...stuff I do and things I like...

Sunday, February 17 2008

My N810 Review

I have a N810 since Wednesday so here is my micro review.

Good:
  • The Keyboard, I really love it. I noticed that I use it a lot (for everything possible).

  • Hardware buttons. Screen maximize/minimize moved to the left. New screen-lock button. This is really improves usability, excellent!

  • Look-and-feel, pretty awesome.

  • Speakers, they make NOISE!!1


Bad:
  • GPS fix time, almost unusable.

  • Mini SD slot. Is there really not enough space to put in a normal-sized SD/MMC slot?

  • Micro-USB, WTF?

  • The keyboard layout, missing symbols (pipe and tab). See solution below.


In order to make the device hacker compatible one needs to modify the keyboard layout and at least add a PIPE and a TAB key. This can be easily done by editing the X11 keyboard layout. Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility had some small discussion in his blog. For now I made TAB to be Fn-Space and PIPE to be Shift-Minus. This way I don't loose either Euro nor Sterling/Pound.

Some must haves:

Configuration:
    update-rc.d -f metalayer-crawler0 remove (this thing sucks!)

    gconftool -s -t string /system/osso/connectivity/IAP/DEFAULT/type DUMMY (you need this to play with the network)

Software:
    Statusbar Load-Applet (CPU and MEM usage)
    IpHome Home Applet (show IP address)
    Important command line utils: SSH, mtr, bluez-utils, nmap, socat, wireless-tools, dsniff, ...


New stuff I've been thinking about: Location Home-applet, shows current position (maybe with street name lookup). Temperature Home-applet (see internal-temp app). New hardware-keyboard-based version of xkbd-bthid, also I need to support Windows and MacOSX (this will take some time).

Any comments or ideas for applications?

Saturday, October 13 2007

Xkbd-bthid 0.2 for Maemo 3.2 (fix for the Nokia N800)

here is a version of xkbd-bthid (my Bluetooth HID-Keyboard software) that works on the Nokia N800 (Maemo 3.2). I've finally found the time to fix it, also the number of users writing me emails to report that it doesn't work grew quite large in the last weeks.

xkbd-bthid still only supports the BOOT protocol which basically means no Windows and no MacOS X support. Linux is supported if you add -B to the hidd command line. Ubuntu users can do this in /etc/default/bluetooth.

Support for the REPORT protocol will defently come to xkbd-bthid.

Also please read the the package information before installing. Since you have to perform one small step manually before xkbd-bthid works. This is setting setuid to the wrapper executable. This is because dpkg on Maemo still doesn't do setuid.

Download/Install it using my Bora repository

Sunday, January 28 2007

More N800 Software

while riding the train home after the weekend I rebuild my bluetooth software (btaudit, sobexsrv and xkbd-bthid) to turn on the N800. The packages are now available in my maemo repository. Also I found that the N800 now comes with it's very own obexserver so maybe sobexsrv is no longer needed.

Saturday, July 01 2006

Xkbd-btHID for Maemo2.0

so I just uploaded xkbd-bthid for Maemo2.0. You have to follow the install instructions otherwise it doesn't work!

I also installed the final version of the IT2006 software today. The first thing I noticed is that it is much faster or snappier then before, really nice.

Monday, January 16 2006

xkbd-bthid screenshot

click to get full size

here is a much nicer screenshot of xkbdbthid I took it using mst. Which is a nice networked screenshot tool. Also it tells you to only bind to 127.0.0.1 (localhost) you can access it from any computer on the network.

Sunday, January 15 2006

xkbd-bthid

...is my latest Bluetooth tool. It's a soft-HID device as I call it. This is a Bluetooth HID Keyboard software implementation. It turns your Linux box, PDA or tablet into a Bluetooth HID Keyboard. This is the same thing some of the newer cellphones have, now we have it for Linux!

This is the very first release, so expect it to be buggy. For example it doesn't support MacOSX by now (because I don't have a Mac) since MacOSX requires a other sub protocol (blablabla).

Check the xkbdbthid site and my Nokia770 page for downloads and instructions.

This is actually just my first HID tool, some more stuff is coming up but I just don't have any time now so I first release this cool thing for you.

Feedback is more then welcome as always!