tigert.com | my life and stuff

4Nov/093

Ogg? Vorbis!? What?

I looked at the internet radio stations in Finland, and discovered that MetroFM does have one. The fact that their stream uses ogg/vorbis format doesnt stop me from enjoying it in the N900 though

Sweet

edit: too bad their terms only allow streaming to ip addresses in finland.

Filed under: maemo.org, software, web 3 Comments

3Nov/0912

Firefox for maemo..?

So planet maemo is having a nice breeze about Fennec for N900. Nice youtube video and all.

But: dear friends, where the heck is the latest packaged version? I would like to try t out on my N900.

I tried googling, and found fennec for N810/N800 and some wikipages which I wasnt sure which version they talked about... I am left with this uncertainty, as I am not a Mozilla project insider. It would be nice if the video and blog posts would include a nice url. Maybe there is a website with all this info, but I, as a potentially interested person, havent found it..

So, where can people find it?

Filed under: Work, maemo.org, software 12 Comments

18Oct/0916

Photojourney with N900

Here are some of the best photos (in my opinion of course) that I have taken with the Nokia N900 during the recent months. I'm pretty amazed with the camera quality and the fact that it's so easy to tag pictures and to post them to flickr and facebook etc.. directly from the device itself. Hope you like them too

It's pretty sweet, especially when you think it's gstreamer and other Gnome technologies under the hood doing the work...

Filed under: Work, general, gnome, maemo.org, photography, software 16 Comments

7Oct/094

amazing N900 camera hack ;-)

My friend Mohammad made this amazing camera hack on his N900 and I had to try it too - works great for nice effect... It's very simple actually - basically take a piece of dark cardboard, make a small hole in the middle and try to position it in the center of the lens and place the back cover in, which locks it in place. Simple, but effective fun - one of those simple things that makes me smile... Thanks for sharing!

Mohammad in test shot (low light = lots of noise)

The Amazing Vignette Filter separated

Filter in place..

Anyone else done something like this? I started to ponder 3M magic tape for "haze" effect already...

Filed under: design, maemo.org, photography 4 Comments

23Sep/091

New gPodder for Maemo… Wow! :)

So it looks like Thomas liked my ideas about gPodder user experience. Sweet!

New gPodder main view

I guess I need to draw some of those icons now... =) Stay tuned!

(Here is a funny thought for today: Ihink the N900 and boring meetings are the key to revive my blogging Wordpress editor works just great with the Firefox-3-based browser in the device.. )

Tagged as: gpodder, maemo, podcast, user experience 1 Comment

7Sep/095

Ho hum..

I am having one of those "long time no blogging" moments again But whatever, I have some thoughts I have wanted to blog about, and also a goodie for those of you who are enjoying the new Maemo and the N900 device already.

GPodder fun

I've been bicycling to work all summer and I enjoy listening to podcasts and internet radio while enjoying the fresh air. I recently installed gPodder and enjoyed the new maemo5-style user interface a lot. The application is easy to use with fingers (not recommended while biking! seriously! ) but I there are a few thoughts I wanted to share. I am sorry to use the lazyweb for this instead of contacting the guys directly - but maybe this sparks up some interesting discussion, so what the heck.. read below for some lengthy ascii-art UI design proposal fun and for the N900 goody surprise..

GPodder: Adding podcasts

I already wrote a nice, polite paragraph about how it would be nice if gPodder would just fetch the RSS feed url information from the website for me, so I could just type "www.uncontrolledairspace.com" into the "Enter the podcast feed URL" -dialog. You know, so I would not need to worry about finding the RSS feed url by hand.. then I tried..

It does it already!

So maybe the dialog title should read "Enter the podcast web address" instead? Like this:

[ # ][ 13:37 %& ] gPodder ________________[ X  ]
|::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
|::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
|::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
|::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
|::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
|::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
|============== Add new podcast ===============|
|                                              |
| Web address: [______________________][ Add ] |
|______________________________________________|

Notifications

When you add a new podcast, the popup notification that says "downloading episode information from.." in a notification banner. I guess this is because you don't have any information about the podcast yet, so you couldnt show the name in the podcast list. How about creating a list item for the new podcast, showing "Downloading information..." in there until you get the RSS feed, and then populating the list with the real data? This would be more consistent with how updating a podcast works, and it would avoid the popup banner that feels like it's blocking the user interface.

Navigation

The two-column main view is not really useful in a small screen, as both sides contain pretty long lines of text. So you end up having just a bit of your podcast names visible, or alternatively just a bit of the episode list. It might be more useful to split this view into two. So that when you start gPodder, you would see just the list of podcasts. Or, maybe a front page like this:

[ # ][ 13:37 %& ] gPodder_________________[ X  ]
|                                              |
|                                              |
|        _                           _         |
|      _| |_         /`´´\         _| |_       |
|     |_   _|      (_|o_O|_)       \   /       |
|       |_|          `  °´        .-\ /-.      |
|                                  ˙˙˙˙˙       |
|   New podcast    Podcasts      Downloads     |
|                                              |
|______________________________________________|

Press "Podcasts" to get to the list:

[ # ][ 13:37 %& ] gPodder Podcasts _______[ <= ]
| /icon\  Daily Source Code                  * | <= green dot
| \here/  4 new, latest 2 days ago             |    (new stuff!)
| -------------------------------------------- |
| /icon\  Uncontrolled Airspace Podcast        | <= no green dot
| \here/  Latest 5 days ago                    |    (all listened)
| -------------------------------------------- |
|                                              |
|                                              |
|                                              |
|______________________________________________|

One could sort them by (Name | Updated | Recently listened ) via the menu? Once you click on a podcast, it would open a new view with episode information about that podcast:

[ # ][ 13:37 %& ] gPodder: Uncontrolled A_[ <= ]
| Uncontrolled Airspace #151                 * | <= new
| "Dave needs NyQuil" - 3 days ago             |
| -------------------------------------------- |
| Uncontrolled Airspace #150                 * |
| "Dave needs NyQuil" - 12 days ago            |
| -------------------------------------------- |
| Uncontrolled Airspace #149                   |
| "Midnight in the Morning" - 21 days ago      |
| -------------------------------------------- |
|______________________________________________|

From there you would naturally show the episode information for the selected one.

Wow, now that was some ASCII-art.. I wonder how this works out in Planet Maemo and on the blog itself..

Oh right.. the surprise. I made some N900 wallpapers, go grab them from here. Hope you like them

Filed under: Work, design, general, maemo.org, software 5 Comments

15Apr/094

Argh.

why cannot comment spammers just do something useful with their life?

(edit: hm.. I think it's time to redo my planet gnome "hackergotchi" image..)

Tagged as: spam 4 Comments

16Oct/072

hello world

Upgraded my wordpress, was long due.

I have noticed a decline in my (not that active) blogging lately - very likely due to the jaiku.com, facebook and flickr etc social web overload altogether. Also, like some others have also suggested, it seems "microblogging" (jaiku etc) really reduce the amount of "proper" blogging, as the daily life and its little quirks and delights get written in such sites already. There are even less meaningful things to write to ones blog, I guess.

Yet, Jaiku, for example, is nothing more than a "planet" and some IRC-likeness thrown in. But it encourages you to write short messages instead of long posts. And it pulls in the comments to a feed. Hmm. That would be an interesting addition to Planet btw - if it could aggregate blog posts and their comments into one "flow"..? Might be interesting, or insane. Not sure which

However, let's see. I am starting to be just way overwhelmed with all this "web2.0" crack anyway, maybe things settle down eventually. Interesting observation nevertheless.

Tagged as: facebook, jaiku, microblogging, socialweb, wordpress 2 Comments

13Jul/070

Guadec approaching..

So, its this time of the year again. For those who have the Nokia internet tablets and are going to be there, this might be useful (I created a small location database for maemo mapper, containing some things related to guadec 2007)