SVU's blog

Unicode tags & OS2008 media players

I uploaded some mp3 files into my OS2008. Some of them have Russian (UTF-8) tags. And … what a disappointment. Shiny new Canola shows total crap instead of Russian. Most of other players too. The only decent ones turned to be (drums roll…) MediaBox and Kilikali. Audio Tag Tool specially intended for editing tags – falls flat when it comes to UTF-8. Are we in 2008 or 1998?

n810 memory module format: Why?

I would really love to look in the eyes of the person who decided that n810 should use MiniSD. And I would ask that person to find the card (on ebay or anywhere else) of 8GB or larger capacity (preferably, class 4 or better). Dealing with MicroSD->MiniSD adapters is a bit too much trouble…

MiniSD is nearly dead, as I can see. MicroSD and SD are reasonably popular. So why on Earth they’ve chosen the worst of 3?… SD on n800 was a very good idea – I could take the card from my Nikon d80 and show the photos straight on the tablet (thanks to great Canola).

n810: random rants

The browser in OS2008 is a huge disappointment. It hangs after every couple of pages, only “kill process” helps. Is it me? Is it about adblock and greazemonkey extensions? I do not know… But at the moment my n810 can not be used for browsing at all 🙁

Regarding the built-in GPS – according to what I hear from various people, there are 2 sorts of devices – “good ones” and “bad ones”. The “bad ones” (like mine) take ages to establish the fix.

And the last (but not least) – the hardware keyboard does not allow to switch between Russian and English layouts. You can have either – but not both (welcome to the Control Panel if you want to change layout). What kind of usability is it? For the company located a couple of hundred kilometers from Russia, it is odd;) The on-screen keyboard is more usable for me ATM.

Freeciv/Maemo

TWIMC: I registered the project on garage.maemo.org. The current code is in SVN. My plans (in no particular order):

• Try upgrading to 2.0.9 (or latest 2.0.x whatever it is in SVN stable branch)
• Fixing configure.in (at the moment, the only way to build is dpkg-buildpackage)
• Trying to get as much code into upstream as possible. May be, separate client subdirectory would be needed (gui-maemo as a heavily modified copy of gui-gtk-2.0)
• Eventually, upgrade to the freeciv trunk

And, sure, bugfixing bugfixing. No deadlines – my spare time is really scarce.

Everyone is very welcome to build, complain etc. Sure, patches are especially welcome.

N810: here

So, yesterday I got it. Again, thanks to Nokia for the developer device program. Nice piece of hardware indeed – but nothing revolutionary, as I expected.  Some comments (mostly rants – but my gratitude is still there and it is huge):

1. Built-in GPS is cool. But why does it take ages to establish the connection (I do not even mention the fact that it does not work in the room). I hope Nokia would fix it in the updated software (hopefully it is not a hardware issue).
2. The car mount is well-thought. But I am not going to use screws to attach it to my dashboard. Probably there must be some other way to use it…
3. The keyboard … well, I guess it will take some time to get used to it. I still did not figure out how to switch between English and Russian layout (which was trivial on n800 on-screen keyboard).
4. Nokia added special lock/unlock hardware switch. Nice touch. But IMHO much more useful would be two hardware volume control keys (or dial or whatever).
5. Why oh why they switched from SD to MiniSD? My 2G card I bought for n800 is useless here 🙁 And now I cannot take SD card from my Nikon D80 and show just made photos on shiny n810 screen :((( Seriously, could anyone explain? It seems MiniSD standard is dying (if you check on ebay). I could better understand switching to MicroSD… Strange move indeed. (as a side note, I do not quite understand the change of the USB socket as well).
6. They added 2G unmountable internal flash. Good and wise decision. But why didn’t they move /usr to that volume (may be, along with /home)? Having 256M for all filesystems is not too much – I noticed it in n800 days. I simply cannot install all interesting stuff from Application Manager!

Overall – I think Nokia is moving in the right direction. My only concern is the pace of the move. While the change from 770 to n800 was a huge leap, the change from n800 to n810 is a small step. Lads, please do not slow down. You are making a very cool gadgets – and there is still a room for improvement, I strongly believe you can make great gadgets.

Nokia N810: ordered

The discount codes seem to be working now. My N810 is on my way to me. Thanks a lot Nokia.

As another bit of my humble contribution (expressing the gratitude, you know;) – I’m putting some effort into making freeciv run on OS2008. There was initial version, made by Markku Vire for 770 – but apparently it does not run on OS2008 (yet). At least now it builds and starts – but more work is necessary. So we’ll see how it goes…

Nokia: like if you hadn’t enough complains yet

With all due respect, Nokia totally blew it, with new firmware. Servers are DDOSed. People complain, share the files using own hostings, they use torrents (why would Nokia not establish own torrent?). And new exciting canola2 release does not improve the situation either… The new firmware rocks, I must admit. The IT organization is poor, that’s a very sad fact.

OS2008/N800

Installed OS2008 on n800. Really sexy interface. And it seems a bit faster than it was. Some minor issues (which are just matter of time to see resolved, I hope):

• the browser is still crashing every now and then
• no vim available yet – how am I supposed to edit Ruby sources?;)
• becomeroot package is not available from standard repos, has to be taken from the “old” repo (thanks to the guys on #maemo who pointed me out)
• nearly no 3rd party home page applets yet. I especially miss the one which shown the local wifi IP address…

In general, it is pretty slick piece of software – and gives n800 a second life (and again, raises a question for any person going to buy n810 for a full price – why pay SO much more?).

N810 maemo submission accepted

Thanks Nokia. I really do appreciate it.