Ever since the announcement that Moblin and Maemo would be merging into MeeGo, there has been a raging discussion about whether rpm or deb packages should be used. At times, this has led to some good discussions about the technical merits of different packaging and distribution systems and the package formats they support. However, more often, it seems to be a heated exchange of religious viewpoints. Initially, I thought this was simply a traditional open source religious feud, but I’m beginning to think that it is much more than that. I now believe it is a battle for the third estate of mobile devices.
Planet maemo: category "feed:d96b080fca66d64fd56a892298c08a27"
The recent announcement about Nokia and Intel planning on merging Maemo and Moblin into MeeGo has generated a lot of interesting discussions online. What does this mean for the future of the N900? What does this mean for developers wishing to write for Maemo or Moblin? Perhaps the biggest discussion has been about the packaging system. On the MeeGo FAQ page, they say “MeeGo will use the .rpm format”.
Between watching events in the Olympics, I played a few games on my Nokia N900 and it occurred to me that the game waiting to be made is the #N900 Bobsled run. Let me present a few videos to give you an idea about what I have in mind.
First, there is this video of the bobsled run from a first person point of view:
Then, there is this sample game that comes on the Nokia N900:
Could Bounce evolve to use a Bobsled track? Even better, could it evolve to use various Bobsled tracks from different virtual worlds? This idea comes from reading about the announced release of Naali, an open source virtual world viewer that might port nicely to the N900. Of course the Naali viewer would need enhancements to take advantage of the accelerometer. Discussions about this are already taking place.
To push it even further, what about slalom racing in virtual worlds where the competitors use accelerometer enabled mobile devices? I want to go the sports bar where people bring their N900’s and race each other this way. Each racer sees their own view of the track on their N900s and the participants watch the race on a big screen over the bar.
What I like about OpenSim, the virtual world platform often used with Naali, Naali itself and the N900 environment is that they are all open source and combined they could provide an great platform for an incredible open source mobile virtual world experience.
My latest adventure with the Nokia N900 has been learning how to control the Status LED on the front of the Nokia N900. The best discussion of this can be found in the thread (N900) Possible to change the colour of the notification light???.
So, I’ve had my N900 for a little over a month now. I’ve written programs for it, I’ve streamed video on it, I’ve used it as an MP3 player to listen to music as well as to books on tape. I’ve used the PDF viewer for reading court briefings and maps of local parks. I used it as a tape recorder, an HDR camera, a game console, and even used it from time to time to send and receive text messages or make phone calls.
I am constantly finding new and interesting things to do with my Nokia N900 phone and the latest is HDR photography. It took a little work to get it going, but I now have my first HDR photographs.
Yesterday, Nokia announced the latest update to the Nokia N900. This is big update, hundreds of modules to be updated and megabytes of data. However, the update also moves some data out of the small root file system to the much larger regular file system.
In a previous blog posts, I wrote about the FM receiver on the Nokia N900. I commented
As I worked on my blog post about QR Codes, I confirmed something I had been concerned about with mbarcode; it doesn’t send SMS messages. In the discussion about mbarcode, the author writes about his desire to “Add support for further 2D barcode payloads - please suggest any you think it doesn't handle, code appreciated too”. I added a suggestion for supporting sending SMS messages, and started looking for how to add this.
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One of the first things I discovered was Kurt Fleisch’s logarchive.py. One of the things that is great about working on the N900 is that you can find good python code that you can read through, copy to a file on your N900, execute it, and then start modifying it. Yet even before I started playing with the script, I noticed something very interesting. The script is reading from an SQLite3 database called “/home/user/.rtcom-eventlogger/el.db”
Firing up SQLite3 on my N900, I went into the database and started looking around. It was a listing of communications events. Every SMS message that I had sent or received, and had not yet deleted, was in there. The same for every phone call placed, received, or missed. A quick look revealed eleven different tables. Most of which didn’t do much for me. However a few tables jumped out at me; Services, EventTypes and Events.
Services has three entries, Calls, Chat Messages and SMS. There are eight entries in the EventTypes table, Inbound calls, Outbound Calls, Missed Calls and Voicemail Messages for the Call service, Inbound Chat and Outbound Chat for the Chat message service, and Inbound SMS and Outbound SMS for SMS services.
The real data is in Events. As I write this, there are 214 events in my Events table. Using a simple SQL query, ‘select event_type_id, count(*) from Events group by event_type_id;’ I can find how many of each type of event there is. With further exploration, I can check various times of various phone calls and messages. There is a lot that can be done with this, especially in terms of building up interesting interconnectivity between a CRM and the N900.
Yet this didn’t get me any closer to being able to suggest code to enable the addition of SMS functionality to mbarcode. A little more searching led me to PyMaemoSMS. I copied this text and gave it a run and it seems to work pretty well. However, it seemed to fail when I used numbers with an odd number of digits. It seems like some patch had been added to append an F to numbers with an odd number of digits. I commented out that section and the SMS messages work nicely from Python. With working Python code for sending SMS messages, there are a lot of interesting things that can be done and this code could be used as a basis for adding SMS messages to mbarcode.
It was a rainy Boxing Day here in Connecticut, so I spent a bit of time playing with my Nokia N900. The N900 comes with a built in FM Receiver. However, software for running the FMRadio was not included on the N900. So, yesterday, I searched around and installed the fmradio package. To use the FM Radio package, you need to plug in headphones which it uses as the FM antenna. You can scroll up and down the radio dial, and when you find a station, add it to your presets. Even though you are using the headphones as an antenna, you can still use the speaker on the phone for the FM station. You are supposed to be able to get RDS as well, but I didn’t get any RDS messages. All in all, the fmradio package is fine for my use, but nothing special.