Planet Maemo: category "feed:329f597d99418623361115205242979e"

Inkscape in action…

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 15:11:09 +0000

Some of you might have a hunch of my interest in aviation and airplanes, so it's no wonder I wanted to help our aviation club a little. The two-seater trainer aircraft was in a desperate ned of a new paint, and we wanted to have a new color scheme at the same time to freshen up the appearance. There were some restrictions for simple financial reasons, so the plane was to have a white base paint and all the color stripes would be done with stickers. Nevertheless I am pretty happy with the result.

I first went to the airport and took some pics of the her side profile with my N900 and sketched some ideas with pen and paper and finally in Inkscape where I opened a 5.5 meter by one meter canvas...

The flight manual of the plane contains a three-way view of the aircraft, so scanned the page and used Inkscape's excellent tracing tool to turn it into a base for my design, and resized it to the corrent size of the aircraft.. This must have been the largest canvas size I have had so far in a design project...

Design work done in Inkscape

The design evolved a quite a bit and I always had a bunch of the latest sketches in my N900 to show to club members who gave me good feedback... And eventually we had something we were happy with, and a PDF file of the design was sent to the paint shop a while ago. Stripping a plane from the old paint is quite a lot of work, and takes a while, so they sent us back some photos of the work in progress..

Aircraft partially disassembled before paint stripping

Paint stripped, masked for spraying

Empty canvas!

And finally today we got the much anticipated message in our mailboxes, the work was nearing completion!

Stripes in place!

It's always nice and rewarding to see a design work transform from bits and bytes into something physical. Even better if you can strap yourself into it and go flying...

11 0

flic.kr bookmarklet

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 10:35:58 +0000

The Nokia N900 browser plays nicely with "bookmarklets" - small snippets of javascript that you can bookmark that perform useful functions. One new find is the Flickr short ur generator, its pretty handy if you like twitter / irc / facebook and post flickr urls a lot..

Another one that I like is the Youtube MP4 video downloader - Youtube videos play fine in the N900, but sometimes I want to save a good one..

To use these, just hit ctrl-b in the browser and find the bookmarklet of your choice..

Oh, and I snapped a nice (in my opinion) photo of Quim giving the opening welcome for Maemo Barcelona Long Weekend.

15 0

Maemo Extras -packages: Droid fonts

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 10:11:40 +0000

The Maemo Extras -repository (and extras-devel / testing) contains community software for the N900 and the older Maemo devices. One of the nice packages available is the open "Droid Sans" -font set, originating from the Android project by Google. Droid Sans Mono works great with the Terminal application:

You can also hack the system theme to use Droid Sans with a simple perl one-liner.. you need the "droid fonts" and "rootsh" packages from extras repository installed first of course..

DISCLAIMER: Do this at your own risk, I might have made a mistake in this example...

$ root
# perl -pi -e "s/Nokia Sans/Droid Sans/g" \
   /usr/share/themes/alpha/gtk-2.0/gtkrc \
   /usr/share/themes/alpha/gtk-2.0/gtkrc.input_method \
   /usr/share/themes/alpha/matchbo*/theme.xml

Then switch theme to another and back, or reboot the device. Substitute "alpha" with "beta" for the orangeish theme variant if you like. Example below:

Switching back to Nokia Sans is left as an excercise for the reader

21 0

share and enjoy (with blue teeth!)

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:05:10 +0000

Now, I wish this was enabled in N900 filemanager and mediaplayer music views directly... But in any case, I found a nice little utility called Petrovich that lets you share any individual file with the sharing framework (bluetooth, service plug-ins and email). Nice!

18 0

Ogg? Vorbis!? What?

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:41:30 +0000

I looked at the internet radio stations in Finland, and discovered that MetroFM does have one. The fact that their stream uses ogg/vorbis format doesnt stop me from enjoying it in the N900 though

Install ogg support for N900 here. Update: Alternatively, open application manager, enable "Maemo Extras" repository if it is not yet enabled, and install "ogg-support" from there.
Enjoy MetroFM

Sweet

edit: too bad their terms only allow streaming to ip addresses in finland.

13 5

Firefox for maemo..?

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 06:59:07 +0000

So planet maemo is having a nice breeze about Fennec for N900. Nice youtube video and all.

But: dear friends, where the heck is the latest packaged version? I would like to try t out on my N900.

I tried googling, and found fennec for N810/N800 and some wikipages which I wasnt sure which version they talked about... I am left with this uncertainty, as I am not a Mozilla project insider. It would be nice if the video and blog posts would include a nice url. Maybe there is a website with all this info, but I, as a potentially interested person, havent found it..

So, where can people find it?

10 2

Photojourney with N900

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 20:07:23 +0000

Here are some of the best photos (in my opinion of course) that I have taken with the Nokia N900 during the recent months. I'm pretty amazed with the camera quality and the fact that it's so easy to tag pictures and to post them to flickr and facebook etc.. directly from the device itself. Hope you like them too

It's pretty sweet, especially when you think it's gstreamer and other Gnome technologies under the hood doing the work...

65 0

amazing N900 camera hack ;-)

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:33:01 +0000

My friend Mohammad made this amazing camera hack on his N900 and I had to try it too - works great for nice effect... It's very simple actually - basically take a piece of dark cardboard, make a small hole in the middle and try to position it in the center of the lens and place the back cover in, which locks it in place. Simple, but effective fun - one of those simple things that makes me smile... Thanks for sharing!

Mohammad in test shot (low light = lots of noise)

The Amazing Vignette Filter separated

Filter in place..

Anyone else done something like this? I started to ponder 3M magic tape for "haze" effect already...

0 1

New gPodder for Maemo… Wow! :)

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:17:11 +0000

So it looks like Thomas liked my ideas about gPodder user experience. Sweet!

New gPodder main view

I guess I need to draw some of those icons now... =) Stay tuned!

(Here is a funny thought for today: Ihink the N900 and boring meetings are the key to revive my blogging Wordpress editor works just great with the Firefox-3-based browser in the device.. )

16 0

Ho hum..

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 08:55:32 +0000

I am having one of those "long time no blogging" moments again But whatever, I have some thoughts I have wanted to blog about, and also a goodie for those of you who are enjoying the new Maemo and the N900 device already.

GPodder fun

I've been bicycling to work all summer and I enjoy listening to podcasts and internet radio while enjoying the fresh air. I recently installed gPodder and enjoyed the new maemo5-style user interface a lot. The application is easy to use with fingers (not recommended while biking! seriously! ) but I there are a few thoughts I wanted to share. I am sorry to use the lazyweb for this instead of contacting the guys directly - but maybe this sparks up some interesting discussion, so what the heck.. read below for some lengthy ascii-art UI design proposal fun and for the N900 goody surprise..

GPodder: Adding podcasts

I already wrote a nice, polite paragraph about how it would be nice if gPodder would just fetch the RSS feed url information from the website for me, so I could just type "www.uncontrolledairspace.com" into the "Enter the podcast feed URL" -dialog. You know, so I would not need to worry about finding the RSS feed url by hand.. then I tried..

It does it already!

So maybe the dialog title should read "Enter the podcast web address" instead? Like this:

[ # ][ 13:37 %& ] gPodder ________________[ X  ]
|::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
|::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
|::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
|::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
|::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
|::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
|============== Add new podcast ===============|
|                                              |
| Web address: [______________________][ Add ] |
|______________________________________________|

Notifications

When you add a new podcast, the popup notification that says "downloading episode information from.." in a notification banner. I guess this is because you don't have any information about the podcast yet, so you couldnt show the name in the podcast list. How about creating a list item for the new podcast, showing "Downloading information..." in there until you get the RSS feed, and then populating the list with the real data? This would be more consistent with how updating a podcast works, and it would avoid the popup banner that feels like it's blocking the user interface.

Navigation

The two-column main view is not really useful in a small screen, as both sides contain pretty long lines of text. So you end up having just a bit of your podcast names visible, or alternatively just a bit of the episode list. It might be more useful to split this view into two. So that when you start gPodder, you would see just the list of podcasts. Or, maybe a front page like this:

[ # ][ 13:37 %& ] gPodder_________________[ X  ]
|                                              |
|                                              |
|        _                           _         |
|      _| |_         /`´´\         _| |_       |
|     |_   _|      (_|o_O|_)       \   /       |
|       |_|          `  °´        .-\ /-.      |
|                                  ˙˙˙˙˙       |
|   New podcast    Podcasts      Downloads     |
|                                              |
|______________________________________________|

Press "Podcasts" to get to the list:

[ # ][ 13:37 %& ] gPodder Podcasts _______[ <= ]
| /icon\  Daily Source Code                  * | <= green dot
| \here/  4 new, latest 2 days ago             |    (new stuff!)
| -------------------------------------------- |
| /icon\  Uncontrolled Airspace Podcast        | <= no green dot
| \here/  Latest 5 days ago                    |    (all listened)
| -------------------------------------------- |
|                                              |
|                                              |
|                                              |
|______________________________________________|

One could sort them by (Name | Updated | Recently listened ) via the menu? Once you click on a podcast, it would open a new view with episode information about that podcast:

[ # ][ 13:37 %& ] gPodder: Uncontrolled A_[ <= ]
| Uncontrolled Airspace #151                 * | <= new
| "Dave needs NyQuil" - 3 days ago             |
| -------------------------------------------- |
| Uncontrolled Airspace #150                 * |
| "Dave needs NyQuil" - 12 days ago            |
| -------------------------------------------- |
| Uncontrolled Airspace #149                   |
| "Midnight in the Morning" - 21 days ago      |
| -------------------------------------------- |
|______________________________________________|

From there you would naturally show the episode information for the selected one.

Wow, now that was some ASCII-art.. I wonder how this works out in Planet Maemo and on the blog itself..

Oh right.. the surprise. I made some N900 wallpapers, go grab them from here. Hope you like them

3 0