Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

I’m about to hop on a plane to New Hampshire. Not a well planned trip, not really all that welcome, but it needs to be done. So just to make sure I could just zip thru what I needed, I cleared my email inbox down to about 40 messages a wanted access to on the road. A nice small inbox is necessary when doing email from the ‘executive model’ Nokia E61. Otherwise it gets confused and generally crashes, sometimes hangs.

Good thing too! Cause as I arrived I noticed that I had written down both the fake flight info for my flight and the real info (one of those ‘operated by’ flights) but forgot to note which was which. Never fear, I have that message right in the creamy middle of my 40 message inbox.

So I fire up the messenger client and wait. And wait. And wait. Listen to music for a little while. And then bing! Messages synced. Except the message I’m looking for isn’t there. Almost none of the messages are. Just a bunch of garbage I thought I deleted. Weird, I must have screwed up and not actually comitted the inbox changes? Could be.

So I fire up the N800 running the open source Claws email program. It’s a lot more tolerant. It can deal with my screw up. And I connect it via bluetooth to the E61. Get that? Cause its important. Using the network connection from the phone, so theres no network disparity.

Claws starts up in literally seconds, shows me my inbox list, which does indeed have the 40 items I expect it to. Including my flight info. Yay! Man I wish I could get a Maemo device with a cellular interface. Theres just no beating what an open community can do. I hope Nokia is learning from whats happening.

Russ has raved about FBReader, an ebook reader for Maemo, in the past. I had installed it before and tried it out, but had problems with the format of the books. He walked me through the stuff he was doing and gave me his FBReader config files, I’ve been trying it out since. I still have format problems, unordered lists in HTML seem to become just mashed up text without and formatting. Which was what really turned me off about it before cause it’s normally the first thing I see. But I’ve grabbed a few HTML based books and read a ways into them (seeing as how I’ve spent the last week lying on the couch rolling around in some half conscious state of delirium, it seemed like a good use of time). There are still some formatting quirks later on, but normally most of the nastyness is up at the start.

Here’s a shot of FBReader running on my N800, with the screen rotated and all so that pretty much the equivalent of a “small paperback” worth of text fits on the screen. It works out pretty well. I’ve grabbed a few online novels from random places, but most of my downloads have been from Project Gutenberg. The site is pretty usable from the built in browser. I select the compressed HTML version of the book whenever it’s available, and compressed plain text when not. Lots of them have three or four pages of unformatted cruft before the book starts, but once you make it past the table of contents the books are pretty readable.

I was fooling around with the layout of the home screen on my N800 last night:

Awww, pretty. I found a bunch of great info in this post on TabletBlog.com and got some tips about statusbar management through Flickr comments on another screenshot image post.

I had installed Simple Launcher from the app manager after grabbing it from the application catalog, but that one didn’t have the option to make the background transparent. Just go directly to the Simple Launcher homepage and use the link to the deb package there, that version has a bunch of new options and looks mighty slick. The other non-standard applets I have on there are omweather set to display my home town of San Mateo. And the Yellownotes applet (with color and font size preferences changed) to give me a place to jot down reminders.

I’m not a huge fan of the RSS reader, I want a way to sync the device RSS reader to the reader running on my server. So for now I just use that from the browser. I would also love to have a way to sync the contacts and calendars from my E61 directly over to the device. Contacts wouldn’t have made a huge difference before except for use in the email client, but with Skype available for the device I would like to have the phone numbers there as well.

Just playing around a bit with the Maemo SDK. I almost forgot about the DNS issue under Ubuntu (maybe others). You need to change the /scratchbox/etc/nsswitch.conf file in order to resolve hostnames from within scratchbox.

I just got a note from the folks at the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group saying that their meeting tomorrow is focused on Maemo. Excellent! I was just rereading the 3.x version of the Maemo developer tutorial this weekend in preparation for some hackery. Here are the essential details for the LUG meeting, in MoMo standard format (PATENT PENDING!!):

• What: September 2007 Silicon Valley Linux Users Group (Maemo)
• When: September 5th, 2007 7:00pm
• Where: Symantec VCAFE Facility, 350 Ellis Street, Mountain View, CA 94043
• Who: Anyone interested in Linux
• Cost: Nothing!

I’m going to try to rip myself away for a bit to make it down there. It’s been way too long since I’ve been to a LUG meeting.

Just trying out a post from the Python based Maemo WordPy client. I was also fooling around with Minimo, but was having a bunch of issues with the UI. Fortunately it looks like the Maemo version of the Minimo source code seems to be uploaded to the garage. Not that I really think I’ll have time to hack on it, but it’s nice to see that the option exists.

I was feeling like I just don’t spend enough time with mobile Linux recently. So I updated the Ubuntu install on my laptop and set out to install Maemo. Ended up having a bunch of problems though. If you’re looking to get the maemo SDK installed under Ubuntu 7.04 keep in mind that the nsswitch config under scratchbox needs some tweeking apparently.

I’ve been pretty insanely busy lately, but that didn’t keep me from borrowing an N800 to play around with. There are little things that make the device a lot nicer, but the price of the thing is way way higher than the 770 as well. I haven’t formed a full opinion of it yet. My major takeaway so far is that usability still really needs some help. All I wanted to do was connect to GTalk an check out how the IM app works, but I was having a hell of a time with it. Grrr!!!

The application manager in the new OS release for the Nokia 770 really rocks. However I always have trouble searching up the application repository list for Maemo. I’ve seen a bunch of postings online from folks who also seem to be missing the info. So I’m linkng to it in the hope that next time I look for it the results will be better.