Older blog entries for pycage (starting at number 47)

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.

I recently caught myself surfing with firefox on my Nokia 770. Of course, firefox is a memory hog and will most likely never run on the tablet, but you can use SSH to start a remote firefox on your desktop computer and have it on the Nokia 770. That's the true power of X11! And for web surfing I need a network connection anyway, so why not use SSH? :D Apart from the missing keyboard, the experience was very good. With some tiny improvements such as a better onscreen keyboard, which can be enabled any time, Nokia could turn the 770 into the perfect thinclient, thanks to the power of X11 and esd.

How to enable task switching

The task switcher on the Nokia 770 has one big bug: for some reason it only lists "hildonized" applications instead of the opened windows. Thus windows of non-native applications (e.g. remote applications) can easily get lost.

Since I started to use remote applications quite often, I decided to get around this annoyance. The tablet runs a customized matchbox window manager, which is configurable through theme files. So I gained r00t and opened the file /usr/share/themes/default/theme.xml with a text editor and looked for the first line starting with "<button". Before that line, I added another line saying

<button x="320" y="0" w="60" h="60" action="next" options="inputonly,pressonly"/>

$ matchbox-remote -t default

One of the things I like about Unix is its great network transparency, e.g. you can run applications on a remote system with the program windows on your local desktop. The Linux-based Nokia 770 is no exception. The easiest way of getting a remote application on your tablet is by opening an X-enabled connection with OpenSSH (the dropbear SSH client doesn't support this):

$ /var/lib/install/bin/ssh -CX -l user remoteserver

All programs which you now open in the SSH shell will appear on your Nokia 770.

Adding Sound

If you now want to start your favorite media application, you will notice that all audio output remains on the remote server...

But this can be fixed as well. This time, however, you will need root access on your Nokia 770 in order to get it stable.

The tablet uses esd, the enlightened sound daemon, for audio. This daemon can receive audio from across the network, if configured properly. To enable this feature, you will have to start the daemon with the -tcp and -public options:

$ esd -tcp -public

Doing so, however, could freeze your display whenever the Nokia 770 wants to play sound locally. The solution thus is to startup esd with these parameters at boot time.

This will require root-privileges. Open the file /etc/init.d/esd with a text editor and change the line

DAEMON_OPTS=""

to

DAEMON_OPTS="-tcp -public"

and the line

dsmetool -f "$DAEMON"

to

dsmetool -f "$DAEMON $DAEMON_OPTS"

That's it. Reboot the tablet or restart esd and you can SSH into a remote system and redirect esd output to the tablet by setting the ESPEAKER environment variable pointing to the tablet's IP address, e.g.

export ESPEAKER=192.168.22.77

Now all remote applications that use esd will play sound on the Nokia 770. :)

I was asked about how to install album cover images for OggPlay, so I'll try to give a better explanation this time. :)

As of version 0.30, OggPlay cannot yet search for cover images on its own (that feature still waits to get implemented). But it can load covers which are stored in a freedesktop.org compliant way. You can either install the covers by hand or by using a tool such as albumart. albumart runs on Linux (but not on the Nokia 770) and according to its website on Windows as well.

If you want to install the covers by hand, here's how:

There is one cover per directory, so each album should have its own directory. Then look for an album image and put it into the same directory (you may choose any filename, but here I'll assume that you call it "cover.png"). Now all you have to do is create an ASCII text file ".directory" in the same directory with the following content:

[Desktop Entry]
Icon=./cover.png

That's it, enjoy your album covers! As a nice side effect, other Linux programs such as Quod Libet, Konqueror, etc. will make use of the covers as well.

Yay, there's finally a new release of my Ogg Vorbis player for the Nokia 770! :D

The new version features playlist support as well as album cover art. If you have a freedesktop.org compliant .directory file with your Oggs, OggPlay will display the image next to the song tags. albumart can download and install the cover art for OggPlay.

If you want to help with the project, you can find the source code in the Xiph.org SVN repository and my e-Mail address in the ChangeLog.

And what about gDesklets?

There is something similar to Google's Summer of Code going on in Finland. One of the projects there is: gDesklets! This means we'll have a guy working full-time on the project for three months. Congratulations, Lauri! :)

gDesklets 0.40 is going to rock!

And gDeskCal..?

The popular desktop calendar gDeskCal was started three years ago. By looking at its features, I consider the program complete. However, GTK changed a lot during the last three years, so that the program now throws a lot of deprecation warnings. It's about time to make gDeskCal compatible with recent GTK version. There are also new skins in the queue to be uploaded. I hope to get all this done this month.

How about a 1.0 release? :)

Although I finished my graduation thesis last September, I received my diploma only about two weeks ago. Some document was lost on the post way, as it turned out. The incident was discovered just in time for this year's graduation ceremony. Now I'm a lucky Dipl.-Inf. which is a German equivalent to Master of computer science. Yay! :D

gDesklets 0.40

The planning and prototyping phase for gDesklets 0.40 has already started. The new version will be a huge leap ahead and is being designed with portability in mind. Some people already dream of running it on phones (Lauri), iPods (chrisime), or the Nokia 770 internet tablet (me). Even Windows ports will be possible, although Vista will feature a similar System called Microsoft Gadgets. The new gDesklets core will be completely platform independent, so that only the backends have to be ported.

My Nokia 770 Top 3

Sudoku - This number puzzle game is really addictive.

FBReader - The Nokia 770 is a great lightweight eBook reader.

Image Viewer - The version coming with the latest firmware is finally fast enough for browsing photos. No more need to carry a laptop around for showing photos.

OpenGL-based desktops will make amazing things possible. I recently discovered Metisse, a promising research project with some really good ideas. And the best thing is: it's no vaporware; you can download and install it today! Just chant the usual ./configure && make && make install to get it running.

I especially like the ability to zoom windows by using the scroll wheel on the titlebar. This helps so much keeping an overview of the whole desktop. Some Expose-style feature is available as well (no eye-candy animation, though; it's more like expocity). And with Ctrl+Shift+I you can minimize the window: the window zooms out but is still running and updating its contents. It will even accept user input in that mode. :D

Metisse is currently using a modified fvwm window manager, and I don't know yet whether it can run on other window managers as well. It would be nice with metacity. :)

See Metisse in action and try it for yourself!

But still, one question remains... These are nice effects, but they need hardware accelerated OpenGL. Similar effects can be found on Mac OS-X, not requiring hardware acceleration. In fact, Expose etc. run very well with a VESA driver. Is X11 so lame that it cannot fly without accelerated OpenGL? :/

I have spent the last few days in Hungary visiting a friend in Szeged. She and her family were originally from Siebenbürgen (better known as Transylvania), so I had the chance to taste both, Hungarian and Transylvanian food. It was very tasty!

Unfortunately the weather was cold and bad, but still it was a great week with sight seeing, ice skating (I managed to learn it without falling), cinema (German movie with Hungarian subtitles), music concert, Silvester party, etc.

Budapest is also a very beautiful city, but I better come back when it's summer to not get wet feet again. :D