Two nice N800 uses

Today was exam at university, and I downloaded a nice single-file Javascript-based HTML page with questions from previous exams. Proved useful: a simple webapp that can be used offline.

After the exam I went home, passing-by an irish pub with free w-lan. Didn't go in, but stood outside, taking out the N800 and connecting to the Internet from some street in Vienna. Neat!

SpeedTouch 5x6: Disabling dial-on-demand

If you want to have an always-on connection to the Internet with your SpeedTouch 5x6 modem/router (for example shipped with Aon Speed), you have to download the configuration file from the device (user.ini) and change demanddial=enabled to demanddial=disabled and then re-upload the configuration file.

If you have strange problems with DNS responses coming from the wrong IP, remove the corresponding ipadd line from the config file and re-upload it to your modem/router.

Finally: DSL at home

After about eight years (or were it nine?) with 64k at home, we finally upgraded to a 2Mbit ADSL line at home. This makes so much things easier and faster, wow. Of course, I had a whopping 6Mbit line in Vienna since mid-October already, but at the weekends, doing something on the Internet was just cruelsome slow.

The only downside: Now, when I accidentally hit a MySpace link, the extraordinarily stupid brain-damaged embedded music files start playing right away. With 64k, I still had enough time to quickly close the tab before the music loaded ;)

Usability: Device Dock

Browsing Theme suggestions for Ubuntu 8.04, I found an interesting idea: Device Dock. The original author writes on this page: Here is my device dock, simple yet in principle should be quite effective, This allows someone to keep their desktop tidy no matter what device the mount and unmount from their computer, icons don't get muddled up yet you can still easily access your icons from the desktop.


I would even go so far and say it would be even cooler if we could make it so that unmounting is just a matter of dragging the icons either just out of the dock or somehow make it easy to unmount the devices by dragging them somewhere. That would clearly make using removable devices easier to use and leave the desktop uncluttered. I could also imagine some fancy animation for the icons, so you will get notified when a new device has been mounted. Maybe even hide and slide-in the dock when it's not used, so it could also be above other windows. Just some random thoughts :)

gPodder, the N800 and Bluetooth

I've just added support for Bluetooth File Transfer to the development version of gPodder. With this, you will be able to send (and convert) Video Podcasts from within gPodder directly to your Nokia Internet Tablet (or any other Bluetooth device). Of course, there is also support for converting videos before they are transferred over Bluetooth, so you will have good performance on the device, independent on which format the Video Podcast is in.

What you need:

• gPodder SVN trunk (instructions)
  
• gnome-bluetooth (includes gnome-obex-send)
• bluez-utils (includes hcitool) or python-bluez
• tablet-encode script from mediautils

After that, you simply configure your Bluetooth device in the preferences and select the "tablet-encode" script as a converter. Then, subscribe to some nice Video Podcast and transfer the downloaded episodes by right-clicking on the episode and choosing "Send to bluetooth device" from the popup menu.

Lecture Parody

Yesterday at University, our professor did a very good parody of the local show master from the Austrian version of "Who wants to be a millionaire?". Sadly, this was the last lecture this semester, but it was surely worth it :)