Greetings from CTIA! Actually I am not at CTIA (I wish!) but, thanks to Monsoon Multimedia, I have had the opportunity to play with a preview of the newly announced HAVA Player for the Nokia N800 and N810 Internet Tablets. I have to say - I can't wait to make this a permanent fixture in my home. Before we look at the Nokia Internet Tablet HAVA player, let's get some questions out of the way.

The press release is finally posted!

Excerpt from the marketing talk:

"By delivering the kind of open Internet experience that consumers previously only expected on a desktop PC, the Nokia N810 WiMAX Edition is a compelling example of how next generation broadband wireless technology will not only change the way people think about the Internet, it will change the very nature of the Internet itself," said Ari Virtanen, Vice President of Convergence Products for Nokia.

The press release also says:

The Nokia N810 WiMAX Edition is expected to be available in the United States during the summer of 2008 in areas where WiMAX connectivity is available.

As for myself - I can't wait to see it in action. The device is now on nseries.com too. They call it N810 WME int he URL, so I'll start calling it that too.

Current Internet Tablet users have something to look forward to as well:

Also being introduced with the Nokia N810 WiMAX Edition is the newest Internet Tablet operating system. This new upgraded OS2008 introduces useful new features to the platform, including an enhanced e-mail client, support for Chinese character rendering in the browser and RSS feeds and Seamless Software Update functionality to eliminate manual software updates, making periodic updates of the operating system quick and easy. While standard on the Nokia N810 WiMAX Edition, current owners of Nokia N810 and N800 Internet Tablets with earlier operating systems will be able to upgrade their device to the revised operating system for free during the second quarter of 2008.

Hello. First of all, I’m very sorry for such a long pause in posting in this blog - I had a lot of work to do. But there are some great news: I’ve participated in two projects. And I want to tell you about one of them today :) It’s new release of one of the most [...]

There has been some movement these days regarding the people project. There was a discussion on the google group, and a couple of blog posts; Ross Burton, Federico Mena, Phillip Van Hoof, and Johann Prieur. Those discussions are too focused on old technologies. In a not too distant future some data portable web service is going [...]

I'm pleased to say that I've just released version 0.1 of Nibbles, an alternative RSS and Atom feed reader for Maemo. A big thanks to the people who were kind enough to help out with the pre-release testing, you've been (and hopefully continue to be!) a great help.

Nibbles is quite stable, can parse a wide variety of feeds and is pretty bandwidth efficient. Nibbles is finger-friendly and does aim to be a good mobile feed reader, but things like downloading of full offline articles didn't make it into this initial release (I have some working code for that, but it's not working enough!). New users might want to know that the zoom in/out hardware buttons hide and show the feed and article lists.

Of course, since this is a first release, things aren't perfect. The biggest problem for me that I think people should be aware of is that Nibbles uses too much battery power. This is detailed in bug #2342 and is really a problem with ruby-gtk2 rather than Nibbles. As I said, with some luck, the next ruby-gtk2 release will fix this.

You can install Nibbles from the project page.

The last poll asked:
If the tablets could be 100% reliable, faster, and more functional using up to 30% closed source components...

You answered:
It's a good thing. The tablets are awesome and they need better software. 58 (21%) It's a good thing ONLY if it doesn't impact 3rd party development. 130 (48%) It's a bad thing. The tablets were born and raised on open source. 39 (14%) It's already bad. The tablets should be 100% open. 68 (25%)

My secret motive of that post: I wanted to see how Internet Tablet users would react to Internet Tablet competitors. It's clear from developer commentary that the tablets themselves will be "as open as possible" even if they offer closed source software like Skype, Rhapsody, Canola, and more. 39% of you resist closed-source software, 48% don't mind it as long as it doesn't interfere with 3rd party apps, and 21% of you want it to "just work." More portable internet devices are trying to enter the marketplace and it'd be interesting to see how people stand on this issue. If you have a tech blog of your own that is NOT centered around the Internet Tablets, you may be interested in the results from the same poll. Let me know if you post it.

As usual, I won't draw conclusions from this poll. I'll leave it up as a topic for conversation.

This week's poll: Which Web 2.0 and/or social networking sites do you post to?

• Twitter
• Jaiku
• Facebook
• MySpace
• YouTube
  
• Ovi
• Blogs
• Flickr
• Picasa
• Wikipedia
  
• Other
• None
  

This is just a curiosity thing for me. I want to know where my readers make content of their own. As usual, visit http://tabletblog.com/ directly to vote. Thanks!

I have made an installable package for Maemo Sync, but do not expect too much. Its a basic port of the current Multisync-gui to Maemo. It is only tested to so far that the GUI starts up and registeres correctly. The fact that I had to use cmake for building Maemo software caused some headaches here… the quality of the source distribution package is still quite bad.

I also did not decide if I want it to become a project forked from Multisync-gui or to maintained with Multisync-gui adding optional support for Maemo environment. The always changing OpenSync API would be a reason to stay with Multisync-gui, but the fact that I have different opinions about UI design, Glade is involved and cmake are reasons for making it a separate project.

Binary package and sources are located here. You also need the OpenSync packages from Graham’s daily repository.

Another minor improvement of the GPE application packages in this repository is that latest Starling supports OGG playback. You only need to have an OGG plugin for GStreamer installed. The mogg package provides this for example.

Any feedback is welcome – if you manage to sync data with either the command line tool msynctool or using Maemo Sync please drop me a line. I would like to collect information which sync peers work with latest OpenSync and how to set up these.

Enjoy!

I was somewhat curious how the new Wordpress 2.5 admin interface would play with the browser on the N810 so I spent a little time poking around. Even though the new interface seems to be a lot more squishy than the previous version, it actually seems to work a bit smoother on the device. I like Maemo Wordpy as well, but it’s nice to be able to go in and do stuff like make sure a sudden spam surge hasn’t completely overrun my comments when I’m on the go.

While I was in a testing mood I poked around with some of the Google apps as well. The search, calendar, maps, and mail apps (as well as a few others) have bookmarks loaded into the browser by default. But I wanted to play around with the reader and the iGoogle homepage. The reader worked pretty much as I expected it to. The fact that it worked at all was great, but it was a bit slow and some screen elements overlapped each other. The kind of thing that might benefit from a bit of Greasemonkey hackery.

What I was relatively surprised by however was the iGoogle version of the homepage. All the controls worked well, even dragging around modules to change the layout. The layout is dense and efficient, I can add calendar and gmail apps in there. I added a weather app in there and then was about to pull it back out cause I already have OMWeather on the desktop of the device. But then I realized iGoogle is actually a better homescreen for the N810 than the device native applet based homescreen is.

When using the RSS reader applet on the N810 the only option is to put a blended list of every item from all feeds I’m subscribed to. No way to pick and choose and select just individual feeds or a single feed to display. The font is ridiculously large and the only options for reading are punching out to either web or RSS app, no expand in place. The same goes for the email app built into the device, just overly simplistic and at the same time fragile when compared to the other apps like Claws mail (but AFAIK Claws doesn’t have an applet to go along with it). Compare that to iGoogle configured similarly. The information density is much higher, configuration options a lot richer and more flexible, and there are just more options there for existing widgets. It’s an excellent example of rising browser capability allowing online applications to displace native apps, even when those native apps have direct operating system level support on a mobile device.

I was somewhat curious how the new WordPress 2.5 admin interface would play with the browser on the N810 so I spent a little time poking around. Even though the new interface seems to be a lot more squishy than the previous version, it actually seems to work a bit smoother on the device. I like Maemo Wordpy as well, but it’s nice to be able to go in and do stuff like make sure a sudden spam surge hasn’t completely overrun my comments when I’m on the go.

While I was in a testing mood I poked around with some of the Google apps as well. The search, calendar, maps, and mail apps (as well as a few others) have bookmarks loaded into the browser by default. But I wanted to play around with the reader and the iGoogle homepage. The reader worked pretty much as I expected it to. The fact that it worked at all was great, but it was a bit slow and some screen elements overlapped each other. The kind of thing that might benefit from a bit of Greasemonkey hackery.

What I was relatively surprised by however was the iGoogle version of the homepage. All the controls worked well, even dragging around modules to change the layout. The layout is dense and efficient, I can add calendar and gmail apps in there. I added a weather app in there and then was about to pull it back out cause I already have OMWeather on the desktop of the device. But then I realized iGoogle is actually a better homescreen for the N810 than the device native applet based homescreen is.

When using the RSS reader applet on the N810 the only option is to put a blended list of every item from all feeds I’m subscribed to. No way to pick and choose and select just individual feeds or a single feed to display. The font is ridiculously large and the only options for reading are punching out to either web or RSS app, no expand in place. The same goes for the email app built into the device, just overly simplistic and at the same time fragile when compared to the other apps like Claws mail (but AFAIK Claws doesn’t have an applet to go along with it). Compare that to iGoogle configured similarly. The information density is much higher, configuration options a lot richer and more flexible, and there are just more options there for existing widgets. It’s an excellent example of rising browser capability allowing online applications to displace native apps, even when those native apps have direct operating system level support on a mobile device.

Thanks to my trusty Nokia N810 Internet Tablet (and, Mr. The Frog, of course), Josiah was occupied while flying this past week…

For those of you who still don’t consider the Internet Tablets as worthwhile PMPs, you should think again. Find someone with Canola installed and play around with it for a while. I know you’ll be impressed.

The video you see in this picture went from DVD to Handbrake (Mac) to N810 without a hitch. The playback was flawless and the N810 kept its charge for much more than the three hour flight to and from California (almost two whole movies and a bunch of music listening).

The Enlightenment Project DR17, the project known by non releasing any official packages, has now released their first library as “alpha”: EET.

README says:

Eet is a tiny library designed to write an arbitary set of chunks of
data to a file and optionally compress each chunk (very much like a
zip file) and allow fast random-access reading of the file later
on. It does not do zip as a zip itself has more complexity than is
needed, and it was much simpler to implement this once here.

It also can encode and decode data structures in memory, as well as
image data for saving to eet files or sending across the network to
other machines, or just writing to arbitary files on the system. All
data is encoded in a platform independant way and can be written and
read by any architecture.

This library is very stable already, with almost no change in the last years, the last addition was the “inlined strings” that are kept in their own read-only section, so you get them mmap()ed on load.

It’s the core of E17, being used to handle configuration data and Edje themes (includes images, scripts and regular data). What I find great about it is the easy- to use struct serializer/parser that you can use to save and load structured data, including lists and hash tables. And it is almost dependency-free, just: libc, libz, libm and libjpeg.

If you are a packager of some distro, or you know some, please package it. If you find out any problems, let them know, but it should be very straightforward, with Ebuild, RPM and DEB packages already available from some sites.

Funny fact: enlightenment is the project ID “2″ at sourceforge.net, the sourceforge.net project itself is the number “1″

Thanks to my new friends at Monsoon Multimedia and following my coverage of the HAVA Internet Tablet client, I got to borrow a HAVA Titanium HD unit to experience the set-up, interface, and interoperability with the tablet and PC clients. While I did have some difficulty with the initial configuration, I couldn't help but be impressed at every turn. Here's the video of the experience:
>

Now that CTIA is over and the Nokia Internet Tablets have the trifecta of device options, it is time to go after the "Average Joe Consumer." There's no time to become complacent.

Today I was thinking...that wow! After the cool video tutorial at Internet Tablet School, Xournal made a second strike and this time on the OS2008 User Site (the old "tableteer", reachable only from a Nokia Internet Tablet).Indeed, the description is not correct. I am not the developer of Xournal, but there are four developers behind it and I am not among them.I only did the port to the Maemo

Are you going to LinuxTag this year? Berlin, end of May. Who would you like us to invite to discuss about maemo stuff [EDITED: on Thursday 29th]?

The fine people over at WOM World recently sent me a Nokia N95 8GB (just on loan for two weeks so that I could check it out). The N95 GB is a nearly $700-$800 cell phone, depending on whether you get it with a plan or not. (Ok, ok. Are you breathing again?) But, for $800, you don’t just get a phone… The N95 8GB has 8GB of internal memory, 128MB RAM, a 5-megapixel camera that can take stills or record video (with a flash, zoom, and a whole bunch of “manual” features), video call capability, an FM radio receiver, GPS, support for a variety of audio codecs, Java and Flash support, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, infrared, A/V output, and more…

I’ve only just opened the package, so I’m not going to post a full review right now. My first impression is that the N95 8GB seems to be pretty slick. Aside from a slightly brickish form-factor, the user-interface is pretty intuitive and (for a cell phone) the buttons are all easily accessible and feel pretty responsive. The slider aspect of the phone (to access the number/text pad — slide up — or the media player controls — slide down) seems a fragile, but honestly, I’m not sure how many people have handled this phone before me.

With the advent of Apple‘s iPhone, I wonder why companies continue to make all-in-one phones with limited internal memory, no touchscreen capabilities, and without additional memory card slots. Still, the N95 8GB is a small, easy-to-pocket phone and media player with a bunch of features. While I haven’t dived into all of the functionality yet, it looks very promising. I’m really looking forward to seeing how well it connects with and accentuates my N810.

Thanks to work done by Jiri Benc in his “ukeyboard” alternative control panel for language and regional settings I am able to present Polish layout for N810 hardware keyboard.

Polish chars are on Chr+ (where is one of “acelnosxz”).

Also few other combinations are added:

Fn+Space = |
Chr+Space = Tab
Chr+j = [
Chr+k = ]

Original functions of “Chr” key were dropped — there is no small on screen keyboard after single press of “Chr” and no option to enter other national chars (like “öïüõôōő” etc).

Click here to simple install.

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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. Messing with keyboard on Maemo platform
2. Localizing Maemo
3. 770 — what to do with it?

The Nokia Internet Tablets include a handy “Internet Search Applet” on the desktop / home screen. By factory default, this applet includes Google and Wikipedia search. However, the list of search engines can easily be expanded through plugins.

I’ve put this feature together with a Google CSE (Custom Search Engine) defined and maintained by myself to create tabletSearch, the “perfect” search plugin for anything Nokia Internet Tablet and Maemo related. It includes searches on maemo.org, internettabletttalk.com and more.

You can download the plugin from this webpage that I created for the MIS plugins, making them hopefully easier to find and install for the average user. Go there to get tabletSearch and more (Amazon, Googlemaps, IMDB…).

When I said a few weeks ago that an important announcement would be made about the future of Epiphany some people told me it was really obvious what was coming. Seeing the reaction of some to the now public announcement, it seems there’s still some room for disbelief. Maybe the date didn’t help too much, but hey, the whole point of April the 1st is to make you doubt. If all the news are obviously false it’s not really that much fun.

So, yes:

• Starting from now Epiphany trunk is WebKit only, and we’ll slowly get rid of the abstraction layer.
• We aim to release an usable browser for 2.24, but if we can’t make it the 2.22 branch will be released instead. The 2.22 branch will be maintained as long as it’s needed.
• We have started (thanks Diego!) a TODO list for the WebKit backend. I’ll try to work more on this in the coming days.
• Help, as usual, is welcome!

I should have blogged about this before, but I spent the whole week abroad working on some world domination stuff. Should blog about that soon too… (guys, nudge nudge, wake up).

My last post (in which I proclaim the Nokia Internet Tablets unprepared for mass consumer appeal) got a lot of attention and great reader response.

The Blinking Light

The N800 and N810 internet tablets have a bright light built into their top left corner (on the N810 it's at the very edge of the corner, on the N800 it's under the direction pad).

This light can be made to blink during certain events. One of the most useful events is when the tablet is switched on but the screen is off, because the blinking light helps you find the tablet in a dark room.

Others find this light very annoying and wish they could switch it off!

Fortunately this tutorial tells you how to switch it on and off. It's very very very very very easy, you just have to know where to look.


How to switch the tablet "night light" on or off

1. Click on the sun icon in the status bar at the top.

2. Select "Display Settings".

3. Click on LEDs.

4. Tick the "Device On" box if you want to switch on the night light, untick it if you want to switch it off.

5. Click on OK.

That's it!


Getting the light to blink on other occasions

You'll notice from the LEDs menu mentioned above that there are many other opportunities for the light to blink.

However, these will only work if you are using the built-in applications which came with the tablet. For example you can only get the light to blink on new e-mail if you're using the tablet's own E-mail application.

If you are using the built-in apps, simply tick the boxes on the LEDs menu that you want to activate and click OK. To deactivate them just untick them and click OK.


Does the blinking light use much battery life?

No, not very much. It only flashes very briefly and it's just a small LED.

Got this finally working. Too bad it is almost useless now, we needed it years ago ;-) What is tearsync? It is feature of omapfb driver that allows video playback without tearing effect. This feature is enabled in N8x0 kernel but never was part of Nokia 770 2.6.16 kernel shipped with any firmware. Luckily when first N800 2.6.18 kernel was released there was tearsync support added also in drivers for 770! All that was needed was to backport it to 2.6.16 kernel, right? Well, no. I did but it didn't work.

Only recently I've seen some strange issues with N800's MMC slot when going back to OS2007 and become aware of 'pin multiplexing' issue. Many pins of OMAP chip can be configured in software to have specific signal routed to it and this setting is done in bootloader. So maybe TE pin was simply not enabled? Too bad that any recent OMAP1 datasheet I could find had SoSSI documentation missing. Then I found in Google cache this text "revision D changes: ... removed all references to: ... Specially Optimized Screen Interface (SoSSI) ... deleted SoSSI function from the signal names with the following ball numbers ...". So after additional bit of googling (thanks Serge) and figuring out what all this means the answer is "ball G20, register 4, value 6, offset 6".

Funny thing, after setting G20 pin muxing correctly, the one year old code now magically works with no other change :-) If you still care for 770, you can get the kernel from Mplayer ITT thread here.

Really exciting news!! This wiki page on eLinux.org describes with details the instructions for running Google's Android on OMAP based platforms, such as the Nokia Internet Tablets. There are also threads on Android Internals and Linux OMAP mailing lists.

Some pictures taken from the wiki page:

Someone told me some years ago:

After the GPS enabled web applicationI created seemed to work in theory it arrived the time to test it in practice.

I decided to GPS mark all of the floating bars along the

Tarumã Açu (which is the first 'tributary' after leaving Manaus).

This is probably not so useful really as floating bars, well, float around the river basically but it is like most enjoyable things in life: good while it lasts.

I rounded up the usual suspects

prepared the technology

and off we set in Clives' amazing GPS

enabled boat, plotting bars

as we went.

We had an encounter along the way with a huge peacock bass

which are great sport fish and fight like ninja's when you hook one.
Memories are unfortunately somewhat hazy after this so here are the waypoints in text and gdb formats.

Maguires Guesthouse and Amazon Trekkers if you are up for it

midgard_dbus API is very simple, but my approach was to make it just simple as possible. Basically we have two major methods of midgard_dbus:

• constructor, which registers object at path
• send, which asynchronously send message to object at given path

New initialized object doesn't do anything special. It just waits for any call to him and then emits "notified" signal, which you can connect callback to.

I tested simple code with midgard-php and midgard-python.

midgard_python "service":

import dbus.mainloop.glib
import _midgard as midgard

def mbus_callback(object, arg):
        print "Hi! I am midgard_dbus from midgard-python. I got message:"
        print object.get_message()

mbus = midgard.dbus("/midgard_article")
mbus.connect("notified", mbus_callback, "foo")

mainloop = gobject.MainLoop()
mainloop.run()

midgard-php "client":

$message = "Greetings from midgard-php!(" . mgd_version() . ") PHP ver." . phpversion();
midgard_dbus::send("/midgard_article", $message);

I started php script which immidietialy ended, and on midgard-python service's terminal I got this message:

Hi! I am midgard_dbus from midgard-python. I got message:
Greetings from midgard-php! (2.0alpha0) PHP ver.5.2.5-3

Probably the code will be soon ported to 1-9 branch, so I will be able to test midgard_dbus in Apache environment. But for now, basic idea looks fine and works fine. We just notify objects at path with particular message, and local proccess does the rest with connected callbacks.

For those of you interested in non-Nokia Linux tablets, I clear up some of the confusion on "What is Moblin?" and "What is Ubuntu Mobile?" over on UltraMobileGeek.com. Have a look!

Yes, the news of Android running on the Nokia N810 did not escape me - but I am trying to get a build working for myself over here before I blog about it in depth. Be patient - I am working on it!

Iterators

The first release of GUPnP A/V is now available. GUPnP A/V is a small utility library that aims to ease the handling and implementation of UPnP A/V profiles.

GUPnP A/V is free software released under the GNU LGPL.

This release features AV Control Point, a simple media player UI that enables one to discover and play multimedia contents available on a network. Hopefully a useful tool to test and debug UPnP MediaServer and MediaRenderer implementations. [Zeeshan Ali]

Other changes in this release:

- Desktop file for each tool. [Ross Burton, Zeeshan Ali]
- New Icons. [Vinicius Depizzol]
- Various misc improvements and fixes. [Zeeshan Ali]

Download from http://gupnp.org/sources/gupnp-tools/gupnp-tools-0.3.tar.gz

Here is a screenshot of GUPnP AV CP in action:

If you have recently seen a post by the name "Back to Hel(sinki)", from me, please ignore that. It's just just blogger.com (or is it p.g.o?) punishing me for adding tags to a two week old post. :(

PyCon2 is the second edition of the Italian Python Conference and will take place on May 9/10/11, 2008 in Florence.

The conference is organized by Python Italia and more than 300 developers, students and researchers will be present for three days of tutorials and other important events.

PyCon 2008 edition will be opened by Richard Stallman with a keynote on Free Software and Free Ethics. Other famous developers will be presento too: Alex Martelli, Samuele Pedroni, Brian Fitzpatrick and many other.

I'll partecipate at the conference as speaker on May 10, with a talk on "PyMaemo: Python for Nokia Internet Tablets". In particular I'll talk about Maemo platform, Maemo SDK (how to install and configure it) and I'll explain how to use the two Eclipse plugins ESBox and Pluthon.

If you want to give me any suggestion or idea for this talk, please leave me a comment on this post, so I'll integrate it with my slides.

PyCon2 is the second edition of the Italian Python Conference and will take place on May 9/10/11, 2008 in Florence.

The conference is organized by Python Italia and more than 300 developers, students and researchers will be present for three days of tutorials and other important events.

PyCon 2008 edition will be opened by Richard Stallman with a keynote on Free Software and Free Ethics. Other famous developers will be presento too: Alex Martelli, Samuele Pedroni, Brian Fitzpatrick and many other.

I'll partecipate at the conference as speaker on May 10, with a talk on "PyMaemo: Python for Nokia Internet Tablets". In particular I'll talk about Maemo platform, Maemo SDK (how to install and configure it) and I'll explain how to use the two Eclipse plugins ESBox and Pluthon.

If you want to give me any suggestion or idea for this talk, please leave me a comment on this post, so I'll integrate it with my slides.

Inspired by some screenshots that came through my feed reader the other day, I updated the firmware on my N810 and installed a few new bits of hackery:

Those are transparent homescreen apps, and more important than looking slick (if that’s possible) they’re written in python! Homescreen hackery here I come!

Getting the packages installed is a bit of a pain. They don’t one click install unless you install two packages by hand. I had to download python-hildondesktop and hildon-desktop-python loader from this site in order to be able to install and use them. And yes, download and install manually, the app installer doesn’t like them. Download them to your tablet somewhere, become root (I do that with an ssh to localhost myself), and run dpkg -i for both of them. Then you’ll be able to install the actual applets and enable them. w00t!

Inspired by some screenshots that came through my feed reader the other day, I updated the firmware on my N810 and installed a few new bits of hackery:

Those are transparent homescreen apps, and more important than looking slick (if that’s possible) they’re written in python! Homescreen hackery here I come!

Getting the packages installed is a bit of a pain. They don’t one click install unless you install two packages by hand. I had to download python-hildondesktop and hildon-desktop-python loader from this site in order to be able to install and use them. And yes, download and install manually, the app installer doesn’t like them. Download them to your tablet somewhere, become root (I do that with an ssh to localhost myself), and run dpkg -i for both of them. Then you’ll be able to install the actual applets and enable them. w00t!

I was on vacation traveling through Portugal for 10 days and I took my Nokia N810 with me to do email and to have something to browse the web (weather info etc). I must say it was super both the vacation and the N810 as a traveling device. Reading email or checking the web while having a coffee. We had free WiFi at all most every place we visited so I could use my N810 for Twitter (don't ask it is a private stream) to tell some stories directly from the vacation. One of the best things ever, we only needed one battery charger for three devices (we only had Nokia devices with us).

I already take the N810 every place I go while at home but now I'll take it on vacation too :-)

Three months ago I wrote post about situation of my Nokia 770 tablet. Today I looked how situation looks with non-Maemo systems.

Flashed recent Poky Linux build. Device booted into nice Sato desktop which I am familiar with. As it was expected — no WiFi support in base system. Why? Licensing problem.

Nokia tablets WiFi stack in implemented by:

• firmware loaded to the chip at runtime (when interface is brought up)
• closed source wi-fi stack in module umac.ko
• open source glue layer cx3110x which forwards packets between firmware and umac.ko over SPI and implements support for linux wireless extensions API.

We also use 2.6.18 kernel from OS2007 instead of 2.6.16.27 from OS2006. With some hacking on “umac.ko” module from 2.6.16.27 + patching “cx3110x” driver I got module which loads on my device. But then other problem appeared — WPA Supplicant is unable to connect to WiFi interface due to lack of wireless extensions support. And Nokia implementation is closed source :(

On IRC I got information that there is a patch which adds WE18 support into cx3110x driver. Fetched, applied but situation is the same:

[ 7206.999359] umac: module license 'Proprietary' taints kernel.
[ 7210.030334] CX3110x chip variant: STLC4370
[ 7210.319458] CX3110x: firmware version: 2.13.0.0.a.13.14
[ 7210.319580] Loaded CX3110x driver, version 0.8
root@nokia770:~# wpa_supplicant -Dwext -iwlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
ioctl[SIOCSIWPMKSA]: No such device

and then reboot :(

So it looks like my 770 will get Maemo OS2006 again and will end it’s life as console for simple games + music player. Too bad that it hard to make it work with other systems.

BTW: I wonder why Maemo.org forbids GoogleBot… It is really hard to find Maemo related things with Google :(

UPDATE: Niels Breet (X-Fade on #maemo) pointed me to maemo webdevs discussion which clarify that GoogleBot index Maemo websites. My fault — sorry guys. It is hard to find current informations in wiki but there are plans to move to MediaWiki and reorganize content.

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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. End of support for Nokia770?
2. Localizing Maemo
3. Bug Labs and their BUG device

Yeah… After some months using monotone repository, Mamona team decided to migrate to git. Reasons? Performance: Some things that you can do while mtn works.. ‘mtn status’: you can check irc messages ‘mtn update’: take some coffee ‘mtn pull’: make the coffee Monotone ‘propagate’ issues: If your branch starts to become very different from the [...]

We invited mickey (Michael Lauer) from OpenMoko to present about OpenEmbedded project at OpenBossa conference. Thanks for the nice presentation! After the conference, mickey came to INdT to take a look in Mamona patches to OE (mainly EFL and Pyhton-EFL). We worked two days together to merge all stuff. All differences were merged and Vivi [...]

Few days ago Nokia N800 tablet emulation was released into public. Richard integrated it into Poky so now we have QEMU which can be used not only to test ARM images on ARM Versatile or Sharp Zaurus but also to run on Nokia N800 tablet. Of course it is not limited to Poky images — Maemo boots very nicely on it :)

Poky

Booting Poky is easy: runqemu nokia800 after building of “poky-image-sato” for “nokia800″ machine. After few minutes (needed to create NAND Flash image and boot into JFFS2 rootfs) Poky desktop appears:

Maemo

Booting Maemo takes few steps more now (will be improved).

1. Edit “scripts/poky-qemu-internal” script and in line 154 change KERNELCMDLINE to boot from “/dev/mtdblock3″ instead of “/dev/mtdblock4″ as Poky do not use Maemo’s “initfs”.
2. Get copy of “config” flash partition from N8×0 — simple “cat /dev/mtd1ro > config.mtd” is enough. Bad news: it does not work :( And the one which works for me is not distributable as it does not came from device but was pre-generated somehow.
3. Transfer it to the desktop.
4. Grab OS2008 firmware image from Maemo website.
5. Unpack firmware image to get kernel and images of “initfs” and “rootfs”.
6. Use poky-nokia800-flashutil to generate NAND Flash image:

poky-nokia800-flashutil initfs.jffs2 maemo-image.qemuflash initfs
poky-nokia800-flashutil config.mtd   maemo-image.qemuflash config
poky-nokia800-flashutil rootfs.jffs2 maemo-image.qemuflash rootfs

Then “touch maemo-image” and run one command: poky-qemu zImage maemo-image to boot it.

Status

Basic emulation works. There is no networking yet, DSP code is not emulated and few other limitations. But it is work in progress so expect improvements.

How to get it

Patch alone can be fetched from Poky repository.

Linux binaries of QEMU with N800 support can be built with Poky by bitbake qemu-sdk command. They will be also part of Poky Linux SDK — nightly builds are available on Poky website.

UPDATE: poky-nokia800-flashutil instructions are fixed (thx to Yasser)

UPDATE: there is second part of that story.

---

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Related posts:

1. Nokia N8×0 emulation part II
2. Resolving ‘Power on drama’
3. End of support for Nokia770?

I've been using my N810 as sort of an universal communicator for a while now, and for this it has generally served well. The only thing I really miss is Skype video calls.

But other than that, I haven't been using the tablet too much. In real-world usage I've found the browser way too unresponsive, and the RSS reader too limited. But now, thanks to two very promising projects the tablet is becoming fun again:

Fennec is the mobile version of the Firefox browser with heavy performance optimizations (install):

Numpty Physics is a maemo port of the awesome Crayon Physics puzzle game where you draw objects and play laws of physics to get a ball moving to the end of a track (download):

Good stuff!

Technorati Tags: maemo, n810, fennec

Imagine a big aquarium and inside it computer programmers, challenges and prizes instead of fishes. This is how the FISL Programming Arena looks like.

Since OpenSync switched to CMake build system I had to get along with CMake in the Maemo SDK. I have to admit the fun was limited. In fact CMake has some advantages over autotools – most notably: It is much faster. One major drawback is that it is more complicated to use pkg-config with it.

I have never worked with CMake before, but OpenSync had some quite good examples how to check and support additional libraries. So I hacked cmake support for some basic Maemo components (libhildon, libosso) and Maemo-like Debian packages.

My cmake files can be found here:

http://www.kernelconcepts.de/~fuchs/maemo/

CMake itself is in the official extras-devel repository at maemo.org. Just add this line to your sources.list:

deb http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel chinook free


The package is available for all other SDKs from the same location.

The DpkgDeb.cmake file is based on the updated DpkgDeb.cmake by Mehdi Rabah. The other ones are based on random files found in OpenSync SVN.

I was mulling some of the geo hacks for the N810 that are out there now. Maemo Mapper is a great open source mapping application, there’s a little app that geocodes photos as well. Then there’s Maemo WordPy for posting to Wordpress, and I was wondering if that allowed for geocoding posts. And I was pondering the user of the N810 as a geocontent production device. As well as wondering if the geoaware primitives we could use in mobile browsers would at all be helped by the evolving state of mobile Firefox.

All the little hacks on the N810 could really be solved more easily on the web if there were a way to hook the stuff together. What I started thinking about was hacking around with the new firefox release and see if I could get it to shove geoinfo into the outgoing headers. But then I realized most of the stuff I wanted to fool around with wouldn’t take the headers in anyway. So for now instead I made just a simple little python launcher app that pulls your current location from the GPS and launches a browser with Google Maps pointed at your current location. Very simple, but I imagine with some basic URL crafting you can use it to create geocoded Wordpress posts or geotag images uploaded to flickr. Maybe I can make it a little homescreen applet to display your location and launch one of a number of sites with your location fed in.

Thinking about the way the web facing geographic services have worked out, passing a URL with the location filled in seems to make more sense right now. There was a geo-headers ietf draft floating around at one point.. but I can’t find that as an official version. Are there services out there that use it? Or something else that’s common across services?

I was mulling some of the geo hacks for the N810 that are out there now. Maemo Mapper is a great open source mapping application, there’s a little app that geocodes photos as well. Then there’s Maemo WordPy for posting to WordPress, and I was wondering if that allowed for geocoding posts. And I was pondering the user of the N810 as a geocontent production device. As well as wondering if the geoaware primitives we could use in mobile browsers would at all be helped by the evolving state of mobile Firefox.

All the little hacks on the N810 could really be solved more easily on the web if there were a way to hook the stuff together. What I started thinking about was hacking around with the new firefox release and see if I could get it to shove geoinfo into the outgoing headers. But then I realized most of the stuff I wanted to fool around with wouldn’t take the headers in anyway. So for now instead I made just a simple little python launcher app that pulls your current location from the GPS and launches a browser with Google Maps pointed at your current location. Very simple, but I imagine with some basic URL crafting you can use it to create geocoded WordPress posts or geotag images uploaded to flickr. Maybe I can make it a little homescreen applet to display your location and launch one of a number of sites with your location fed in.

Thinking about the way the web facing geographic services have worked out, passing a URL with the location filled in seems to make more sense right now. There was a geo-headers ietf draft floating around at one point.. but I can’t find that as an official version. Are there services out there that use it? Or something else that’s common across services?

Soon after I announced the release of gupnp-tools/av, someone pointed out that libsoup-2.4 is already out and therefore gssdp and gupnp needs to be ported to the new API. I am already done with the porting of gssdp and most of the gupnp (thanks to Dan Winship for being so helpful) but then came the shock: the SOAP support has suddenly been dropped from libsoup. I blamed my ignorance on me not being subscribed to libsoup ML so I started to dig into the archives but failed to find any mention of this change.

I know how to solve this issue and I am sure Dan will help me out in this one as well but IMO APIs should be deprecated first and then removed in the next major release.

My last blog entry reminds me of what my bank (Sampo bank) recently did. They were recently bought by a Danish bank and as part of the integration process, the e-banking system of Sampo was replaced by a stupid system that Danish bank had been using. The biggest problem with it is that it doesn't work on every machine, not even all i386 running windows. The result was that a large number of customers moved there money to other banks. Fortunately for me their system do work on this Linux laptop I am using to write this blog entry but my 64-bit desktop is another story. :( According to Riku Voipio, the problem is that they are using some 'native code' in their JAVA applet, now how pathetic is that. These kinds of things happen when a bunch of no good managers with no (or not enough) technical knowledge make decisions about technology behind closed doors.

To add to my agony, their cross-border money transfer has some problems too and if I knew that I would never have used bank-to-bank transfer as the method to send money to my mother for her chemotherapy. I had to call my ex-boss to talk to his friend who works in the destination bank and he just told us that the Bank's branch number/name wasn't conveyed to them.

Whe had a nice chat on the #maemo irc. It started by trying to define how a maemo hacker should
perform presentations at linuxtag. Because the obvious answer is called "noBounds" we started brainstorming
about the other possibilities. many possibilities involve having a "real" server and controlling
the real server using the nokia. This can be done using web 2.0 or vnc. an other alternative is using the tablet as mass-storage device but of course that is not sexy!.

We did not find the the answer , but we did came up with some nice ideas of what could be a nice goal for LinuxTag or a reason for gathering. I mean what is the point of see each other if you don't have a common goal!

Here are some ideas:

• Create a 4 times HD big wall of nokias
  
  • That is 10*9 devices
• Create a scroller using different tablets
• Allow people to use a tablet to draw on screen
• Create 3d images using images captured using tablets
  
  • Have the tablet create a sound chain reaction
  • record and playback
• Create a messhed network
• Use BT to show you are wearing a device
  
  • Broadcast your name
  • Play war, don't get beeped

As in the last year, some people in our company have just started to play around with their Neo’s and Nokia Internet Tablets to get some cool robots for Linuxtag running. In the last year, we had a booth with N800-controlled robots as showcase for Jalimo, our Java platform.


Beyond the platform showcase, people got so much fun with their robot ideas, that they have started the freedroidz project, just to play around with this nice toys. So, feel free to play with us, either now, or at Linuxtag – only six weeks left!

I finally managed to get to work on MMPC after quite some time. MMPC 0.1 was 2007-11-14 08:45 (wow, that was pretty early in morning :-))

Well, mmpc-0.2.1 is available for immediate consumption. Changes, which were major concerns until now, are:

• New buttons and images, finally. And a new logo you can see above.
• Add tap-and-hold functionality to more places. For example, it’s now possible to update the database from within the client.
• Add scroll windows to all preference tabs to display the full content.
• Bold the currently played track.
• Increase connection timeout to 3 seconds. This will hopefully solve the strange disconnect issues I wasn’t able to reproduce.
• Fixed tree browsing in playlist browser.

Fresh screenshots can be found here. Packages are available from the extras repository. So most people will get the update automatically (if anything goes wrong, try to enable red pill mode). Otherwise, grab them from garage.

Next things will include the support for some plugins. Please report any problems. Happy listening!

So, I’ll be joining LiTL together with some familiar faces and jobi. Can’t go much into detail what we’ll be doing, see the jobs page for info, but it’s going to be cool. I’m litl excited.

Since leaving Nokia I’ve had the pleasure of meeting the team and hunting an apartment in London (still can’t quite believe the prices!) Found myself a nice-ish place in Fulham where I’ll be moving this week. My mobile number will cease to function, send me a note if you want my new number.

The bureaucracy involved with moving to a different country is interesting. Fortunately as EU citizen I don’t need a visa, or basically any permit or notification to move to another country in EU, but the dead tree mess is still annoying. Basically in order to get a bank account you need a UK address, in order to get an address you need a UK bank account. Fortunately relocation agency was able to help there somewhat, though not with the 18 page lease I had to print and scan.

But still, I couldn’t get phone line activated as BT can only handle local VISA… weird, need to get some local to pay initial deposit. And you can’t even order any reasonably priced Internet connection without a phone line. I’m already feeling disabled for the lack of Internet.

Anyway, this is going to be an exciting year.

Let’s play by the rules:

Who? Havoc and some other guys. And myself. And some other people without a blog (hello jobi).

What? I’m joining LiTL.

Where? Ye Olde London Town.

When? Next week, actually.

Why? To do The Right Thing. Or maybe it was the other way around? For the details you’ll have to wait, but I hope it’ll be worth it; or better yet, you could join the company

P.S: ¡Feliz Día!

This is a bit old news. We announced the WIMAX version on the N810 in CTIA already 2 weeks ago. And we received a CTIA WIRELESS 2008® E-TECH AWARD for the best Fashion & Lifestyle Product.

Wow, I feel pretty fashionable now!

We are also making progress with some longer term plans and thoughts. We plan to make the maemo platform even more powerful and extend its capabilities further. In addition to GTK+, we intend to provide a Qt-based application development environment to the maemo platform. We will therefore hire people with knowledge of GTK+/C and/or Qt/C++.

I’ll keep you posted. Take a look at the Nokia jobs and the maemo.org, too.

You guys remember TMut? It’s an E-mail client for small screens that uses Tinymail. It serves as an actual E-mail client, as some code that you can use to peek at while developing your E-mail client and as a piece of code where you can derive your stuff from (although TMut’s current build is not set up to build TMut’s classes into a library, you could easily do this and then subclass TMut’s high level components).

What makes TMut unusable for non-software developers is that it has no account management. You need to do that in for example GConf (depending on what implementation of TnyAccountStore your TMut uses).

At Modest we need to test Tinymail’s account management capabilities without executing all of the extra code involved in what Modest does whenever you manage its accounts. Therefore I started putting in place some code to have basic account management in TMut.

It’s, as usual with the things that I blog about, unfinished.

A while ago I found out that it was possible to charge my N810 via USB connected to a regular PC. This can be very convenient if you don't have a socket available for a charger.

The Nokia N810 has the ability to be a USB host. It can provide a little bit of power via it's micro-USB port. As you can see in the picture, the device notices that the charger is connected.

Tools needed for this trick:

• Nokia USB charger
• USB F-F adapter
• Standard micro-USB cable

Software:

Urho Konttori's usbcontrol

By now you should probably already know that this about the same as Perpetual motion, a great idea, but impossible (Without rewriting the laws of physics).

But still, it is good fun to see the charging notification pop up.

I noticed that more and more people from several specific cities are visiting Tinymail pages, and I know at least a few companies and organisations who are using Tinymail right now.

My personal opinion on development frameworks is that if they come without documentation, they are worth as much as vaporware.That’s why I started first, at an early stage, with writing the API documentation of Tinymail and then Tinymail’s trac, which holds a collection of examples and on top of the API documentation also explains most of its types and how to use them.

This was not sufficient. I wanted to write a test E-mail client to find the source of bugs in Modest. While I was doing that I decided that this test E-mail client was going to be documentation too. Documentation in the form of source code that itself required documentation.

I started TMut’s trac to deposit that documentation. Yesterday I mentioned that I implemented simple account management in TMut, today this is ~ finished. Here is the documentation about that source code.

New items:

• TMut’s account store
• Account manager
• Account editing

Former items:

• Creating messages
• Select a folder window
• TMut’s menu, its first screen
• Showing the summary of a folder
• The message view component

... will be slow! There are a couple things going on off-blog that are going to keep my attention and will slow the writing here though I will try to update as much as I can. As some of you here already know, my day job (a hospice company where I work as "the Linux guy") got bought out. They're closing the Phoenix office and my job will end this July. I now have to find a new day job that will

The comments to my post about the Internet Tablet UI generated a stream of "me too!" comments. Krisse of Tabletschool went so far as to say the Canola interface should be the Internet Tablets' next UI. I think now would be a good time to discuss what WE think would be a better interface for the tablets. Wouldn't you know it? It's time for another poll! I mentioned three possible alternatives (

Apart from the title, that is just to grab your attention I really wanted to make sure some people understand one thing: Knowing how to criticize is a crucial thing to have your message heard. Also I wanted Maemo Developers and some heavy users to know another thing: The most ...

I don't know who this guy is, but his work is fantastic. I love unique uses for tablet. Reminds me of a very old video (you can tell I didn't have Final Cut yet) of when I installed Windows XP on my Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. Readers: Come up with your own unusual (and humorously impossible) use for the Nokia N800 and N810!

WowWell, it seems that one single (and somewhat controversial) editorial item stirs up more interest than dozens of completely neutral tutorials.For those who don't know, yesterday the Internet Tablet School published its first editoral item calling for the current tablet graphic interface (Hildon) to be replaced by another interface (Canola). You can read the entire article by clicking here. The

Today, I’m going to give a talk about Vagalume in the “VIII Jornadas de Software Libre de GPUL 2008“, since Berto finally won’t be able to be there, as it was initially planned, so I’ll be charged with the responsibility of telling the people how cool Vagalume, Maemo and GNOME are in only 30 minutes… quite a big challenge for me, since I seldom can speak in a concise, short and effective way without going on and on.

Here is my first suggestion to clean up the complete mess we have at the moment when it comes to package categories in the maemo extras repository. There is no official list of categories, which has brought us to state we are in now.

We have these nice categories for example: 'Boingo', 'Canola'. Those should never be a category by themselves. We also have a lot of duplicates like 'cli' ,'Commandline' and 'Web','www' and 'Utilities','utils'.

This really has to stop as this is confusing for end users. We, the maemo community, need to find a solution and fix this.

If we look at Debian, we can see that they have the following list of categories:

admin, base, comm, contrib, devel, doc, editors, electronics, embedded, games, gnome, graphics, hamradio, interpreters, kde, libs, libdevel, mail, math, misc, net, news, non-free, oldlibs, otherosfs, perl, python, science, shells, sound, tex, text, utils, web, x11

My suggestion would be to base our list off the Debian list and remove the categories that are not suitable for Maemo. We might also want to add some categories if we find some missing.

admin, comm, devel, doc, editors, games, graphics, interpreters, mail, net, news, utils

and add:

desktop, database, education, internet, multimedia, office, scientific, security, system, travel

Please feel free to suggest other categories. Try to keep them as broad as possible. I would really like to get a list of categories where every application can be in at least one category. It would be nice not to need the 'misc' or 'other' category.

Perhaps it would also be a good idea to have the Application Manager display the pretty name for each category. e.g. comm -> Communication. That might be step 2 though.

I also would like your feedback on this idea:
"For diablo we only accept packages in the extras/extras-devel repositories when they have a valid category."

I'm really not sure if we can do this in time for diablo, but at least we can try to get the community to agree on this. I don't think we can do anything for existing repositories, but at least we could try for the new ones.

Please respond with your ideas in the comments section, but keep it to the category subject only.

Edit:

There seems to be a list of categories for the Application Manager. I don't think that list has enough categories, but it is a start.

I've updated my previous howto that explain how to install Maemo SDK 4 (Chinook). The other howto was written when Maemo SDK 4 Beta was out, now it's updated to 4.0.1 version of the SDK.

You can find it, as usual, on this wiki: http://www.ptlug.org/wiki/Howto_Installing_Maemo_SDK_4

If you have any suggestion or if you want to give me any idea to improve this howto, please leave me a comment.

I don't know what the hell is this all about but seems like a cool thing to do and in-fashion these days so here I go:

$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
100 cd
78 make
58 ls
36 vim
22 ldd
21 ssh
12 git-diff
11 src/av-cp/gupnp-av-cp
10 git-log
10 ./autogen.sh

I've updated my previous howto that explain how to install Maemo SDK 4 (Chinook). The other howto was written when Maemo SDK 4 Beta was out, now it's updated to 4.0.1 version of the SDK.

You can find it, as usual, on this wiki: http://www.ptlug.org/wiki/Howto_Installing_Maemo_SDK_4

If you have any suggestion or if you want to give me any idea to improve this howto, please leave me a comment.

I just released Tinymail’s pre 0.0.9, enjoy!

That's right. The Nokia N800, initially a $399 device, is now available through Dell at $199. That's $28 less than the lowest I've seen so far.

Reminders on the difference between the N800 and the N810:

• N800 has two full sized SDHC card slots for massive storage.
• N810 has a single MiniSDHC card slot plus 2 GB internal storage.
  
• N800 has a pop-out rotating web cam.
• N810 has a fixed, user-facing web cam.
  
• N810 has a sunlight readable display.
• N810 has a keyboard.
• N810 has a GPS.

Hello,I just wanted to let people know that I have just finished to port the latest Xournal (version 0.4.2.1) to Maemo (sorry, only chinook for now).The most interesting features of the new version are Pressure Sensitivity and Shape Recognition.You can find more info about that on the Xournal page.The Maemo port has a bunch of new features compared to the old port (version 0.4.1):- The user

I rarely feel like blogging about personal stuff but today my patience finally went off. Since I switched from Finnish Nordea (which provides excellent service BTW) to a Polish one I'm having only problems. Not the only one being that for two months now they’re unable to send me a banking card for my account.

Today, however, something much more scary happened. When trying to send them email (using their own banking account messaging system) I got this nice failure:

Warning: pg_exec() [function.pg-exec]: Query failed: ERROR: syntax error at or near 
"u" at character 2101 in /www/pglib/libs/c_db_postgres.php on line 106
error: query(): ERROR: syntax error at or near "u" at character 2101 
INSERT INTO cms.tabmail ( sto, ssubject, scontent, sheaders ) VALUES 
( 'solopl@nordea.com', 'produkty i usługi bankowe', 
'Temat: produkty i usługi bankowe...

As garrett pointed out — of all the places you want to see this kind of error, your bank is not one. For those unfamiliar with the problem — it’s esentially an Sql injection bug which, in short, means that your system security is a piece of shit.

Just a short note: due to an unfortunate regression, Modest (version: W16 release) does not work with SSL/TLS, breaking providers such as Gmail. See bug 3084. The reason was that what we tested with, differs slightly with the Chinook environment, and so this one fell through the cracks. Mea culpa... Anyhow, the problem has been fixed. If you build things yourself, get the latest (tinymail and modest) and all will work fine. If you don't want to do that, you'll have to wait until Monday; unfortunately, we can't do anything before that.

Once more, apologies from the Modest team for the inconvenience.

I'm currently in Porto Alegre, Brazil attending the 9th International Free Software Forum (FISL) - a huge conference with some seven thousand participants. My talk in the event will be about GeoClue, the geo-information framework designed for Linux-based mobile devices.

For those unable to be there or missing the 9am talk because of the parties tonight, the slides are now available online:

| View | Upload your own

GeoClue is now nearing release, and so we will probably be present also in the GUADEC and Akademy conferences this summer.

Technorati Tags: geoclue, fisl

Some hints and tips for using the web browser on the Nokia N800 & N810


$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
1 emacs


Dr. Vollmer's Cut:

$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head
1 emacs

I was invited, but unfortunately had to decline, to speak at the maemo track of LinuxTag 2008. The final topic, maemo.org: what next? is subtitled "mid-term: what Nokia should do + what the community could do". Whilst looking at whether I could attend, I started thinking about this topic. Below is the crystallisation of some of those thoughts which probably would've formed the basis of a few slides to kickstart discussion.

Jaffa has a fantastic essay up on his blog. It's all about the responsibilities of Nokia, developers, and community in advancing maemo as an "open source" project. I rather enjoyed this particular bit:

It's surprisingly simple and wholly true: It's impossible to have total openness, control, and community involvement at the same time. Giving more of one means taking from the other two.

Read the article. It'd have been great to hear this one as a speech - especially with the chance to listen to audience questions.

I've been tardy to report that Ubuntu has been ported to ARM with much help from Nokia. It seems clear that the Nokia Internet Tablets will be getting at least some code base in the future from Ubuntu.

There is nothing I can say about the news item that has not already been said by the link above. However, it leads me to think a bit further into what the future software platform will be on the Nokia Internet Tablets.

If the Internet Tablets take a normal Ubuntu route, they will be more "desktop-like" and turn into more utility machines than consumer electronic devices. This is the opposite direction from the Nokia-stated goal to make these normal consumer friendly devices. What's the alternative to "Normal Ubuntu?"

We know darn well that Ubuntu Mobile uses a lot of the open source code from Hildon, well developed by Nokia's maemo team. With this latest news, the code can be flowing both ways. Ubuntu Mobile developers may well be working on porting their existing interface to the Nokia Internet Tablets! And why not? It's an interesting interface and has common goals with Nokia. Hop over to this article to see what I have learned of Ubuntu Mobile so far.

Here's a video done by my good friends JKK Mobile and UMPC Portal.

I think the Ubuntu Mobile user interface is just fine for the Nokia tablets to make them more consumer friendly. Maybe I'll harass my friends at Nokia to see if they'll give me more information on this.

HEY FRIENDS AT NOKIA! I KNOW YOU READ THIS! ;)

I was invited, but unfortunately had to decline, to speak at the maemo track of LinuxTag 2008. The final topic, maemo.org: what next? is subtitled "mid-term: what Nokia should do + what the community could do". Whilst looking at whether I could attend, I started thinking about this topic. Below is the crystallisation of some of those thoughts which probably would've formed the basis of a few slides to kickstart discussion.

Amazing: that's the best word to describe everything that happened during this last fisl. Everything was so great that it's even hard to describe here using only words. So I'll try to explain a little bit about each interesting topic that I want to talk about. Arena We had two levels for ...

Wow!!Since I have released Xournal few days ago, a lot of people downloaded it and now Xournal is among the first 4 (yes, four!) most downloaded applications !Thank you guys and thanks to Denis Auroux, the real developer of Xournal.And thanks also for the great votes Xournal has got so far.We're climbing fast :)I was really surprised to see how many people downloaded Xournal, but really surprised

Yesterday I upgraded from Ubuntu 7.10 to the new 8.04 RC and I "broke" my Scratchbox installation. I tried to install it again and I had still some problems logging into Scratchbox and installing the SDK.

The I found this page: http://suppressingfire.livejournal.com/35277.html

that explain how to fix these problems. In particular if you get this kind of error trying to log into Scratchbox:

Inconsistency detected by ld.so: rtld.c: 1192: dl_main: Assertion `(void *) ph->p_vaddr == _rtld_local._dl_sysinfo_dso' failed!

You can fix it in this way:

echo 0 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/vdso_enabled

You can read the complete fix in my updated wiki: http://www.ptlug.org/wiki/Howto_Installing_Maemo_SDK_4

Yesterday I upgraded from Ubuntu 7.10 to the new 8.04 RC and I "broke" my Scratchbox installation. I tried to install it again and I had still some problems logging into Scratchbox and installing the SDK.

The I found this page: http://suppressingfire.livejournal.com/35277.html

that explain how to fix these problems. In particular if you get this kind of error trying to log into Scratchbox:

Inconsistency detected by ld.so: rtld.c: 1192: dl_main: Assertion `(void *) ph->p_vaddr == _rtld_local._dl_sysinfo_dso' failed!

You can fix it in this way:

echo 0 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/vdso_enabled

You can read the complete fix in my updated wiki: http://www.ptlug.org/wiki/Howto_Installing_Maemo_SDK_4

Sorry to various people who I will miss, but I won’t be at LinuxTag in Berlin this year. I would have liked to be there.

Instead we will be in Edinburgh/North-Berwick for 2 weeks introducing Liam to his English-speaking Aunt and Grandfather. It was the only time that we could all be in one place.

Finally I am done with new version of publishr for Nokia n810. Check out the demo video.



You can install from here. Check out the project page.

Friends recommended me this page to test the browser performance:

dhtml benchmark

This test is especially good if one needs to test the event handling performance in the browser engine.

Hello, hello! Long time no see, eh? Well, hasn't been too very much exciting news in the Maemo world that I've gotten to spread first lately, but there is something quite amazing going on.

Within days of release, your friendly neighborhood uberhackers (Penguinbait and Wolf08) have already begun work on the porting of KDE 4 to the Nokia Internet Tablets. Yes, I didn't believe it either, but, a picture is worth a thousand words. Here's~ Dolphin! (The KDE 4 File Manager)



And, for the uninitiated, KDE4 is simply amazing. (I am posting this from it at this very moment, mon amie.) The improvements are much more than skin deep (but it's skin is certainly exquistite, nonetheless). The core of this release has been amped to efficiency levels beyond anything that KDE3 (and, in my personal opinion, GNOME as well) has ever, ever achieved.

Ergo (love that word, Latin geek), KDE4 should run much, much faster then Penguinbait's old KDE3 port.

You can catch the original post at ITT here, join the discussion, encourage our favorite hackers :D

Oh, and some screens (I can't help myself) of Qt compiled for Maemo. And, no, this is not from Nokia, I dragged this out of scratchbox kicking and screaming. You guys know the feeling, right? If it looks this nice after Nokia is done with it, I will embrace Qt (almost) wholeheartedly. ;-)







(Is that a decent text editor I see, running on OS2008 without a hitch, that can supposedly export as a PDF, html, rich text, or plain text? Golly gosh, guys and gals, we might have something here! These are just the bloody demos: A full Web Browser, a full Text Editor, a Media Player, and many others...)

In photography, when you're trying to add flash and want it 'off-camera' there's a few options. Off-camera flash is important, because let's be honest, on-camera flash looks harsh and just plain bad. So we have to move the flash away from the camera. Sometimes it's to the right, sometimes left, sometimes up. Other times you might add more than one flash to light the frame.

One way is to use a sync cable. This involves the possibility of adapters, and stretching a long cable between you and the flash. My camera doesn't have a sync socket, so I'd need an adapter.

Another way is to use an optical flash. This is a flash that is triggered any time it sees any other flash light up the scene. I have one of these, and it's great until there's other people in the same area with flash cameras. Then it gets flashed for them instead of me.

The third way is through a radio remote. The most popular of these is called the PocketWizard, and sells for around $350 for a pair (transmitter + receiver.) I didn't have that kind of cash lying around so I ordered a $40 (including shipping) knock-off that people lovingly call a 'PovertyWizard.' Mine came in the mail today.

Rough testing showed I get about 20 feet range with them. I ordered mine planning to disassemble, violate some FCC rules and add an antenna to the transmitter. People have reported upwards of 100 yards after doing that modification. I also plan to modify the receiver to use standard AA batteries instead of the wacky 3 volt that it comes with.

Here's my first attempt. The addition of the radio transmitter lets me trigger my old Pentax flash by radio, and use the light from it to trigger my Digi Slave 3000 optically.

The Pentax flash is behind and above her as a highlight. The optical slave flash is above and right in a bounce umbrella. I'm not really happy with the shot, but hey, it's my first picture ever taken with two flashes, neither of which is attached to the camera.

Buzz Aldrin, as he's verbally attacked by some moron claiming we never made it to the moon.

Buzz doesn't take that crap. He's my hero (sorry, Chuck!)

I was fooling around a bit with the screen rotation support for Maemo this morning on my N800 (didn’t want to risk mucking with the N810 yet). I would put up some screenshots, but for some reason the screenshot applet is messing up in my version and trying to still take a landscape image. Not sure how those screenshots on the sse2 page were taken, looks like they’re running the same load applet with integrated screenshot that I am. The instructions on that page worked great for me, booted the kernel without flashing, install the xomap package and use the installer for the rotate applet.

There’s still a bunch of funkiness for me: onscreen keyboard on the N800 works, but is really smushed, orientation of the dpad doesn’t change so you have to take that into account, can’t really use the home menu rotated cause it goes straight off the screen. Some of this stuff could be hacked around if the base packages of the OS2008 user environment were also open source. Hint. Hint.

Generally though the rotation itself works fantastic. I installed the Firefox release to muck around with that, but forgot that it doesn’t have an onscreen keyboard. Have to dig out the bluetooth keyboard to poke at it. IUI applications look much slicker on the rotated browser for example, with the screen format being much closer to the expected.

I was fooling around a bit with the screen rotation support for Maemo this morning on my N800 (didn’t want to risk mucking with the N810 yet). I would put up some screenshots, but for some reason the screenshot applet is messing up in my version and trying to still take a landscape image. Not sure how those screenshots on the sse2 page were taken, looks like they’re running the same load applet with integrated screenshot that I am. The instructions on that page worked great for me, booted the kernel without flashing, install the xomap package and use the installer for the rotate applet.

There’s still a bunch of funkiness for me: onscreen keyboard on the N800 works, but is really smushed, orientation of the dpad doesn’t change so you have to take that into account, can’t really use the home menu rotated cause it goes straight off the screen. Some of this stuff could be hacked around if the base packages of the OS2008 user environment were also open source. Hint. Hint.

Generally though the rotation itself works fantastic. I installed the Firefox release to muck around with that, but forgot that it doesn’t have an onscreen keyboard. Have to dig out the bluetooth keyboard to poke at it. IUI applications look much slicker on the rotated browser for example, with the screen format being much closer to the expected.

Hello planet maemo. Probably the people in nokia already know me; I joined the company few months ago. I am working on tracker, porting it to the device and improving the code with the help of some amazing hackers. We are working with upstream so i hope in the next releases you can notice some [...]

I placed an order with Puget Systems (www.pugetsystems.com) at 1:24 PM today.

The products, two heatsinks for a Socket-F CPU, did not specify the size in their website. I learned moments later that model fit the larger 4.1' mounting and I need the 3.5' mounting.

At 1:27 PM (3 minutes later) I sent a message through their system requesting a cancellation of the order, and explained what product I really need.

At 2:17 PM I received the following e-mail:

Hello Sir,

Unfortunately we've already processed your order and have it prep'd to ship. At this point we have to charge a 15% restocking fee, to cover our time and the fees that we are charged when we process and then refund credit cards. This is in accordance with our return policy, as seen here: http://www.pugetsystems.com/warranty.php

As such, your refund will be for $67.57; I've got that set up in our system, and it will be credited back to your card in the next 3-5 business days.

Thank you,

William George
Puget Custom Computers

Last year I spent over $18,000 with Newegg. This was their chance to make me a happy new customer of Puget Systems. I lashed back with a quick 'Thanks, but I'll never do business with you again' email. I got the following response:

Tony -

This issue was escalated up to me. The problem we have is that it costs us 3% to charge a credit card, and another 3% to refund. So we're out 6%, 1 minute later. We are also very fast about preparing orders for shipment, which means we've gone to the administrative work, inventory allocation, boxing up for shipping, all very soon after the order is placed. I checked on this order, and while it was allocated for shipping, they actually had not boxed it yet, so it is true we did not have our full overhead in place by the time you cancelled. Due to that, I'd be happy to lower our restocking fee in this case, but we still have to cover our costs. That'd be 6%. I think people don't think about how placing an order actually does result in action on the vendor side, and that undoing an order results in even more action on the vendor side. Just let me know if the lower restocking fee is agreeable, and do let me know if you feel this is unfair.

Thanks,

Jon Bach
Puget Custom Computers
------------------------------------
http://www.pugetsystems.com
jonbach@pugetsystems.com

At least they listened, and were willing to work with me. That says a lot.

Yesterday I uploaded a new version of the Canola2 Youtube plugin to maemo extras repository. Youtube has changed the way it references the .flv file, breaking the way we were dealing with it. Kudos to Adriano who's been doing an excelent job maintaining the plugin.

As usual, the source code is available in the Canola2 website and in the Maemo extras repository as well.

Please update your installation by clicking on "Check for updates" button in the Application manager. Big thanks to everyone who reported the issue on our tracker.

Some days ago i’ve sended my numpty physics level to its author.

Now it’s available at Numpty Physics Home Page.

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 on

"How much does the monthly service plan for the N810?"

Not a week goes by when I do not get that question in a blog or video comment. After attempting to explain to each that the Nokia Internet Tablet is not a phone, I get news that it's now easy for the tablet to BECOME a phone.

Skype just launched new monthly unlimited calling plans for the US/Canada, Mexico, and world. These cost from $2.95/mo to $9.95/mo. That covers outgoing calls only. Skype-to-Skype is always free, but inbound calls to phones will require a SkypeIn number. Without a calling plan, a SkypeIn number is $18 for 3 months or $60 for a full year. If purchased with one of the new calling plans, the cost is half that.

With a WiMAX Nokia Internet Tablet and good bandwidth, it would be possible to turn your tablet into a functional phone. Here's a break-down:

• WiMAX Service: $40-$60/month (estimate - could be more or less)
• SkypeIn Number: $3/mo (based on purchase with a calling plan)
• Skype calling plan: $3-$10/mo
  

That's $46-$73 per month depending on WiMAX costs and Skype features. Compared to my AT&T service, that's a GOOD deal. I pay over $100/mo for 900 minutes, some text, and limited (MediaNET, not 'real Internet') data service.

What will not be there:

• Coverage in non-WiMAX areas,
• Emergency 911 service
• Picture messaging
• A text messaging plan (Skype can send SMS through the chat interface, but cannot receive it.)

Even without WiMAX or an Internet Tablet, this Skype offer is good for heavy phone users. Thumbs up, Skype.

As you might know, some time ago I developed a plugin for the maemo version of Vagalume which would allow the user to manage the most basic features from a tiny icon in the status bar.

After that, I thought it could be a good idea to implement a freedesktop tray icon as well, so you would be able to hide/show Vagalume with a tray icon in the notification area, in the same way you could do it with some other programs such as pidgin, xchat or rhythmbox, for instance. Moreover, some people told me that it would be very nice to have a tray icon in the desktop version of vagalume, so everything seemed to say that I was not mad after all and that it could be a good idea…

So, I’ve started working on its implementation (using a GtkStatusIcon) some weeks ago and now I finally managed to get the enough ‘spare time’ to plug everything together and to finally finish the patch for being applied to one of the latest revisions of the SVN trunk (158). In fact, at this moment I’ve already sent it to vagalume-devel@maemo.org mailing list and I’m waiting for Berto to take a look into it to finally integrate it for (hopefully) the next release :-)

Update [2008/04/29]: After working a bit more on this new tray icon during the past weekend I’ve added libnotify support to allow the tray icon to show a notification each time Vagalume starts playing a new song. Of course, as I know there’re people who might dislike this feature, I’ve also added the possibility of disabling these notifications from the ‘Settings’ dialog in the GNOME version of the application. I’ve also added an screenshot of the notifications working at the end of this post.

To finish with this post, and knowing that sometimes an image is better than just a description, here you are a couple of screenshots of the new tray icon working in my GNOME environment:

Vagalume’s tray icon: showing the menu

Vagalume’s tray icon: showing the tooltip

Update [2008/04/29]: Vagalume’s tray icon: showing playback notifications

And that’s all. I hope the patch is good enough to integrate it with the next release of Vagalume. Of course, suggestions and criticisms are always welcome, so don’t hesitate to leave your comments here.

I hope you like it ;-)

I see that my blog is now aggregated on Planet Maemo (at least for Maemo related stuff) - all of you who want to get my off-Maemo ramblings on GNOME, the Libre Graphics Meeting, my life, or free software in general will just have to check out my journal at the source.

For those wondering why I’m here: I’m being funded by Nokia to help make the Maemo documentation community rock. I’ll be working a bit more than part-time on improving documentation organisation and processes, and removing roadblocks anywhere I can. If anyone has any problems with the documentation, reports of “bugs” with the organisation of docs, or has general suggestions for things that we can improve, I’m all ears.

I’m still feeling my way around, and with the forums, mailing lists and wiki, there are a lot of entry points to this community - but the best way to get started is to start solving real problems, and over the next few days I’ll be working to resolve some outstanding website bugs and get access to everything I need to do that.

Oh - and if anyone has any hints for solving the Numpty Physics level where the yellow ball is in a kind of snail’s shell, I’d love to hear them. And is it possible to delete the last stroke with the N810? I haven’t figured it out yet.

A while ago we discussed the idea of an autobuilder for the extras repository. We have been working on creating such an autobuilder and have been testing it in private. As a result we now think it is time to do a tests with a larger group and make it publicly known. Please give it a try and tell us your results.

- What does the autobuilder do?

The autobuilder takes a source package from the incoming queue and tries to build it in a fresh environment. The builder fetches all dependencies from the extras-devel repository. If it can't find the dependency in extras-devel, it will fail and send a mail to the extras-cauldron-builds list.

If there are no problems with the package, the builder can create armel, i386 and source packages. Those will be put in the extras-devel repository after a successful build.

Instructions for the builder can be found at here.

The builder only handles building one package at a time. If you have dependencies that are not present in the extras-devel repository, please upload these first.

- web-based assistant

We have also created a web-based assistant to help you with requesting rights to upload and creating/uploading of source packages. You can upload packages to the builder with either dput or the assistant.

- How do I get my package into extras?

After a successful build a package will appear in the extras-devel repository. You can move your packages from extras-devel to extras with the promotion interface. Instructions for the promotion interface can be found here.

We would like to invite all developers to take a look at the autobuilder and try it out. Please discuss problems and feature requests on the maemo-developers list.

More information about our effort can be found at the extras-cauldron website.

Well, I've talked about it for a while, but I just took the plunge.

I just migrated my OSS Ramblings blog to the new domain and moved all the old posts into the new Drupal engine. I really like Drupal, and I'm thrilled that I was able to save all my old posts from my Nucleus CMS site.

I'm sure there'll be a few issues with the old import, but at least the text is here. Any that had images uploaded along with the post probably will be lacking the images.

The actual import wasn't that hard, but figuring out the steps was a chore. I ended up taking my old Nucleus Data, doing some MySQL wonder work with it to merge the body and extended fields into one, remove the CR/LF's from the text along with any double quotes (which I just wholeheartedly replaced with single quotes for the export.) Then I was able to save the three fields I needed, being title, body and date posted as a CSV file. That then imported into Drupal using the node_import module.

I've set redirects on my old site to bring viewers to the new one. Soon I'll migrate all my code over so it will be available for download.

My prediction? Exxon might just have this guy assasinated:

Bossa Conference ’08 was a great open source conference for mobile embedded platforms.

Have you missed it?

Will you miss it again next year?

See you there next year!

http://www.bossaconference.indt.org/

Bossa conference 2008 promotional video.



be ready to 2009.

Next on my TODO is a desktop-wide UPnP MediaServer based on tracker. Basically, it will make all of your media availabe to other UPnP devices that is tagged as "shared via UPnP". I already have a working dummy implementation, based on code from Jorn's rhythmbox plugin. I call it "dummy" because ATM it only exports a hardcoded list of media files. Here is a screenshot of Windows Media Player playing music from it using on2share plugin:

While I was gathering some info about a DBus related task that I’m doing at this moment, I wrote down whatever I found about DBus’s glib bindings in tutorial format.

A few other people have done similar things in their blogs. This one explains how to use org.freedesktop.DBus.GLib.Async a little bit too.

If you find any mistakes in the document, it’s a wiki page so please just correct them.

Hello, hello!



I can't believe we don't have one. Have what? you ask. An Ideastorm. That word just rolls of the the tongue, hn? ;-)

Dell and Ubuntu have established Ideastorms (Ubuntu = Brainstorm) and they have worked amazingly well, so there is proof of concept.





But, why would we as a maemo community need one? Simple: New, great ideas absolutely litter places like iTT, but there is no way to hit home with that, except bugzilla (which is official looking and scary ;) Eh?).

We need an Ideastorm as a simple and organized way to let Nokia see what their users (not developers, already plenty of input from devs to Nokia) want.

So, when does it go up? ;-)

Video calling is very, very cool indeed

Summer of code 2008

I’m going to mentor three Summer of Code applications.

• E-mail activity for OLPC by Shikhar Bhushan
• Seahorse integration in Evolution by Zhang Shunchang
• SuperRandom, a predictive listening plugin for Rhythmbox by Charlotte Curtis

One of the Igalians who developed Modest and among many of his Tinymail contributions implemented the libcst implementation for handling certificates in Tinymail, José Dapena Paz, is going to mentor Zhang Shunchang’s application together with me.

Picking up what I left in 2005

I also just picked up AsyncWorker. I made it a little page and with the help of Tinne I improved its API documentation. Perhaps I will do a release someday (I never did, actually). Thing is that I hate the work involved with releasing. Especially since most of our development tools stink.

Note that my super fantastic lovely girlfriend, Tinne, has her own blog now. It contains a bunch of photos of our stay in Durham UK. In a few minutes, she just told me, she will put online a funny photo of me holding a fish bowl filled with cocktail.

According to this page on buy.com, the Nokia N810 WiMax Edition has an MSRP of $479 and will be sold for $455. It's not in stock, of course, and there is still no word on WiMAX coverage and price plans yet, so we wait.

SMplayer, a powerfull GUI for MPlayer, is now available for Maemo.

More info are available at qt4 garage homepage.

Well, I finally took the plunge this weekend and drove 45 minutes to a bike shop. I picked up a 21 speed Trek Urban 1.0 for myself:

And a 21 speed Jamis Citizen 1.0 for my wife so we could bike together. When it's not raining (like it is today) I plan to ride mine to work. I also picked up a four position bike rack that will connect to the tow package on my F-150 so we can take them camping without having to take up bed space.

Carla and I rode about 5 miles yesterday. I'm surprised I'm not sore today.

Can any python guru out there explain whats going on here:


$ /usr/bin/gnome-about
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/gnome-about", line 35, in ?
import gtk
ImportError: No module named gtk

$ head -n 1 /usr/bin/gnome-about
#!/usr/bin/python

$ head -n 36 /usr/bin/gnome-about|tail -n +29

import pygtk
pygtk.require ('2.0')

import gobject
from gobject.option import OptionParser, make_option
import gtk

$ /usr/bin/python
Python 2.4.5 (#2, Mar 12 2008, 00:15:51)
[GCC 4.2.3 (Debian 4.2.3-2)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import pygtk
>>> import gtk
>>>

$ /usr/bin/python
Python 2.4.5 (#2, Mar 12 2008, 00:15:51)
[GCC 4.2.3 (Debian 4.2.3-2)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import pygtk
>>> pygtk.require ('2.0')
>>> import gtk
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in ?
ImportError: No module named gtk
>>>

UPDATE: Thanks to Karl-Lattimer, the problem was solved by:

# rm /usr/bin/python
# ln -s /usr/bin/python2.5 /usr/bin/python

Today I took the plunge. US Cellular finally stepped up to the plate and apologized for pissing me off, so I went ahead and replaced my crappy RAZR with a Blackberry 8830.

I then promptly installed the Funambol Sync Client on it, and configured it to sync my calendar and contacts with my eGroupware server. Amazingly, it was very easy to do.

The Blackberry is definitely a different experience. It's going to take some getting used to. Too bad my Nokia n800 refuses to transfer files to it. I guess I'll need to get my ringtones over another way.

In order finally to make use of the integrated built-in GPS receiver of the N810, the maps are for free available for download, I needed 3 more things:


* the Nokia HH-12 Easy Mount Holder
* the Nokia DC-4 car charger
* license code for the Wayfinder Navigator for Nokia Internet Tablet


In fact, the N810 came with some kind of car holder, the Nokia CR 89 which could be fixed to the dashbord itself, but in fact the HH-12 is required in order not to damage your dashbord. I bought it today via Ebay, the easiest and cheapast way, isn't it ?!

For the 'voice guidance' I will have to buy an extra license code from 'Wayfinder', the Wayfinder Navigator Nokia N810 Edition. The price for the license depends on the region and duration (1 month (9.98 EUR), 1 year (89.00 EUR) of 3 years (98.99)).

The product region I am interested in, includes a licence to use voice guided turn-by-turn navigation in the following map regions:
- UK & Ireland
- Germany & Alps (Germany, Austria, Switzerland)
- Scandinavia (Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway)
- Benelux (Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg)
- France
- Italy
- Spain and Portugal

After purchasing the product you will get a license key to unlock the navigation features of the map application. If you make the purchase directly from the internet tablet the key is entered automatically.

First I will try the Wayfinder Navigator for 7 days free of charge, just enough to test the built-in GPS quality (some people complain about the long time to fix) and the provided software functionality. If this test periode gives a positive result, I will buy the 36 months license !

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

Everything worked great at first, but now I'm having e-mail issues with my Blackberry.

Now whenever I compose and send an e-mail I get "invalid message from server" but if I select the same e-mail and hit resend, it goes fine.

I'm using the Internet service. It checks mail on my imap server just fine and pushes it down to me.

Not two days after we broke the news on the Nokia N810 WiMAX Edition price on Buy.com, they go ahead and lower the cost!

The new product page shows $47.01 off the MSRP instead of the original $23.01. Additionally, new Google Checkout customers can get an additional $10 off. Way to keep us on our toes, buy.com!

Why the polarisation?