One thing I love about *nix

I use Xournal all the time on my N800. It allows me to take notes and sketches freehand rather than having to type on a little keyboard. Freehand is messier, but MUCH faster.

When I erase in Xournal I always use the eraser in its ‘delete strokes’ mode. I don’t know why that is not the default eraser mode. Fortunately nearly everything in Gnu/Linux (and other *nixes I think) has configuration files.

Had a look at the Xournal user manual and sure enough “Xournal’s configuration settings are saved to the file ~user/.xournal/config”. So on the N800 “vi ~/.xournal/config” change a “0″ to a “2″ and tada! Delete strokes is now my default.

Configuration files. I love that about *nix.

GPS, Today & Tomorrow

A lot of technology comes into general use after being developed or applied for military purposes. GPS is one of these.

I finally got an in-car GPS yesterday. A bit behind the times, I know. I had been making do with OpenStreetMaps on my N800. Yesterday morning while trying to find a customer in an unfamiliar area, with one eye on the road, one eye on a tailgater, one eye on the street signs and one eye on the PDA (and I don’t even wear glasses!) I finally decided I might try a GPS.

At the end of the day most roads in the region were clogged due to a surplus of accidents. The traffic helicopter lady sounded quite overwhelmed and it seemed unlikely that I could get home from where I was. So, I went shopping instead.

Bought a GPS. Should have bought a GPS a long time ago. It can tell me where the nearest Tim Horton’s is and guide me right to it! Most important — I can keep my eyes on the road while it tells me where and which way to turn.

Occasional glances at the screen show me what to expect ahead along with time, ETA, direction, speed, etc, etc. I found that I do like the 3D view better than the 2D view.. After a couple of hours though it occurred to me that a bit more military developed hardware could enhance the GPS.

Drones. A GPS should have an available personal drone aircraft.

The drone could fly over my vehicle and give a birds-eye view of the traffic around me. Particular hazards, such as erratic drivers, could be highlighted in yellow. Animals or pedestrians poised to enter the roadway ahead could be highlighted in orange. Approaching emergency vehicles could be highlighted in red and maybe flash as they get close in case their siren is not heard. Maybe the drone could have a spotlight to deploy when approaching dark-haired, dark-clothed, helmetless, lightless cyclists on dark roads at night. (Do those cyclists not think that being seen is prerequisite to not being hit?)

A driver’s space on the road would grow to include the airspace overhead, and the sky above busy roads would become pretty busy. Drones would have to be able to hover over traffic jams. If each drone remained over it’s associated vehicle though, there should be no (or few) mid-air collisions. Some autonomous obstacle avoidance would be necessary of course, lest trolley wires become the robotic equivalent of bug zappers. With all the military and law enforcement experience with drones in recent years we should be able to adapt drones to civilian use without too much trouble.

I love my new GPS, but I look forward to the drone upgrade.

Freerunner, SHR, WiFi

Finally got ’round to looking at WiFi on the Freerunner since installing SHR on it. SHR included an application called Mokonnect that looks nice but on my Freerunner didn’t work for WiFi.

Tinkering a bit I got the Freerunner to connect to my Linksys WRT54G with WPA2/TKIP & AES from the command line with…

root@om-gta02 $ wpa_supplicant -i eth0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf &
(that’s actually all one line)

root@om-gta02 $ udhcpc -i eth0

(of course with a suitable wpa_supplicant.conf file in place. I copied the one from my N800 and edited out the extraneous bits with vi)

That worked. Some time later I picked the freerunner up and it had lost the WiFi connection. A simple “ifup eth0″ got it back.

Later I installed an app called NWA. NWA worked too and looks pretty slick, but it wouldn’t connect to my other network’s WRT54G2 using WPA2/AES. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to try connecting from the command line there.

SHR likin’ this phone!

Had a few minutes to play with SHR on my Freerunner just now. Installed bluez4 — opkg install bluez4 — so I can use bluetooth between my Freerunner and N800. Or at least I hope so. I’ve never used bluetooth so am not sure how to proceed. Then happened to see that SHR has gpe-filemanager. I use some gpe apps on the N800, so — opkg install gpe-filemanager. Looks great!

Then thinking “Hmm. What if….” — opkg install xournal — and sure enough there it is! Xournal on my Freerunner! Now that is going to be handy.

Like the heading says, I’m shr likin’ this phone!

Freerunner – SHR, first impressions

Wow, where have I been? Oh well, I’m back and I got bored with OM2009 on the Freerunner. Not pretty enough I suppose. Also I wanted to run a little Python/Sqlite3 program that I’m working on. So I thought I’d try Debian. No I didn’t check whether I could run a Python/Sqlite3 app on OM2009. I never promised to be rational.

The Debian install script couldn’t partition the SD card because I had set up bind-home on it, so that partition on the SD card was in use as /home/root.

How to deal with that? I know, a sledge hammer! So I flashed SHR and Qi to the phone. That took care of the bind-home problem, but the Debian install script still wouldn’t complete. Each attempt seemed to generate different errors and it was late. I tried setting INST_MIRROR to different mirrors. Got different errors. No joy. Went to bed.

Next day, started playing with SHR. It’s pretty cool! And pretty! And Cool! It uses Illume to provide the ‘desktop’ environment. There is an easy to use slider for unlocking the screen. There’s Alarms, Calc (Not the OOo Calc, but a calculator app), Notes, Pidgin, Sketchbook, TangoGPS, Terminal and the usual phone apps; Dialer, Contacts, PhoneLog. There are some games including Numpty Physics which is something I’ve never looked at before but think I’ll be wasting lots of time with now.

The call volume is great and there are sliders on the screen for volume and mic. DTMF works! Speakerphone works!

Better yet, USB networking worked without any fiddling and a quick “opkg install sqlite3″ put Sqlite3 on the Freerunner and the Python/Sqlite3 app I’ve been working on runs just fine on it!

According the the OpenMoko Wiki about 60% of Freerunner users are running SHR and the majority of OM developers went to SHR. It shows! It’s not perfect. The calculator doesn’t work and I haven’t been able to get Mokonnect to connect to my WPA2 WIFI, but overall I’m impressed so far. I might just use this for a while.

Canadian Copyright Consultations

Copyright law is back on the government’s front burner and you can bet that the big players have hold of decision-makers big ear. If you care about copyright — and if you read, listen, watch or think, you should — make some time to get involved!

See the Government of Canada Copyright Consultation web page at http://copyright.econsultation.ca/

Freerunner Buzz-fixed — a few days in

Just a quick update on the Freerunner since it returned from SDG Systems where it was buzz-fixed. I flashed OM2009 to the phone and set up bind-home and have been too busy to think about the phone since. And the good thing is that I haven’t had to think about the phone since. It just works.

The default ring is fine. I make and receive calls and SMS. Call volume is good, call quality is good. Notifications are fine. At last (for now at least) my Free phone seems also free of troubles.

In the bigger picture, Maddog Hall posted some very interesting news re talks with the University of São Paulo, Brazil about their possibly getting involved in a very beneficial way with the OpenMoko/Freerunner community. Fingers crossed!

Freerunner Buzz-fixed

My Freerunner returned yesterday from SDG Systems where it was buzz-fixed. It doesn’t look like there has been progress on the notification issues with Android on Freerunner, so I opted to flash OM2009 to NAND.

First I tried flashing just the kernel and root filesystem, but it wouldn’t boot. So I flashed the u-boot from the same source as the kernel and root fs. After that the phone would boot.

Never content to leave well enough alone, I checked the GSM firmware version and found that it was moko-8. Moko-11 is recommended so I used the micro-sd method for flashing the GSM firmware. That left me looking at a white on green login prompt. I didn’t get the green d_o_n_e message.

On first boot following, GSM failed. Shut it down and it wouldn’t boot at all. It would get as far as “Starting hardware abstraction layer ….” then appeared to power off. No poking or tapping would elicit a response. But maybe it was just resting. After several attempts it booted. However after a long while it once again said;

“can’t init service GSM:
org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply:
Message did not receive a reply (timeout by message bus)”

which is followed by a chain reaction can’t init Gprs, TopBar, Audio, SIM, SMS. I’ll try flashing GSM firmware again.

I tried the micro-sd method of flashing the GSM firmware again and once again was left at a green login prompt. So I went through the steps to flash the GSM firmware the geek way and ended up with

“(fluid, version 3) ok
Checksumming (269 * 8kB = 2152kB): ok
Flash Detect: (0xEC, 0×22A0) Samsung K5A3240CT ok
Program: (0 sectors, 0*8k=0k) () ok”

which is supposed to mean that I’m trying to flash the same firmware version as is already there. So, reboot….

And it works! Oh happy day!

Now to set up bind-home and that’s enough playing with phone for today.

W233 Renew Voice Memo Update

If you happened to catch my first post on the Motorola W233 Renew (June 5) you’ll know there was a question of whether or not the phone could do voice memos.

Fido’s website said that the W233 can do voice memos, but I could not find that feature in the W233 menus. So I called Motorola and after quite a while on the phone was told that the W233 can not do voice memos.

So I phoned Fido to suggest that they correct the information on their website. After quite a while on the phone Fido told me that the W233 can do voice memos, but that it is a hardware feature not a service feature so I would have to call Motorola to find out how.

So I phoned Motorola and after quite a while on the phone was told that they would get back to me. That never happened.

So I emailed Motorola on June 28. The next day I received a reply from Motorola which said, in part, “The feature is not available in the menu of your phone.”

That got me wondering whether the hardware was present to do voice memo, but not the software. Might software be available in future? Or — and here’s where I’ve been spoiled by my Openmoko Freerunner — could a user add their own software? Perhaps this phone could run a python interpreter? So I posted my new questions to a Motorola users forum at https://supportforums.motorola.com A very friendly support forums manager named Mark soon replied that he would contact the product team and look into the voice memo question. I await further news there.

I also emailed Fido with an excerpt from the email from Motorola and again suggested that Fido correct the information on their website.

Today, July 3, I got an email back from Fido saying that my email has been forwarded to their website team and that the info on W233 features will be updated.

So there it sits. I’m a bit disappointed that the W233 can’t do voice memos. It will be interesting to see what response comes on the Motorola user forum. I’ll be very surprised (and pleased!) if there is any way for an owner to add software to the phone.

I learned a bit about the cell phone business too. I always thought that if a phone had a capability you got that capability when you bought the phone. Not so! Your phone may be crippled by the carrier you get service from! From a W755 thread on the Motorola forum (Mark again, he must be a busy guy);

“Unfortunately Verizon restricts the transfer of pictures and ringtones via USB cable. The drivers you downloaded are for charging via USB and are used in conjunction with Motorola Phone Tools. Motorola Phone Tools usage is restricted to Contact and Calendar connectivity only per Verizon’s restriction. You must purchase ringtones directly from Verizon or use MMS to send them to your Email address.”

Such evil! Imagine if there was truth in advertising. “We’ve crippled some of your phone’s built in capabilities in order to pick your pocket better. Thank you for choosing Verizon.”

The more I learn, the more I like my Freerunner.

Dual Monitors

It’s a dreary, fall-like day and I’m on a big couch cuddled up to a warm laptop when I find I need to do a side by side comparison of data in an accounting app window and a spreadsheet. Woe is me, I have only one monitor!

My main desktop machines have had dual monitors for many years. Being used to two monitors, it always feels crippling to only have one. I’ll probably fix my immediate need by unplugging a monitor from some other machine and plugging it in to my laptop external monitor port as soon as I finish this post.

If you have not tried dual monitors you really should. The ability to work on a document while researching on-line with both word processor and web browser open full-screen is wonderful. Or have one monitor for work and the second for IMs, Twitters or what have you. Any time you find yourself Alt-Tabbing between windows is a good time to have multiple monitors. And it’s easy!

My first dual monitor machine was a Celeron 533, Windows 98 box with onboard video and a $10 used PCI video card. Plug in the two monitors, right-click on the desktop and select … oh heck, I forget. “Configure desktop” maybe? I don’t have a Windows machine anymore, but it’s pretty obvious when it’s in front of you. Enable the second monitor and you’re off! Windows XP was just as easy and I’m sure Windows Vista is too. Have a look at this Windows blog…

On Linux it used to be a bit more difficult. You had to add the second monitor by editing your xf86config file manually. It could take a bit of trial and error, with care not to set too high refresh rates for fear of harming your monitors. These days dual monitors are detected and xorg.conf written automagically. You just have to make some decisions around options regarding how you want it to work. Here’s a good example of multiple monitors in action. Wow. I almost wish I hadn’t seen that.

In these days of virtualization I suppose a person could even run multiple OS with multiple monitors and have a separate ‘machine’ on each display! Hmmm.

You can do dual monitors with two video cards or pick up a video card that supports two monitors. It’s not difficult and it’s a great boon to productivity and workspace comfort. Give it a try!