June « 2006 « tigert.com | my life and stuff

25Jun/061

Cafe Americano

Those of us like me - who never learned spanish - might find this food dictionary site very very useful at dinner time at guadec - especially if one is equipped with a Nokia 770 or some other mobile internet device (if you don't mind the perhaps unwanted extra geek 'appeal' )

Filed under: Work, maemo.org, web, weblinks 1 Comment

24Jun/060

Guadec time

We arrived yesterday, after a slightly delayed flight ("technical reason") from Helsinki. Arriving at Barcelona airport we took a taxi to the place. We successfully used maemo mapper to find our accommodation as the driver was not familiar with Vilanova i la Geltrú. "Ah, GPS.. perfecto!"
Today is the warmup time, meeting people and trying to cope with the very warm conference hall. Imagine +27ºC, a hall without air conditioning and a few dozen laptops in there..

My talk will be on tuesday, and Henri, my co-comedian, will arrive tomorrow. Still some things to wrap up to finish it, but hopefully it turns out interesting

Filed under: Work, gnome, maemo.org, software No Comments

19Jun/065

Learning to deb

So I'm sitting at the University of Helsinki CS department again, been a while

This time it's a Debian packaging school organized by Lars Wirzenius - I figured this will be an useful skill to learn since I deal with themes, icons etc that also need to be packaged..

Filed under: Work, gnome, maemo.org, software 5 Comments

12Jun/060

English for Planet Maemo ;)

So, a beta of the Nokia 770 OS 2006 is out. It's cool.

Among other nice things it has is a full-screen thumb keyboard. After playing with it for some time I tweaked the settings a bit to make it suit even better for my own use. I thought I might share them here, maybe someone finds them useful. To change these, open the Settings dialog on the stylus keyboard.

First I turned auto-capitalise off. "Shift" function is also accessible by tapping the "abc" tab if needed.
I also turned off word completion. It is a "full" keyboard, so "guess-ahead" completion is not needed that much. It is more useful with a cellphone numeric keypad, but this has most needed keys already on the screen.
I also enabled "launch via rocker key" and "launch via screen touch" in the thumb keyboard tab in the settings. Pressing firmly and slowly on a input field with your thumb opens the fullscreen keyboard - very cool with the chat for example. "Rocker key" is the middle key of the directional keypad, and it is a handy alternative way to open the keypad. I found it useful with web forms where the input fields are very small and thus hard to aim with a big thumb. It doesnt seem to work for password fields though, those seem to need the stylus keypad.
Turn on screen "tap" sounds, as much volume as you and your friends can stand. It really helps you to get used to the keyboard tapping and key locations, as you get audible feedback of pressed down key events.

All in all, I like this "jabber in pocket" thing a lot.

Filed under: maemo.org, software No Comments

8Jun/060

Mugshot and such

I think I see the point now. Took a while to get over that "WTF? Redhat? Web services? Social networking and ajax?" -thingy, but in a way this is not much different from what I have been thinking about a lot lately as well.

There's a lot more software these days than what's we used to think of as "the desktop" as well. While working around Maemo.org I have realized the mobile devices, the OLPC, the internet tablet are a whole new area - and since it's a new frontier and while we have had some really interesting web services for a while - like flickr, google calendar etcetera - it's a whole new interesting trend to use those with mobile devices, blogging and posting photos directly from where you are. Blogging while commuting, posting pics when taking a break from a hike etc.. Checking out what your friends are doing tonight, maybe someone wants to go to dinner together.. there was this nice restaurant Joe found.. you get the picture. Software, part of the mythical "real life"?
Computers are starting to move around a lot. Laptops are being sold like crazy, and there are more and more of those small handheld thingys that one can use to access the net with. Very interesting stuff.

Filed under: Work, gnome, maemo.org, software, web No Comments

2Jun/060