Older blog entries for pycage (starting at number 54)

Looks like there'll be a new Internet Tablet with WiMAX in 2008. Intel has the details...

My office computer has no speakers, so I can't hear any sound. But with the help of my N800, it was easy to solve this problem:

1. open the terminal on the N800
2. run esd -tcp -public
3. make the (Linux) office computer use ESD for audio output
4. set the environment variable ESPEAKER on the office computer to point to the N800, like this: export ESPEAKER=192.168.22.80
5. enjoy the new network speakers!

Obscura Photo Manager 0.10 released

The Obscura Photo Manager for Nokia internet tablets has been released in version 0.10.

Obscura Photo Manager is the companion for your digicam. Organize, sort, annotate, and show around your photos with your internet tablet.

Obscura works with Nokia 770 ITOS 2006, and is believed to work with Nokia N800 ITOS 2007, but this has not been tested yet. Please report success or failure on the N800.

Special thanks go to Jiri Brozovsky for beta-testing and valuable UI-feedback!

Nokia is currently choosing 500 lucky people who will get the N800 for 99 EUR. And I was in the first wave of invitations. Many many thanks to Nokia! :)

Of course I have some plans with this device. First of all, I want to make sure my Obscura Photo Manager will work on it. Obscura is an application for the 770, though; I won't abandon that platform.

Then, we'll give gDesklets a second try on the internet tablet. Unfortunately, the 770 was too low on RAM to make good use of gDesklets. But now with Cairo available on the N800, it should be no problem to get the 0.40 developer version running there.

Obscura Photo Manager

It looks like Obscura Photo Manager already caught some interest even before its first release. Special thanks go to Jiri Brozovsky for beta-testing and for giving valuable feedback on the UI. And thanks to Teemu for making some advertising already. :)

There's still one week of January left, and the first release will make it these days.

The first release of Obscura is to be expected soon. I have already set up a project at garage.maemo.org for this. The code can be downloaded from SVN. An installer package will be available soon.

I have been asked about what will happen with Obscura now that Nokia has released the new Internet Tablet N800.
Obscura was designed to live with the limited resources of the old Nokia 770 and will thus certainly make a good citizen on the N800, too. In other words, Obscura will be developed for the Nokia 770 but should also work very well on the N800.

A happy New Year to everybody!

Obscura Photo Manager

As I have already mentioned earlier, I'm working on a photo manager application for the Nokia 770. Obscura (lat. camera obscura) is getting better and better every day, as the date of release draws nearer. So let me tell you a little bit more about it.

Obscura is not just another image viewer; it's a photo manager. This means that the application was designed for handling big images (one or three megapixels or maybe more) in digital photo albums. A photo album is a collection of several pictures, where each picture may have an annotation. The order of pictures in the album can be changed anytime by dragging the thumbnail preview images around. You can also drag pictures from one album into another.

Obscura's picture viewer component was made for being controlled with your fingers, so scrolling and other functions will be (literally) at your fingertips.

Have you ever tried scrolling a 5 megapixel photo fullscreen zoomed by 800% or more on the Nokia 770? Most likely not, and I think Obscura will be the first application on the device that can handle this kind of stress test! :)

If you're interested in the code (it's Python) or want to help, you can visit the project page on garage.maemo.org. I'm going to upload the code there soon.

The first version of Obscura will be released some time this month, so stay tuned.

... it's Christmas time, the blogs are getting longer...

Handling Photo Albums with the N770

During Christmas holidays I started working on another project for the N770. The device is a good size for showing around photos, so I'm building an application for managing and presenting photo albums. Special focus is on handling large albums with lots of photos on the device's limited resources.

There will be a stylus-controlled conventional hildon interface for managing, sorting, and annotating your photos, and a finger-controlled fullscreen interface for presenting them.

The app is still in an early stage of development, but I plan to get a first version released sometime in January. Screenshots will follow in a later post. I'm gonna setup a project at garage.maemo.org soon, once I have a name for the project.

This is my first real Python-project on the N770 and it shows that Python is really a good option for developing apps despite the limited resources. Python has been my favorite language for almost seven years now, so it's great to have it on the N770, too.

Some useful N770 Hacks

Get more out of your N770 with these little hacks.

• Easy Task Switching (aka car-mode)

  You don't want to use the stylus in car. Task switching, however, is difficult without a stylus. So let's put task switching on the menu hardware key.

  1. Become root
  2. Open the file /etc/matchbox/kbdconfig in a text-editor
  3. The file is usually empty. Just append the line F4=next
  4. Save the file and run the command matchbox-remote -keys-reload or restart the N770
  5. Enjoy the new car-friendly task switching by pressing the menu key!</b>
• Playing Ogg Vorbis files

  The N770 does not have support for playing Ogg Vorbis files. Up to now, I know of three solutions:

  1. My Ogg Vorbis Player project was the first to enable Ogg on the device. It supports album cover art, a playlist, and recently also Ogg Vorbis internet streams. The sound, however, gets jerky under heavy CPU load.
  2. mplayer was ported to the N770 and can play Ogg-Vorbis. The GUI does not show them so you have to use the command line.
  3. Recently a Ogg gstreamer plugin was published for the N770. This is the cleanest solution as it extends the system libraries so that the audio player and Canola can play Ogg files, too. The plugin doesn't yet support time information and tags, but it's already quite stable at playing Ogg.
• Playing Ogg Vorbis files with Canola

  The Canola media center happily ignores Ogg-Vorbis files pretending that the device cannot play them, even if you have installed the gst-ogg plugin. Let's have Ogg files show up in the list of music files.

  1. Shared Ogg files on a UPnP server show up and can be played without problems. At least when fuppes serves the media.
  2. Local Ogg files are listed and played by Canola if you change the file extension into something Canola understands, e.g. .mp3
  3. When playing local Ogg files with Canola, either have them write-protected, or don't rate them using the stars. Canola will corrupt writable files when rating.
• Using a bluetooth keyboard without the special statusbar plugin
  1. Find the bluetooth ID of the keyboard. The ID is usually printed onto the backside of the keyboard. You can also use hcitool scan on the N770 to get the ID (after putting the keyboard into discoverable mode).
  2. Open a text editor and write a simple script:

     	    #! /bin/sh
                 hidd --connect xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
                 maemo-gtk-im-switch xim
                 

     Replace xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx with the ID you found in (1).
  3. Save the script, e.g. to /home/user/keyboard
  4. Make the script executable: chmod +x /home/user/keyboard
  5. Run the script to connect the keyboard. If you saved the script to the memory card, you cannot run it directly, but have to invoke the shell, like sh /media/mmc1/keyboard

Leather case review

Proporta is selling a leather case for the N770 for about 13 EUR. My case arrived last week, so I'll write a little review.

The case replaces the original grey sliding case and fits the device perfectly. The touch screen and all buttons are reachable. The left arrow key, however, is still as difficult to reach as with the original case. The lid is aluminium-lined for additional protection of the screen (the aluminium is not visible as it's between two layers of leather), and closes the case with a magnetic button. Speaking about magnets, the original sliding case had a magnet at the right place to put the device into sleep mode while covering it. Proporta forgot about such a magnet in the lid, so it won't go into sleep mode immediately. Maybe that's a plus if you want to keep up a wireless or bluetooth connection while the case is closed. There's also place for up to three memory cards in the lid.

When the case is closed, you can still reach all buttons at the top of the device as well as the headphone jack, the stylus, and the memory card slot.

The production quality looks very good (from what I can say after a few days of usage) and Proporta gives a live-long warranty on the case. Now I can finally put the device into my pocket without worrying.

And last but not least, the case makes eBook-reading a whole new experience. It now feels exactly like holding a leather-covered small book in your hands, if you rotate the FBReader screen clockwise by 90 degrees.

So if you're looking for good value for money, this case might be the right choice. Especially since all the other N770 cases that I know of are more expensive (I haven't tested the other cases though; how good are those?).

I saw a ladybug today. I guess we'll have flowers and bees around Christmas...
Hmm no, I'm not in the southern hemisphere, I'm in central Europe.

Last week Nokia released the Navigation Kit for the Nokia 770. Since I was in need of a navi for business and since the Navicore software got positive reviews for other systems already, I decided to buy this bundle consisting of a car holder for the Nokia 770, a Nokia GPS module, a car power charger for the 770 and the GPS module, and the Navicore software on a 1 Gig memory card.

Some nice features:

• Very good auto-completion interface for entering street names
• Multitasking is possible, e.g. you can play a playlist with the music player in the background (audio playback is jerky for the first minute but then gets OK)
• Traffic info (traffic jams and safety camera locations) can be updated automatically via a bluetooth-enabled mobile phone
• Warning when approaching a known safety camera too fast
• Data transfer over phone is highly compressed and optimized, so it'll stay cheap
• Different routing modes for car, bike or hiking (it's not only a car navi)
• It's a Linux-powered GPS navi :D

The following should be pretty much standard, and the Navigation Kit won't dissapoint you here:

• Easy to install and mount (you'll need a screw driver for one screw)
• Easy to use
• Can navigate with or without GPS
• Good coverage (e.g. 99% for Germany & Alps)
• Optimized for use with fingers and the hardware keys, not a stylus
• Full screen keyboard for text input
• Clearly spoken directions in 11 European languages (female and male voice available for each)
• Always and clearly displays the names of the current and the next road
• Big screen font which is very good to read
• Quick rerouting when choosing to take another way
• Solid car holder for the Nokia 770
• GPS device is almost as small as a matchbox
• Software and maps are upgradable
• Coverage of many kinds of places of interest (gas stations, museums, restaurants, tourist info, etc... a long long list)
• Editable list of favorite places (think of bookmarks)
• Car power charger included
• Can be installed on any memory card big enough (512 MB or more)
• Different color schemes for daylight, bright sunshine and night
• 2D and 3D map modes
• Navicore installs a quick start applet which you can put on your Nokia 770 home screen
• The Nokia 770 is the perfect size for a car navi

Things I didn't like:

• Software has to be activated via internet within the first 7 days
• Software for map and software upgrades is for Windows only
• For the price of 350 EUR (Nokia 770) + 199 EUR (Navi Kit) you'll get at least two good navis usually (I got my Nokia 770 for only 100 EUR, so the price was OK for me)
• User interface inconsistency (dialog windows in the system style don't fit the rest of the interface)
• Only one map available at a time (e.g. it can't compute a route from Germany to France as both countries use different maps)
• The car power charger cannot charge the Nokia 770 and the GPS device at the same time
• The audio volume of the Nokia 770 is rather limited

And these are annoying:

• You shouldn't hold down the cursor keys for a long time as this will render the software unresponsive until all movements are being processed (the Nokia 770 isn't that fast)
• No quick access for changing the screen brightness (you have to leave fullscreen and fiddle with the status bar icon in the usual way)

So, would I recommend it? If you already have Nokia 770 and are still looking for a navi, then absolutely yes, but otherwise it's way too expensive together with the Nokia 770.

I somehow hate threads. They can add almost random behavior to any simple program and are a debugger's nightmare. Nonetheless, my Ogg Vorbis Player for the Nokia 770 makes heavy use of them.

I'm currently adding support for internet radio streams to the player; this sounds easier than it is! While the threads work fine together in the scratchbox environment, they're just wreaking havoc on the real device. Jeez, a state machine would have been predictable at least! This reminds me of the words of some famous person (don't remember who, though): "Threads are for those who don't understand the state machine." Some time ago, I got rid of all threads in the gDesklets core and was rewarded with better performance and less race conditions. Yes, threads pose evil threats! Avoid them wherever possible. :)

Back to my threaded hell... As soon as I get stream playback on the Nokia 770, I'm gonna release a new version of the Ogg Vorbis Player.