...stuff I do and things I like...

Every once in a while I check the iPAQ h63xx Linux port page at handhelds.org and today I discovered that the guys got the phone part running on March 23rd. This is really good news! Also other essential stuff is still missing.

I really wished I had more time so I could also work on this project.

I just read this story on heise.de (in German) about Palm building its own Linux based OS now. Also don't confuse this with the plans of PalmSource which is already working on this for some time now (I can't really remember when this was first announced). The article further describes how PalmSource stopped doing the quite good PalmSource Developer Conference which I guess was one part of the whole Palm sucks now disaster. Anyway it seems like Palm tries to get away from PalmSource, which I think is a really good idea, since they really need to become the cool PDA company, they once were, again. Maybe the idea to have a nice Linux Kernel underneath the relatively good PalmOS UI (user interface) is the right way, who knows. Palm just needs to get their ass back on the ground and provide a modern PDA OS with important features like: real multi processing and threading or multi user security (also PalmOS is really not that bad in comparison with Symbian oder WinCE). I just say: do it Palm!

I saw this posting at Engadget about the Samsung Q1 UMPC/Origami and I couldn't resist looking at the FCC specs including the User's Guide (part 1). While skimming through the pages I found the thing below, the Windows Security Button. The image is taken from the User's Guide part 1 page 9. The button is what we have all been waiting for, Ctrl+Alt+Del all-in-one button, I find this hilarious! I guess they had to put this on the device to make it easier to get the Windows login box to pupop so a user can login. I guess thats the most direct sign of we f**king choose the wrong software for this kind of device and therefore we had to add some extra hardware. Great this made my day!

The Palm PDA is turning 10 today! Heise (in German) and ZDNet have a nice story about Palm and Palm gives free shipping as anniversary present. I bought my first PalmPilot Professional in December of 1997 and I still love these devices, also I now prefer linux powered PDAs. More about Palm is available here on WikiPedia and here.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY PALM!

some random Sunday afternoon fun :)

www.mestarrunner.com/sbemail58.html (Flash Video! but very cool)
www.hrwiki.org/index.php/Trogdor
www.hrwiki.org/index.php/Trogdor_%28song%29

so here is the source to ParanoiaOTP I basically made it public because some one was asking for the code and since I did use the crypto stuff from GNU crypt I have to release the code (not that I wouldn't release the code otherwise but no body ever wanted it and I just didn't see the need). Have fun with what ever you do with it, and please don't send me hate mail about this. I simply didn't take licensing very serious when I wrote this program four years ago.

See this report from Spiegel and look what kind of other crimes are equally treated as copyright violations. This just sucks!

I guess Germany will be the new center for developing better anonymous filesharing. Also hard disk encryption probably will become more popular now! See my dm_crypt freeofte setup.

today I saw the new MacBookPro my boss (aka. Master Advisor) got and WOW. This thing seems to boot right quick and he was all about how fast Safari started up. Also the tiny camera build into the display seems to be really good, not like these shitty webcams but more like a digital foto camera. The magnetic power cord also looks interesting ... anyway I'm a Linux nut and I hate touchpads so I will stick to my ThinkPad with the awesome trackpoint.

so some guy started porting kismet (THE wireless sniffer/detector) to the Nokia 770, see ApplicationCatalogWip entry. It works in general but reports a bunch of ghost networks which makes it actually unusable, I have just tried it (and was excited) but as soon as the ghost networks scroll by doh...

Anyway this looks promising, also I don't have to do it. Yea!

just put up my mobile security research page. It will basically be a annotated link collection, since my stuff will mostly be PocketPC Security and I have a separate section for this. Feel free to send me additions and/or corrections.

I'm doing a small talk about my PocketPC security stuff at CSUCI next week. It will basically be the talk I did at What The Hack! with some minor updates.

so here are my Origami (origamiproject.com) predictions:

In case it is an Internet tablet, my ideas are listed below. In case it is an iPod thingy: WTF do I know, I don't own/use MP3 players!

hardware

* nice display with higher resolution then the 770 (people talking about 800x600)
* fast CPU, +400Mhz ARM or x86 compatible
* WiFi, Bluetooth and Infrared (even if IR is dead MS will still have it)
* lots of RAM/FLASH but not enough to make the thing usable
* SD card slot, I don't think they go with RS-MMC
* USB port or maybe some iPAQ kind of connector

software and such

Either Windows XP (tablet edition) or CE (PocketPC), where I think XP is more likely to happen because CE really sucks in terms of performance and so. Still the hardware will be awesome (like the iPAQ hardware) but the OS and software will make it unusable. Also, will they try to make it an ebook reader or movie player? Yes! So will they totally cripple it with DRM? Properly. Will they sell tones of them, most likely. Will I buy one? NO!

Anyway the pictures on Engadget look really cool (the hardware, just to be clear!) so lets see. Anyone registered origamilinux.org yet?

this post is an answer to Varis comment, also note that I haven't been using the PMA400 as long as the 770.

First each device targets a completely different market, while the PMA targets the mobile/portable media player market the 770 is meant to be for mobile/portable Internet usage. These differences are pretty easy to spot: the PMA400 has a build in hard disk and extra hardware to speed up video and audio decoding and comes with recording software, the 770 comes with Bluetooth, a web browser and news reader and offers way better connectivity.

In terms of being the ultimate carry around device I really can't decide, there are just these significant differences which would make me vote for both devices. I terms of size/form factor and battery runtime I would defently prefer the 770 (sorry Matze and Frank!).

Finally I guess both devices are already outdated, since rumors are out that both companies have been working on new devices for some time now. I can't wait to see what they have come up with to impress us even more!?!

so I finally got over to watching videos on my 770 and I noticed that there is almost no CPU usage while playing a video, so I guess the Nokia guys did a good job and heavily use the DSP :) The only annoying thing is the video format and resolution restrictions but I guess that comes with the low CPU usage.

Anyway I wrote a small script using a slightly modified version of peapod (a small command line based podcast receiver written in python) to download and convert the 20Uhr (8pm) Tagesschau for the 770. So now I can watch the Tagesschau by pointing my browser to my local webserver which holds the converted file, nice! Streaming would be awesome but I don't have the time to set this up. Also my room mate had the very interesting idea to just make a cgi/php/whatever to convert videos on-the-fly by just handing a URL over to the script running on a webserver.