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Chumba! Wamba!

Sat 30-Jan-2010 in english, geek | Please leave a comment!

I was informed by my colleague the other week that the Chumbies have invaded Finland and that the Chumby One model is for sale at Verkkokauppa for 99€. Weak spot. I have dreamed for this cute but kind of useless … no, just cute device since the original “Latte” model was introduced, yonks ago. Checking my archives, that would be the 13th of November 2006. Whoa.

With little sanity to hesitate me, i ordered not one but two of these puppies. One to hack and the other just to toy gently with [0]. And yesterday they arrived. I named them Chumba and Wamba (yeah). Wamba is still in the cardboard box because my wife is still in a state of denial that i paid a hundred euros for a clock radio [1]. The closest thing to a nod of approval was received upon informing her that it can work as alarm clock.

Currently, i am in two confused minds. And one blissful. I have a device which shows the time, displays pretty pictures and plays The Dividing Line. Which is nice. Also, i have this wonderful little thingy, an embedded Linux computer with a wireless network connection and a touch display and i can’t even begin to think what funky things i should be doing with it! But most of all, i’m fascinated by how my kids react to the physical user interface, how effortlessly and naturally they interact with the dangling spider on the display by tilting the box, or how they make it moo by turning it upside down.

So even if i won’t ever get this to be my wireless link between home and office, or a controller of my yet-to-be-realized home automation network, or even a music library controller, i can still learn how to do things differently. I guess it’s about time to start learning Open Laszlo, since Flash is the native UI platform on the Chumby. Or FlashDevelop. Or HaXe or the Ming lib. Or just port Silverlight to the Chumby and have our guys dev some really slick schtick for it :) (or maybe not)

A usability guru Don Norman once wrote about information appliances, and i think a Chumby is well suited  to become one once i decide what one or two things it is supposed to do well. Now it’s more a twitter-like miracle that you can do anything with and hence there’s not really anything to do with it well. No focus, so to say. The only thing i’ve done so far is to ssh into it and create a cron script that switches between night mode and day mode at 22:00 and 7:00 respectively. But once i come up with something, i’ll surely let you know.

[0] Update: Wamba’s power supply was broken so now i’ve got to make it an RMA to Verkkokauppa. And bob knows when i’ll have another one. Yeah, they want me to return the whole device, not just the psu. Bustards.

[1] The fact that she showed me the two pairs of nice but not entirely cheap pairs of nearly identical shoes she got for herself might have saved me from more excruciating scrutiny.

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Wanted: Networked ePaper photo frame

Wed 6-Jan-2010 in english, geek | 1 comment

I just realized what was wrong with digital photo frames. The fact that they shine, like monitors do. They emit light to display a picture.

If they would require light to show a picture, much like a printout, they would look a whole lot more natural. And the answer to that is to use e-paper. Colour e-paper to be specific. It doesn’t even have to be touch sensitive, though that would be a bonus. I’m just not sure if touch sensitive electronic paper is invented yet. Could be. Should be.

So if somebody out there just got a terrific business idea with this, the least you can do is send me a few networked epaper photo frames for making you stinking rich. Thank you.

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Nya kännyckegenskaper

Thu 6-Jul-2006 in geek, svenska | Skriv en kommentar!

Nokia ryktas integrera in en metalldetektor i mobiltelefonen. Praktiskt om man ska hitta sina borttappade nycklar på beachen (eller sin telefon). Men det är inget i jämförelse med LG, som skapat en kännyck med inbyggd promillevarnare. LG LP4100 vägrar ringa till mamma eller chefen då användaren själv saknar behövligt omdömme. Tänk att inte Nokia hittat på den egenskapen själv!

Update: Nåmen si! pni tangerar samma ämne i sitt senaste blogginlägg.

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Impressions of a 770

Mon 19-Jun-2006 in english, geek | Please leave a comment!

I got to borrow a Nokia 770 from work for the weekend. It’s a nifty little piece of hardware which has two distinctive features: it is not a phone, and it runs on Linux. OK, maybe the second point is distinctive only if you’re a geek … which must make me one. Oh well, guess i didn’t know that before.

I named it Colin.

The most immediate wow-factor comes from the screen. It looks fantabulous. The resolution is above anything i’ve seen on a digital device anywhere ever, period. The font rendering is so crisp that a limiting factor to what is legible are my eyes, not the screen’s capabilities.

The N770 comes with a web browser that displays GMail in “native” mode, a RSS reader, an audio player (mp3, not ogg), RealPlayer for video stuff, a picture viewer, a PDF viewer, a notes application, a paint application and a few games (including a beautiful match-the-tiles “Mah jong”). Nokia explicitly markets the 770 as a surfboard, not a PDA, so the device does not come with a calendar, an alarm clock or a to-do list. But it does have a nearly usable (as in “easy-to-use”) WLAN and Bluetooth connection — both of which i’ve tested — and it will show up as a USB mass storage, so it’s still pretty cool.

And it runs Linux. Which means you can install a sizable number of applications on it. Which is nice, but.

The first app i installed was XTerm. Aaah. Command line. What a feeling of relief and togetherness with the machine! Linux and i… oh, sorry where was i? XTerm installed without a hitch using the .deb package and the built in Application installer.

Sadly, there ended euphoria. I installed a few “necessary” tools like DSniff and Wireless Tools, which installed nicely but to the less-than-obvious location /var/lib/install/usr/sbin, but then refused to do anything proper. The reason, i believe, is a mixture a less than adequate measure of clue and the lack of root access to the device (in brief, download flasher to a Linux/OSX box, carefully flash the 770 over USB, open xterm and sudo gainroot then su - et voila, thou art root). And i was too lazy to increase on either of them for just a weekend test. Maybe if i get to borrow it for a longer time…

I also installed an OGG player, which alas does not play ogg streams, only local files.

I then considered installing SSH to the device, but both Dropbear and OpenSSH really benefit from root access so i decided i wouldn’t be bothered (now, though, it is starting to bother me — am i not enough of a geek after all?)

Finally, i tried what i came for: receiving a video stream from my home box to the 770. For that, i used the VLC. Just a few days before, i had managed to get a pretty picture to my work-laptop (Linux) and at least some kind of a moving jumble to my PDA (Windows). But the 770 wouldn’t be so easily amused. The user friendly litle piece of software asked for a web address to stream from. Which in plain lang… no, in geek language means something of a pointer/playlist file accessible over http. My butt. I got disgruntled to the point where i had to blog about it.

Finally, i must vituperate (ha, that’s a new word for me!) the hopelessly inadequate hanwriting recongnition of the 770. It just sucks. It leaves out letters it doesn’t recognise and it leaves me feeling silly and incommunicado. And it feels like it’s my bloody fault. Which it, technically speaking, of course is, but i still don’t like it that way.

Yarr.

But apart from all of that, it still is a nifty little piece of hardware.

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Mera leksaker

Fri 16-Jun-2006 in geek, svenska | Skriv en kommentar!

.Jag har en Nokia 770 til låns från jobbet, och det här skriver jag på just den mojängen. Mitt första intryck av apparaten är att den ser piffig ut… och har ett handstils-igennkännings-system som suger ägg i busslaster. Det konstigare är ju det att min kollega Ursula, som oxå har en 770 i låns tycker att handstils-systemet funkar hur fint som helst. Jag antar att hon bara skriver bättre än jag.

Maskinen döpte jag till Rodney, för jag var för trött för att komma ihåg att Rodney egentligen heter Colin. Men nu heter den då Colin. Mer kommentarer senare.

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Toys toys toys

Mon 2-May-2005 in english | Please leave a comment!

It’s my birthday on Friday. Here are some toys i don’t expect to get:

  • The Airscooter II is an ultralight helicopter that this doesn’t require a pilot license. Space for one. Can take off from your lawn and land at the parking lot at work.
  • Vocera’s communications badge, which doesn’t look like it comes from Star Trek TNG, but nearly works like one.
  • A hiphopper’s pocket sice PC from OQO or Vulcan.
  • The N91.

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Nifty Ninety-One

Fri 29-Apr-2005 in english, geek | Please leave a comment!

OK, Nokia has done it. They’ve finally published the phone i want. The N91. Packed in stainless steel (yesh) and not decisevly larger than a 2 cm thick business card, it has, well, basically everything. 3band gsm, b/10 (e)gprs, edge, Wifi 802.11b/g, wcdma (for those returns to Tokyo), two cameras –one for pretty pictures, one for videconferencing– a 4 gigabyte HD storage for music and pictures, and FM visual radio.Oh yes, and no OGG support (damnit), but this being a series 60 phone, i guess it shouldn’t be too long until somebody ports a player for it. Maybe even in time for Q4 when this phone is supposed to hit the street market. Also i didn’t see push-to-talk (PoC/PTT) advertised, but either i haven’t been paying attention or it’s just a software add-on. I hope. It’s only a shame that i can’t pick one up on my way home, which will be on the 10th of June 2005, landing at around 16:35 on the SAS from Copenhagen. If everything goes well, that is. Still, you can come to the airport to meet me :)

With a built-in iPod killah (it plays m4p:s too) and being affiliated with Nokia’s N-Gage line, it is obvious that this phone is targeted to the techie spearhead early adopter consumer junkies (like me), not to the serious business user (like i, ahem, should be). Since the N-series are built on s60, there really is no reason why ond couldn’t use it for “serious use” as well. N-series? Well, there are “crippled” versions of the flagship N91. The N90 flips open and you can twist the display half, and a small “outer display” to show who’s calling. It has one 2Mpx camera with optics from Carl Zeiss himself. And you can videoconference over the Edge, and synch or print over bluetooth or usb2 and connect to the office server over vpn. The N70 is basically a multimedia/smart phone for grannies or business users. Capable but unexciting.

Nokia has, as i think i mentioned earlier, gone to bed with Microsoft, so the N91 might well synchronize with Outlook. Of course, i would rather see it synchronize with Linux, which probably will happen soon enough, as there has been Linux tools to talk with Nokia phones for quite some time now. There’s even a tool to talk with PocketPCs on Linux now. What they don’t say is whether the N-series phones will act like external hard drives when plugged in over USB to the computer. Then they would be truly exciting! You’d have a 4 GB portable hard disk with your phone. Nifty.

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Mission Impossible-MP3-spelare

Wed 21-Jul-2004 in geek, svenska | Skriv en kommentar!

Minns ni början på Mission Impossible tvåan? Tomppa Cruise klättrar berg och lyssnar på musik i sina Oakley-solglasögon. Det var ganska koola linser år 2000 det. Nå, nu, lämpligt till premiären för Mission Impossible 3 så ska faktiskt Oakley komma ut med en MP3-spelare integrerade i ett par solglasögon.

Lite trist var det ju att solglasögonen inte har display i linsen, som orginalet, utan bara nån fånig LED som berättar om det finns ström i batteriet eller inte. Och inte har de publicerat några bilder på underverket heller. Och naturligtvis är de Flashminne-baserade, så det finns ju gräns på hur mycket musik man kan sätta i dem. Och inte spelar de .OGGar heller. Men visst är det ju koolt.

OK, ska vi vara riktigt noggranna, så vill jag ha en iPod (eller iRiver eller vasomhelst) med Bluetooth — och att Bluetooth-kompaniet ska komma överens om Bluetooth Stereo Audio-protokollet — och sen ett par hörlurar integrerade i ett par Oakelys.

Eller vafan, ett par Bluetooth-lurar med Oakley eller inte. Tuta och kör.

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