mack's blog, wrote a love letter about his N810 as an apology to his dear Thinkpad.

I do not own a laptop either. I have an Asus EeePC and a TabletKiosk eo v7110 UMPC, but no "laptop." I can see where he's coming from. Read the link. It's amusing.

I've returned to Helsinki after visiting the FOSDEM-conference in Brussels. Before anything else, I'd like to thank and compliment the organizers for creating a great conference. And not just the organizers, all the volunteers that made it another great FOSDEM. The amount of work that goes into something like this cannot be overestimated, and it all went very smooth. If anything, it was too succesful, so many people...

Anyway, I had the chance to meet a great many old friends, as well make new ones. It's fantastic to see all the free software projects that improve things all over the software stack. Kernel, console, X, web services, funky UI bling, end-user applications, embedded software,... So much combined brain power, pushing the envelope of free software.

I did a presentation (should be available soon) of our own little addition to that, the modest e-mail client. Although there was some delay (Murphy!), I was quite happy with my talk. And it was particularly interesting to talk to modest users - what do they like, what do they miss, and so on. Overall, we've been blessed with very helpful users, and with there assistance, we were able to kill quite a number of bugs which would have very hard to fix otherwise. See our resolved buglist in our bugzilla for some great examples of that.

Anyway, overall FOSDEM made me quite happy -- such a gathering of smart people and great software, promising a lot of good things for the free software future.

Note, screenshot is of the unstable, proof-of-concept GNOME desktop-version of modest, courtesy of dape.

I’m going to pick up the handheld of the year thread from TabletBlog and encourage all you N810 fans to go vote N810 at the Engadget awards.

I just got the Nokia newsletter in my inbox and it featured the N810 at buy.com for a special deal. If you were waiting for a price break, now is your chance.

Maemo Team has just released a plugin for Maemo Eclipse integration. This tool allows developers to use Eclipse IDE to develop and test Maemo applications.

This release includes:

1. maemo PC Connectivity version 0.1 (Beta)
2. maemo ESBox plugin for Eclipse IDE version 1.3.6 (Beta)
3. maemo Pluthon plugin for Eclipse IDE version 0.1.7 (Beta)

Maemo PC connectivity packages are tools and other components developer needs to install into his Internet Tablet to enable connectivity between developer PC and Internet Tablet.

Maemo ESBox plugin for Eclipse IDE integrates maemo SDK Scratchbox based development environment to the Eclipse development environment. ESBox plugin supports application developers using C, C++ or Python programming language.
Developers are able to do all their development work inside Eclipse, from starting the project using template to packaging final application into maemo installation package.

Maemo Pluthon plugin for Eclipse IDE integrates Eclipse IDE development environment to the Internet Tablet so that maemo Python developers do not need to use maemo SDK and Scratchbox as development environment. Maemo Pluthon plugin fully supports application development process with Python where developer develops and tests his Python application directly with Internet Tablet.

You can find more informations on the official plugin websites:

ESbox: http://esbox.garage.maemo.org/
PluThon: http://pluthon.garage.maemo.org/

The waiting is finally over. There is now support for phone-tethering via the PAN Bluetooth profile, which is so popular on Windows Mobile smartphones.

By "native" I mean that it's quite well built into the system and does not appear as a separate application. And you no longer need a command line or root access for making PAN connections.

After you have installed the maemo-pan add-on (sorry, only OS 2008 supported so far), you can get online with just a few simple steps:

• Go to the system preferences and add your phone in the phone settings. Do not enter the wizard for configuring the dialup settings. PAN does not use them.


• Start internet sharing on your phone. It depends on your phone how and where to do this. On Windows Mobile 5, open the Start menu and select "internet connection sharing" from there.


• Make sure that Bluetooth is enabled on your internet tablet. Now open the connection dialog and you will see that there is a new connection called "Bluetooth-PAN". Select it and you will be connected to the internet via PAN.


• When you're finished, just close the connection the usual way. Wasn't this easy? :)

Thanks go to aleksandyr for figuring out stuff and to Frantisek Dufka for writing the initial PAN connection shell script for OS 2008. Without you guys maemo-pan wouldn't have happened!

Maemo Team has just released a plugin for Maemo Eclipse integration. This tool allows developers to use Eclipse IDE to develop and test Maemo applications.

This release includes:

1. maemo PC Connectivity version 0.1 (Beta)
2. maemo ESBox plugin for Eclipse IDE version 1.3.6 (Beta)
3. maemo Pluthon plugin for Eclipse IDE version 0.1.7 (Beta)

Maemo PC connectivity packages are tools and other components developer needs to install into his Internet Tablet to enable connectivity between developer PC and Internet Tablet.

Maemo ESBox plugin for Eclipse IDE integrates maemo SDK Scratchbox based development environment to the Eclipse development environment. ESBox plugin supports application developers using C, C++ or Python programming language.
Developers are able to do all their development work inside Eclipse, from starting the project using template to packaging final application into maemo installation package.

Maemo Pluthon plugin for Eclipse IDE integrates Eclipse IDE development environment to the Internet Tablet so that maemo Python developers do not need to use maemo SDK and Scratchbox as development environment. Maemo Pluthon plugin fully supports application development process with Python where developer develops and tests his Python application directly with Internet Tablet.

You can find more informations on the official plugin websites:

ESbox: http://esbox.garage.maemo.org/
PluThon: http://pluthon.garage.maemo.org/

I’ve put up the slides from my FOSDEM ’08 talk on developing Web/GTK+ rich internet applications with WebKit and deploying them on the desktop and on mobile devices. If you were simply too hung over from the night before to get to the morning session or couldn’t make FOSDEM, be sure to check it out.

View slides (PDF format)

Demo sources

• Hosting a Dashboard widget
  • Simple example without JS integration

(Will update this post with more demo code over the next few days.)

Citations

• Slide 20:  All the cool kids are doing it (February 3rd, 2008) — donscorgie.livejournal.com
  
• Slide 30: WebKit and XULRunner (Mozilla) side by side on the XO (August 2nd, 2007) — j5live.com
• Slide 32: WebKit testing methodology for reproducible mobile benchmark performance results
• WebKit/GTK+ build instructions

I had a though the other day. A thought that if I had the time I’d code myself. I was thinking about the Nokia N800/N810. It has a camera. Ok it doesn’t have the speediest processor, but it’s not bad. My thought is this. Can we hook up some rudimentary hand gesture processing to the camera to provide simple media player functions. Moving your hand/finger up an down for volume control, moving left and right for track change? Please get in contact, I think this is possible and will be a lot of fun.

After my IUI Maemo Microb hackery the other day I started pondering making the browser lie to say it was an iPhone. More cause I wanted to hack around some with extensions and Microb than because I really find myself using iPhone sites all that often (though I will say that ShifD on the iPhone is way way more pleasing than it is on any other device).

I expected it to be no problem, there’s a Modify Headers extension for Firefox, there’s documentation about how to package an extension, there’s a working set of extensions to start from. Yet still I have failed.

Microb doesn’t support XUL, so I knew I couldn’t rely on the stuff for preferences and additional windows, etc. I just created a version of the plugin that held a static Modify user-agent rule to make the browser emit the same UA as an iPhone example I pulled from my logs. I loaded the xpi into my desktop browser, and sure enough when I restarted it was telling everyone it was as iPhone. W3wt! Used the instructions from the Microb site to package the extension, but there the browser behavior didn’t change. The extension wasn’t listed. I must be doing something wrong says me, how can I test this out?

Fast forward to some time hours later and way way into the wee hours of the morning. I’ve stripped out all the chrome, rewritten the install script, repackaged the browser extra packages to make sure things weren’t funky with my build system, pored over the adblock source, merged modify headers /components directory into adblock to get it to load that way, compared the installed files to my starting files, and attempted installing the extension by hand.

I know a hell of a lot more about Mozilla extensions than I did before, but I can’t help but feel much of it was in vain. Why do all these extensions work no problem on my desktop browser but fail to load on Microb? Is there a way I can get some kind of console or debugging info out of Microb? Should I be running Microb on my desktop when debugging these things? I would love to be able to just hack out Microb extensions on a whim. The way this worked out in my head was actually that I could have a few bits of pieces of stuff I liked to use and I could hack the extensions right on the device. Totally p1mp, I might even have to get a new velvet coat to wear while I do it if I can get it working. But my experience is running very counter to my expectation so far.

I was listening to LugRadio earlier on and the discussion about Open Source and participation by everyone. It got me thinking back to my idea for a book on open source contribution and how to get involved. Now I’m thinking about some thing both smaller and larger in scale.

How about a contributors pack? To help give something back to those considering contributing to your project. I envisage having a leaflet, which would take on the form of a generic template, stylable to your project which hold information about every aspect of the project that needs help. For example documentation, packaging, coding, bug fixing, advocacy etc.

The contributors pack could be online, or even include some paper pamphlets on request, printable via lulu for example. It would contain information about processes such as MOTU, and detail the tools people use for tasks, and where to get them, how to file a bug correctly. The possibilities are endless. I know it took me a long time to learn some processes, and the thing is, I was taking up valuable people’s time when if the right resources were available I could have just read them online, or in a leaflet. Each team in a project could have their own leaflet with contact information, processes, etc.

If you think this idea has merit, I urge you to comment here.

On another note, thanks Lugradio. Maybe my place isn’t so much a doer, as a proposer of ideas. That one’s for you Bacon.

A little secret has been let out of the bag :)

Canola2 can be run in windowed mode rather than taking over the whole screen. Whilst this may not be for everyone and its not guaranteed to be there in the final version it is indeed present in beta5.

To do this you need to drop to an xterm and type:

canola - n

Windowed mode shows nicely that the icon's can rearrange themselves to fit the available screen real-estate. Everything else that I've played around with seems to work too.

I'll be sticking with full screen mode though, why have it windowed when you can have it full screen and just switch windows with the home hardware key?

Grab it while you can. In the US and UK nokia stores you can get 15% off the listed price by entering the code found on Adam Curry's website.

Quick, grab it while you can. In the US and UK nokia stores you can get 15% off the listed price by entering the code found on Adam Curry's website.

I have found myself foster parents for Tinymail.

One of the difficult jobs of a maintainer is delegating tasks to the right people. In my opinion a good project leader is someone who motivates people by giving out responsibilities.

This is why Igalia is doing Tinymail’s 0.0.8 pre-release this time.

A while ago I wrote the “official” video transcoding for Maemo how-to based on the wiki page and some heuristics. The interesting thing here is the intelligent script that automatically finds the right parameters to use for the encoding. Some of the considerations include: As higher framerate as possible. For smooth videos. Keep aspect-ratio. So the videos don’t look [...]

Global WarmingThey say that this will be the warmest winter ever in Finland. The last record is –no it’s not from 2006 - but it is from 1924. Early days of global warming? But seriously, at the grass root level things are different now.

January ---------------- February

Back in the 70’s, I used be play ice hockey with my friends on an outside ice ring from early December to late March – even April. Now I’ve managed to take my 5 year old on the ring only once this winter. No ice. Well, today we have -5 degrees Celsius, it is kids’ winter break, and the sun is shining. I’ll post this now and then go out with my kids!

Candy Store

We’ve now dived deeper into the Trolltech stuff. Good stuff. I’m more and more understanding the great ecosystem and a partner network they have around their technology. I’m excited. Also, the guys are really nice – but then again, have you ever heard about an angry Norwegian? (yes, they are not all Norwegians but I was trying to be funny … sorry) People are extremely important -- people and relationships are far more important than lines of code. Really, even in business.

So now there are many things on my mind. We will use Trolltech technology in a range of Nokia products. That’s for sure. If the acquisition goes through, that is. I’m also very keen on finding the best balance and combination with G and Q technologies. I feel that we have a unique opportunity to act as a catalyst to even fill some chasms here? I'm like a kid in a candy store! So much candy – this is exciting!

Ads
Then something else. Two ads:

OSiM USA. I’ll be there. Come and say hi!

The Finnish Summer Code 2007 project employed five university students for the summer. Nokia’s maemo team was one of the sponsors of the students' projects. The Finnish Summer Code is organized by COSS (The Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions) and aims to help Finnish students participate in open source development.

Now it is time to apply for Summer Code 2008! We’ll sponsor it, too. So if you have nothing better to do next summer ….

A little secret has been let out of the bag :)

Canola2 can be run in windowed mode rather than taking over the whole screen. Whilst this may not be for everyone and its not guaranteed to be there in the final version it is indeed present in beta5.



To do this you need to drop to an xterm and type:

canola - n

Windowed mode shows nicely that the icon's can rearrange themselves to fit the available screen real-estate. Everything else that I've played around with seems to work too.

I'll be sticking with full screen mode though, why have it windowed when you can have it full screen and just switch windows with the home hardware key?

Nokia Internet tablets are volume produced, low power consumption devices that are designed to be enough rugged that they can last as mobile devices. Even they are designed to be used as Internet communication devices, thay are also excellent for controlling embedded devices.

This is my presentation in Fosdem 2008,Brussels  about Controlling embedded devices aith maemo Internet Tablet Fosdem_maemo_2008.pdf

Internet tablets have many advantages like price, rugged design and small power consumption compared to both PC-based or special embedded hardware based designs. They have also new challanges because they does not have so wide selection of interface options. 

Some examples of embedded controll projects using Internet tablet is Small aircraft Glass cockpit, Home Automation, Accelleration sensor interface, maemo puppy robot or Carman car data terminal. 

In N800/N810 you have basically three interface options Wlan, Bluetooth and USB. All of these optios require with some rare exeptions separate embedded processor or microcontroller to controll I/O box.

Wlan is fast and versatile but requires in practice multichip embedded controller running Linux.  Good example  is to (mis)use  Wlan routers with  Openwrt

In small series Bluettoth and microcontroller module may be more costly than wlan router.  

The USB is most practical way to expand tablet I/O capabilities. Microcontrollers with USB-device interface price start from some tens of cents to few Euros. USB-device needs something around hundred lines of the code in the microcontroller.

Two easiest ways to connect USB microcontroller to Internet tablet is to use libusb or make device emulationg USB serial converter. In N8xx musb driver has certain limitations that may need some workarounds.