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

today I had about 30 minutes to play with a iPhone. Here is my impression: The device actually looks really good once you have it in your hand (better then I expected), it is slim, light and has nice rounded edges (real nice look and feel). The screen is really bright for a touchscreen (the best I have seen so far - also I only used it indoors). Surfing the web is also quite fun as long as you don't need to enter any URLs by hand. For a first impression the keyboard kind of sucked - I know that it should be better after using it for a few days. The web browser seems quite fast, but it couldn't handle some of the websites I've tried. I really like the zoom feature (double tap). Since I spent most of the time playing with the web browser I can't say to much about the rest. But the overall impression is rather good (much better then I expected). The user interface concept seems really good; on exceptional good idea is the big button at the bottom of the screen that all ways takes you back to the application screen. Palm devices have a similar button on the Graffiti area, but having a real hardware button is it much better.

All in all it was a rather positive experience. Also I would still not buy a iPhone because of it's lack of certain features.

I finally had the time to build Aircrack-ng (0.9.1) for the N800. Many people were asking about it and I also wanted to play with some of the newer features. Some of the cooler features of aircrack-ng don't work on the N800: airreplay-ng requires a driver that is able to send raw frames as far as I know the N800's wifi driver doesn't support this (also airreplay-ng doesn't seem to compile out of the box); airtun-ng also didn't compile so I didn't include it in the package.

A few days ago I build a package for iodine (a IP-DNS tunnel). This little thing is really fun (best IP-DNS tunnel software I have seen so far).

I just uploaded ttdnsd. New in this version is support for running ttdnsd on your local computer (before you were only able to use it through a second computer or router). This new feature is made possible though a very simple LD_PRELOAD library that comes with ttdnsd v0.2. The setup is quite simple as you can see on the ttdnsd website.

Have fun with anonymous DNS over TOR.

The Home InfoPanel is my new project. The goal is home information system Star Trek style (just without the voice interface), basically it is a touchscreen hanging on the wall. During the day it will display fotos from my file server (or from services like Flickr). It will have time-of-day related special views e.g. for the morning. The Good Morning view will show stuff like: weather information and calendar events (birthdays).

Sofar I bought the touchscreen unit and wrote a first basic version of the software (python gtk).

The part that is missing is the computer that will run the InfoPanel. Besides the size and price (small and cheap) it must have: VGA-out, USB-host (2 ports if it doesn't have ethernet). I don't care if it is x86, ARM, MIPS or SH. Any hints are welcome!

I got my hands on a Nokia N95 so I can play with it over the weekend. It turned out that I don't like it, here is why.

First, I really don't like moving parts on any mobile device. Because these will either break or will allow dust to get into the phone. Second, I tried to surf the web using wireless (WiFi) this was a really bad experience. It took 15 minutes until it finally connected to my WPA-PSK network (the router was about 2 meters away from the phone). Also the user interface for this kind of sucked (this was the first time for me using a Symbian device that has WiFi). The web browser seems fast, but the website don't look good at all. It is like I remember web surfing on a mobile phone a few years ago. Not having a touchscreen doesn't help either (navigating with the 4-way button isn't fun).

I don't care about having a camera in my phone, but this one is soo big. I really think the camera makes the phone 3-4 millimeters thinker. This is stupid.

Some good stuff: USB and stereo jack (I like standard connectors).

Lets hope there will be a new phone with all these (impressive) hardware features but without the moving screen and buttons. Instead reduce the number of hardware buttons give it a bigger screen and use a touchscreen. Making it thiner would also help.

Just my 2 cents...

earlier today a friend showed me: iPhone: Will it Blend? Tom from Blendtec blends an iPhone. Yea!

Will it Blend? is a really funny way of advertising for blenders. They basically just blend many different things to show how strong the blender is. For me really impressive is: 50 Marbles

Great fun, but don't try this @home :-)

I'm back from SyScan (and Singapore). It was a lot of fun I and I met many interesting people. It was a really good time.

The slides for my talk are available here.