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

Some time ago I setup a script that greps for interesting strings in my www log, today I found this entry (I highlighted the interesting parts):

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; X11; Linux armv6l; U) Opera 8.5 [en_GB] Maemo browser 0.7.4 RX-34_2007SE_2.2006.48-10

A new CPU, newer Opera version, and a firmware name that is dated for next year :-)

In comparison, the current 770 firmware looks like this:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; ; Linux armv5tejl; U) Opera 8.02 [en_GB] Maemo browser 0.4.31 N770 /SU-18

And since the new device log was produced by a German IP I guess some people are allready running around with new a device. I wonder if this was the 870.

since I'm playing with OLSR I quickly built a package for my 770. In order to use it you need to be root and you need some basic knowledge about olsrd. The general steps are: edit /etc/olsrd.conf to fit your network, bring up interface and assign an IP address, configure the wireless part (essid, ad-hoc mode, and channel number), and finally start olsrd.

The package is available in my Maemo2 repository and on my Nokia 770 page.

I just checked my site stats and saw about 6000 hits for my maemo repository during the last 20 days, this is awesome! Especially nice is that my IpHome homepage plugin seems to have a lot of users.

Btw. I have a new utility in the queue. Hopefully I have enough spare time during my job search in order to finish it before I start working.

I now run my own Maemo2.0 repository. I know it is point less that everybody sets up their own repository, but I just wanted to play with it (I'm a long time Debian user and I was just curious about how this repository thing actually works). See the repository settings below:

repository settings

web address: http://www.mulliner.org/nokia770/repository/
distribution: maemo2
components: free

so I just uploaded xkbd-bthid for Maemo2.0. You have to follow the install instructions otherwise it doesn't work!

I also installed the final version of the IT2006 software today. The first thing I noticed is that it is much faster or snappier then before, really nice.

The final version of the IT2006 OS/firmware for the Nokia 770 was released to developers today. Get it here: maemo.org/downloads/nokia_770

so finally I got my IpHome home page applet running on Maemo2.0. It took a little longer due to some undocumented changes (well besides in the header files of course). Anyway get IpHome for Maemo2.0 here. I also updated some other applications for Maemo2.0.

I started porting my applications to IT2006/Maemo2.0, the first application is my Bluetooth OBEX server sobexsrv. The package is available via the ApplicationCatalog2006 and of course via my Nokia 770 page.

I also wanted to update my IpHome homepage applet, but I have trouble getting it to work on Maemo2.0, so you have to wait a little longer for it.

The developer BETA finally is out. See the announcement at: www.maemo.org
I guess I have to rebuild all my packages :-)

I did some Nokia 770 hacking today and I needed socat for part of it so I packaged it for others to use. I also packaged aircrack-ng because kismet is still not really working on the 770. So far I only tested airodump and it seems to work, it nicely displays all networks and happily dumps packets. What do you want more?

As usual the packages are listed on the Maemo Application Catalog and on my Nokia770 page.

several sites (Slashdot, Engadget) are running stories about a new Nokia 770, I think this will just be a major software upgrade instead of a new device. The reasons for this are following: the current software doesn't support all hardware like the microphone which is obviously needed for any kind of VoIP application. VoIP or GoogleTalk is exactly the new feature that is mentioned by these sites. Also, the 770 is still pretty new and it wouldn't make sense to replace it already (making the 770 obsolete). The current 770 could do way better with just a software upgrade so this is most likely to happen. Anyway they defently work on a new device but this will not be released any time soon.

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!

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.

so here is dsniff for the 770. Warning the package is BIG.

just read it on the developer list and tried it right away, and yes it works. So since firmware 51-13 (should be the latest) we have working monitor mode.

Since you need the Linux wireless tools to set monitor mode (iwconfig wlan0 mode monitor) and the 770 comes without them I complied and packed them. Download them here.

so I just uploaded a packaged version for the 770 of NMAP. Its a really cool thing to have on the 770. Especially since I now (Dec. 2005) own a cool Bluetooth keyboard (Stowaway Think Outside) which I got as a birthday present from my girl friend. It, together with an xterm console, really makes your 770 more usable. I started installing all the necessary shell utilities and now its just a cooler device. Also the keyboard applet is far from perfect right now. I have problems getting enter/return working sometimes. Also the power save mode kicks in too often.

click to get full size

here is a much nicer screenshot of xkbdbthid I took it using mst. Which is a nice networked screenshot tool. Also it tells you to only bind to 127.0.0.1 (localhost) you can access it from any computer on the network.

...is my latest Bluetooth tool. It's a soft-HID device as I call it. This is a Bluetooth HID Keyboard software implementation. It turns your Linux box, PDA or tablet into a Bluetooth HID Keyboard. This is the same thing some of the newer cellphones have, now we have it for Linux!

This is the very first release, so expect it to be buggy. For example it doesn't support MacOSX by now (because I don't have a Mac) since MacOSX requires a other sub protocol (blablabla).

Check the xkbdbthid site and my Nokia770 page for downloads and instructions.

This is actually just my first HID tool, some more stuff is coming up but I just don't have any time now so I first release this cool thing for you.

Feedback is more then welcome as always!

Happy New Year, here is IpHome 0.2! Actually this was just a test tool but so many people downloaded it and I got some emails with feature request - so I decided to put in more features. Now you can cycle through all interfaces which are up and have a IP address assigned. Just tap the plugin display panel to switch to the next interface.

Download it from my 770 section.

IpHome is a small and simple hildon homepage plugin that shows the current IP and TX/RX bytes and errors. Its meant to be a first try homepage plugin, also I am an information fetishist so I like to know whats going on on the network :-] I also want to keep an eye on the network because of the wireless speed issues.


For those who don't know what hildon is, its the GUI system used by the Nokia 770.

Download is in my Nokia770 section, have fun.

while playing around in my home network I noticed that wireless is kind of slow, I only have 1.5Mbit DSL so I didn't noticed it before. But now I tried to download stuff from my laptop via FTP and boy this sucks. I did a few tests with different security settings, since I use WPA and WPA is done in software, I though this could be the problem. Here are the results:

setup

WRT54GS - with wrt-dd #22 prefinal4
computer running Debian with proftpd (xinetd)
N770 with Opera as ftp client

tests

WPA-PSK TKIP+AES
ftp ~80KB/s (cpu maxed out)

WPA-PSK TKIP
ftp ~150KB/s (cpu maxed out)

WPA-PSK AES
can't connect

WEP 104bit
ftp ~400KB/s (peek ~560KB/s)

WEP 40bit
same as for 104bit

NONE
same as for WEP

I didn't try WPA-EPA (radius). Also I noticed that the download destination also impacts the speed. When writing to memory I couldn't get more then 160KB/s, so all test downloads were done to MMC.

after all the bashing against some of the 770 bugs I again have something nice to say about it. I finally installed FBReader and a bunch of e, pdfs and html-books. Now I use it as a handy reference manual, search ability is so great (let's quick check which RFC xyz was specified in). It's not perfect yet (perfect does not exist...).

To enjoy your 770 even more you need to be really nice and: don't open multiple websites at the same time (most of the sites just have too much junk and make opera eat your memory), be patient if things seem to hang it will recover faster if you don't try to switch apps, open the menu or change back to normal screen. Disabling flash in opera is also a good idea (I don't like it anyway - sometimes only for games).

Also by now I prefer the 770 over my h6315 for listening to podcasts. The 770 doesn't completely freeze when playing mp3s. It now happened multiple times that it suddenly stopped playing, every time I thought damn it it crashed again. But it didn't I only drained the battery to the ground - I guess thats a good sign :-)

ebook reading really seems to be the killer application for tablets and/or big-screen PDAs (if there is a difference between them besides the lack of PIM tools). InternetTabletTalk [1, 2] amongst many seem to think this way. Also yesterday at a friends birthday party (90% IT workers aka GEEKs) we had a short discussion about PDAs, portable media players and friends. Many of us came to the conclusion that we want a viewing devices. This means mainly: PDFs, HTML and insert popular ebook format here. Everybody complained about their favorite device either the screen is to small or unreadable outside, the device is too slow when rendering content, storage is to limited or DRM sucks to badly. Also what about watching movies on the same device? Na - we don't want that, that just makes the device to multi purpose and that never works out well.

As a comment to Russell's review, I really think Internet access is the killer application for the Nokia 770. All the other features are just add-ons. Of course you need the special viewers (web browser, rss reader, audio streaming client and all the different format readers).

Finally what I would like to know is, if people carry around their 770 during the day (when you are not at home/office)? Are you carrying it around with your cellphone or do you keep it at home close to your couch and fast wifi access? I personal only take it to places where I know wifi is available for me.

a rather sad report about my 770, I apologise to all 770 developers in advance for hurting their feelings (I know how it is like when somebody complains about your software).

The web browser (Opera) continues to crash on me with random sites also sites not always make it crash, its a random thing (digg.com is a good example). I tried to reproduce it but its to random, sorry no decent bug report.

The file manager is slow as hell (with big directories) - I guess this has to do with the pre-fetching which I noticed with obexftp (accessing files on your cellphone). Also I got many very long hangs (no display update or reaction to user input) and crashes, mostly while browsing large directories. The memory usage seems to be pretty insane too.

I get around using the file manager for browsing large directories by using opera (url=file:///).

Device just rebooted/reseted while playing with WPA-PSK - I really guess it was just a coincidence. This happened while setting up WPA-PSK on my parents Linksys WRT54GS (wrt-gg). I had opera and xterm running and the connectivity-settings panel open. Suddenly the device silently reboots (no low memory waring as usual when you do nasty things with opera). No data lost! Just a normal reboot. I tried to reproduce it again - but no luck. Maybe just some problem with the wireless driver where it dead-locked itself and some kernel watchdog killed and resurrected the device (I was heavily messing with the access point settings). This never happened to me with any Linux box I wasn't messing around in the kernel.

Anyway I still totally like this thing also everybody always comes over to look at it :)

More feedback is on the way... I still need to investigate some of the things I want tell you folks.

when I first got my Nokia770 I started right away with hacking (developing and porting applications) rather then actually using it. I started being just a user over the Thanksgiving weekend. Some user things I noticed where:

We have Flash/Shockwave support, thats kind of nice. I actually didn't expect this. Also web browsing is really nice, just sitting on the couch watching TV and surfing on the tablet. But unfortunately the browser (Opera) is sometimes a little picky and crashes or just eats memory when going to some of my favorite sites.

A PDF reader, yes there is one on the 770. Don't reading the product manual really pays of - if you like surprises :)

Now for some bad things, the email client. I think I remember somebody complaining about the lack of SMTPS (SMTP with SSL) support. Yes, this is unbelievable the email client doesn't support SSL for outgoing mail, why? This makes the mail client totally useless and just a waste of storage space. Maybe the idea behind the email client is a email reader because IMAP supports SSL. Anyway Opera nicely renders my webmail page (IMP/Horde), so it's not to bad.

Some remarks about the filemanager, especially about the OBEX browser (this is the thing that gives you access to the files on your phone). The OBEX part is supper aggressive, it not only gets the current directory information it also goes into subdirectories. If you browse directories with a lot of subdirectories and files, the filemanager sometimes is just blocked totally because of all the pre-fetching.

Also you can't directly use files from OBEX sources, I wanted to play a MP3 from my phone on my 770 but the audio player complains. I thought I could just use the big SD card in my phone as network storage for my 770, but I guess I have to finally finish btfs to get this functionality.

One last thing, I noticed that the wireless antenna (802.11/WiFi) seems to be pretty good for such a small device.

I wanted to start writing my first maemo application but instead I ended up porting xtris a very cool Tetris implementation. The package is available here. The nice thing about this game is that it supports multiplayer mode, the foto shows me playing against myself (laptop vs. 770). To play in multiplayer mode you need to start xtris by hand from the console (xterm) like this: xtris x.z.y.a where x.y.z.a is the IP address of the host running xtserv. If you start it via the menu the server is started for you, so your opponent just needs to know your IP and your good to go.

Now I want a second 770 :-)

so I started pulling my 770 apart. First I flashed in the developer rootfs, which turned out to be very striped down - so I decided to immediately switch back to standard and add a few things on the way. But first I needed to get the original image back, to do this you have to go here. And by the way, this nice awesome hardware is made in good old Germany!

I started going through the filesystem, a modified stuff like /etc/sudoers to include user ALL = NOPASSWD: /bin/sh so I can just get a root shell, without calling gainroot.

Searching further I found all the images, like the big Nokia logo that you see on startup (/usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/hildon/qgn_indi_startup_nokia_logo.png) and the Nokia hands (/usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/hildon/qgn_indi_nokia_hands.png). Guess what, of course I replaced them - no big magic. I also found this funny logo - actually its not funny if you get to see it (/usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/hildon/qgn_indi_startup_failed.png).


Also all the themes are nicely split up into multiple files, so modifying or creating new themes should be easy (I can't do graphics).

I guess I'll built me a real nice image over the next days. Also I don't know how the licensing is - can modified images based on the original firmware be redistributed?

I played around with WiFi (802.11) over the weekend. And found that promisc mode is not working on the 770, this means no fun with tcpdump or dsniff (which I spend hours on building). Also the whole monitor mode thing doesn't seem to work right now. When asking on the developer list about this issue, I got told that they are currently working on these things (due to popular demand!), which is nice to hear.

Also changing the MAC address of the device seems to work, its not really a feature that is needed by many people but I happen to need it.

so I just did the sunlight test (to see if the display is readable under direct sunlight [I used genuine Californian sun]). In the default brightness setting it is very hard to read anything (images are ok). If you crank up the brightness setting to the maximum setting the text is actually readable. I guess the battery wont last as long in the max setting.

I guess the display passed :-)

so I finally got my 770! And from the first second I loved it! It's small, black and has a big screen. WiFi and Bluetooth work like a charm. The first thing I did was: enabling the R&D mode (to get root), installing xterm and dropbear-sshd.

The Nokia 770 is really nice, it boots fast. The UI seems pretty usable, sometimes a little to slow for me (I'm an old Palm user) but since I'm used to PocketPC it's fast :-)

The first thing to test was of course web browsing (since it calls itself an internet tablet). WiFi setup was fast and easy (it found a tone of access points around here (I haven't looked for some time now)), so I could kick it of right away. Browsing is real fun thats clear. Most of the web pages I checked showed nicely.

So Bluetooth, the sad thing is no GUI support. But it works once you have the shell. OBEX, when I first setup my network connections the device asked me for the phone setup (for dial-up and file transfer). File transfer is OBEX, so I fired up sobexsrv on my laptop and told the 770 that it is a phone. And whups I can browse the files on my laptop from my 770 with the built-in file manager, this is awesome! This makes installing applications really easy, just double tap the .deb file and it gets installed (from your laptop). The next step was then to compile sobexsrv for the 770 so I can browse the files on it from my laptop. It of course supports regular push/pull too. In the next weeks I will try to port all my Bluetooth applications to the 770.

Thats it for now. I'll keep writing and porting new applications for my new toy, so keep reading!