Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

I was taking a look at a few things this morning along the lines of mobile browser support for extensions and customization. Following along the theme of Russ’s post about using Mowser as a search provider in Opera Mini I just put up a “View in Mowser” bookmarklet for Opera Mini. Thanks again to Dennis at WAPReview for having raised bookmarklet support in Mini to my attention. You can find a collection of Opera Mini friendly bookmarklets at o.yeswap.com.

I have a shortcut setup for this on my install of Mini now. Once you create the bookmarklet and have it working, go into the bookmark manager and select the “Speed Dial” entry. There you can set the bindings for shortcut keys. I have the View in Mowser bookmarklet bound to *1, so I don’t even have to bring up the bookmarks screen to use it.

Opera Mini rocks, I’m surprised to see that the Nokia open source browser still hasn’t grown support for bookmarklets. One other place where it does work however: the Mozilla based browser on the N810. Very cool!

I was playing around a bit more with the N810 this morning. What I’m aiming to do is not need a laptop when I leave the house. The N810 should be perfect for that. What I was trying to get going was syncing the calendar that I keep on my desktop and N95 to the N810 as well. Seems like it should be easy. I use iSync on my Mac to sync up the laptop and the N95, I was expecting to find something that would allow me to relatively simply pull in some software that would allow the N810 to participate in that. I did find some interesting bits of software that would lead in that direction, but didn’t get it working. Then I was trying to get a read-only version of my calendar on the N810 using the GPE Calendar program. But even though I have ical exports up on my server, the calendar app was failing to subscribe to them. Finally I had to settle for using Google Calendar subscribed to my ical feeds to view them on the device. Google Calendar, also, is not syncable using iSync. There’s some commercial software that provides it… but no thanks. Why is it that calendar and contact management still blow after all these years? Wasn’t the standardization on Bluetooth as the transport supposed to fix this whole data problem?

While playing around with Google Calendar I was also poking at the new Mozilla based browser. Check out the info about it here. I’m happy to see that it supports extensions, which in some case can be simple repackages of desktop extensions. No UI elements for the browsers though, which is kinda restricting. Something I wanted to poke at was support for bookmarklets. Do they work? How do they compare to their desktop equivalents? Questions for another time, need to go run about for a while… with my laptop unfortunately.

Trying out a posting from MaemoWordPy on the N810. The keyboard certainly is nice. Still a lot of work to be done in porting apps over from previous versions though. I miss my home screen apps.

Calendar and contacts support still doesn’t seem to cross to the phone at all. There is no calendar app built into OS2008 still. Contacts don’t sync from my N95 to the N810 either. In an ideal world I would be able to use the N810 for everything, even voice calls and sending and receiving SMS messages, without having to take my handset out of my backpack.

The folks at AdMob got me an N810 as a going away present:

Omar took the time to poke around and ask Russ what I was lusting after but didn’t already have, and the N810 was at the top of the list. As if I didn’t already have enough good stuff to say about the folks there, they went and piled even more icing on the cake. Thanks everyone!

I’ve already screwed it up, but then fixed it. So it’s all good. Just want to lay down the order of operations in case anyone else runs across it. My problem was pretty much the same as the one described here, after updating the firmware the internal memory card was getting mounted read-only. I discovered this because I was trying to install apps using the package manager and it was failing. The app manager log viewer showed the errors as /media/mmc2 being read-only. I think this was related to me setting up swap on the internal storage card and it being on when I did the firmware upgrade.

The kicker was that I had yet to install becomeroot or SSH, and I hadn’t reset the passwords. So how do you unmount and reformat the internal card on the N810 pre-hackery? Here it is:

• Enable RD mode using the flasher. Despite the indication to the contrary on the HowDoIBecomeRoot page, you can enable RD mode on the N810 to enable access to gainroot. Just run ‘flasher-3.0-static –enable-rd-mode’ using the same process described for firmware updates (plug in the N810 with the power off, run command, power on while holding home key).
• Now you should be able to use ’sudo gainroot’ from xterm (which is distributed with the base OS, interesting) to get root access to the device.
• Unmount the internal card using ‘umount /media/mmc2′.
• Reformat the internal card, which will destroy all the data on there. For me this wasn’t an issue cause I had yet to put anything at all on the device. The command I used was ‘fsck.vfat -a /dev/mmcblk0p1′, which is a slightly different device name than given in the Internet Tablet Talk forums, I think there’s just a typo in that version.
• Reboot the device and run ‘mount’ from the command line, you should see /media/mmc2 as read-write mounted now.
• Do a little victory dance.
• I installed openssh and reset the passwords for both the standard user account and root account.
• Disable RD mode using the flasher using ‘flasher-3.0-static –disable-rd-mode’. Power consumption and response times seem to really suffer with RD mode left on, so I always turn it back off now.

Seems like a really nasty firmware update bug too, if I weren’t prone to hackery of the sort or attentive with respect to what’s causing errors I could have easily assumed an incorrect root cause for these issues. I was already on my way down the path of cursing the package repositories for including screwed up dependencies before I realized the app installer log indicated a completely unexpected error from the underlying tools. The package manager should really throw a better error for something like that.

Russ pointed out a different version of Ruby for Maemo than I had tried before. This one has a hildon library and GTK support, w00t! I tried out a few of the examples but haven’t dug into it too much. Requiring the hildon module throws a bunch of warnings, but the module works perfectly once it’s in.

Apparently the N810 is on shelves somewhere. I’m not going to frusterate myself by trying to order it from NokiaUSA however, that would just be stupid. But it’s supposed to be in Best Buy and CompUSA. Neither of the online systems for those stores know what an N810 is. No one I’ve managed to reach in the corporate office or at any of the branch locations in the Bay Area for either of those stores know what an N810 is, and when asked to check everyone comes back saying it’s not in stock. They don’t know when it will be in stock. Call back later. Anyone sighted the thing in the wild? I really want one now, like right-now-this-very-second now!

The N800 is a fantastic device for web and IM, but I’ve been poking around with how to make it more useful as a production device. Or something more like a personal dashboard. I would like to have the device sync with my server and other services out on the net when it goes online and pull in a bunch of info. Pull down stats from the web server, comments and links from the weblogs, a few slices of info from my inbox, stats from AdMob and Adsense, juicy stuff from the newsreader.

The way I’ve been dealing with that stuff in general is with an IM bot, which works out pretty well from the device. The IM support in Maemo is pretty sweet. However I’m having some information density and interaction issues. So I’ve started fooling around with the Python port to see if I can make something useful. Just need a few independently updating ‘windows’ and some nice small buttons to change views. Should work till I can get data glasses.

The N800 comes with a package called docpurge that deletes files which for most users are just cruft. I end up installing some packages that install stuff I actually want in places like /usr/share/doc. I want to keep them around, but I also don’t want them sucking up core memory either. Fortunately the script that cleans up the files is just a shell script that gets called by the package manager, its located at /usr/sbin/docpurge. I modified mine to check if the internal MMC card is present, and if so copy the files from /usr/share/doc out to the card before removing them. Good enough for what I want.

The next revision of the internet tablet from Nokia, the N810 looks like one sexy beast. I certainly hope they manage to get this out into retail outlets quick, seeing as how Nokia can’t manage to sell me things online. I did actually consider for a while if my disgust should extend to the Linux devices as well, but I don’t think I have to do that. After all, selling something like a laptop is “much different than selling an unlocked phone” according to NokiaUSA. I wonder if selling an internet tablet is more like selling a phone or like selling a laptop? I bet that discussion could get pretty meta pretty quickly. Doesn’t matter though, I want me an N810, I just know where I’m definitely NOT going to try getting it from.

One of my main concerns is that the dpad seems to be on the slider and just the back and home buttons are on the side when the slider is collapsed. The way I have opera on my N800 configured I use the dpad a lot. Just easier to activate links on pages with small type and close spacing. I’m concerned about how that might work out with the pad on the inside. Still looks like a minor annoyance when compared to a well positioned camera, full keyboard, and 2gig of memory. Oh baby. I’m not sure I would say it makes the iPhone look 5 years old though. Seeing as how it lacks a, you know, phone. Kinda essential feature they keep leaving out on these things. I bet all the folks at the NRC in Palo Alto have a lot to say about that, maybe someone should ask them what they think. Hmm, maybe?

I’ve swapped from Gregarious to OMGWTFBBQ a while ago, mostly because it rocks on the N800 when compared to the other stuff I’ve tried. And of course cause I named it, so I think it has a fantastic name. Give it a shot if you’re looking for a nice simple reliable multi-device RSS reader you can use from a phone, tablet, and desktop web browser.