Times Change
The iPhone Killer Pt.1
A couple of years ago the smartphone decission to take was: "Will I go with the iPhone 3G or do I choose a Windows Mobile 6 phone?". I remember well sitting next to my boss at our christmas party. When he heard about my thoughts he just slipped over the brand new Apple device and said: "If you have questions the answer is 'Only one button.'". I was so pissed at the time about the laggy Windows Mobile phones that I got convinced right away although I knew I would hate Apple for their "Do what we tell you to do" politics.
After two years most of my colleagues upgraded to the new iPhone 4, some switched to a Windows Phone 7 device, and others went the Android way. Mainly because I saw the need for improvements on the hardware side I felt the time is not ready for a change but I also felt it would be before another two years pass. I decided to stick with my iPhone 3G and luckily I got hold of an unused 3GS otherwise I might not have been able to wait that long. At that point I thought my next device would be Android driven.
Since then I tested every beta of iOS 5. Apple did some very necessary improvements (mainly OTA, WLAN Sync, and most of all Notifications) but it's iOS after all. It's just not sexy anoymore. I got so bored I went to a mobile store and played around with Windows Phone. If I wouldn't have found the device I am using now my next phone would have been from Redmond, that is for sure.
But what about the Android thing? Well, I had the chance to test the Samsung Galaxy S II aka i9100 for a couple of month. In terms of features it is even, sometimes better, sometimes worse than the iPhone. Otherwise, it is just ugly shit. Cheap and shitty hardware (they should also have used gorilla body and not only gorilla glass for the display), shitty UI and physical design, absolute shitty usability. While I can give the iPhone to my dad or my three year old son and be sure they get along I could never do this with an Android device. It is just crab. After four month of intensive day2day usage I am further away from Android as I ever was before. I am so glad I didn't have to buy this device.
So about a week ago I finally got my device of choice and since then I am always running around with a little smile in my face and a tickling at the ends of my underjaw. Ladies and gentlemen, let me present to you...
the iPhone killer
... more after the break ...
Tweaking the Nokia N800
I’ve been using the Nokia N800 for quite some time now and never found the time to enable Dual-Boot. The reason one might want to dual boot the device is that you can copy the OS to another SD(HC) card that may be faster in terms of I/O than the internal flash memory.
So I looked for a fast SDHC card and finally chose a SanDisk Extreme III with 8GB. According to Alternate read and write speed is 20 MB/s so it’s far more than the Class 6 standard (6 MB/s) requires.
I then used this How-To from Schmot’s blog to configure dual-boot. Nice walk-through and I had no problems at all. Afterwards the N800 greets you with a new welcome menu:
Now, the big question is if this is really worth the work? Subjectiveley spoken I’d say yes it is faster than before. Objectively I can’t tell. I use mYtube to watch You Tube videos and I hope it a least profits from the fast SD disk it now uses as buffer storage.
Ah yes, the reason for this post is a personal shortcut:
fsck -fy /dev/mmcblk0p2
This command is needed whenever there is a problem with the MMC booted OS and has to be launched from the internal flash OS, of course Hopefully my super trouper SD card will manage any filesystem problems itself.
Linux with UMTS HSUPA ExpressCard
On my laptop (HP Compaq nx6325) I run Kubuntu Feisty Fawn and I am very satisfied. Especially the built-in support for UMTS modems perfectly fits my needs since I am sort of a stroller.
I used to go online with an “old” CardBus PC Card (PCMCIA). On the back of the card it says Option Globetrotter GT 3G Quad and it came with a real UMTS flatrate (50./month) of the German provider E-Plus.
Anyway, E-Plus is the worst provider ever and I can only recommend everyone to never ever demand any of their services. Although I have to admit, their support is nice and friendly and each time I called they gave me a bonus (5. or 20.) to compensate for my bothering. But this is no help if you want to go online and they simply won’t let you half of the time for whatever reason. There were times I almost freaked out.
Since I rely on a good network connection to do my job my employer now ordered a “Vodafone Mobile Connect Card (Express) UMTS Broadband” (wow, what a name) for me and on its back it says: “Option“, “Model: GE0301“, “Qualcomm 3G CDMA“, and on the box “Option Etna Express“.
It supports HSDPA and HSUPA with a bandwidth of up to 7,2 MBit down- and 1,45 MBit upstream. 
Besides, it is a ExpressCard34 which takes less space in my pocket. This is pretty cool so I could test my ExpressCard slot which works just fine. For those not having such an interface Vodafone encloses a PCMCIA adapter.
Actually, Feisty Fawn comes with all the drivers needed (usbserial). The only problem is that the vendor and product ID of the card are not known to the system, yet. To find out those IDs you issue a
# cat /proc/bus/usb/devices
on the commandline and somewhere in the results it says something like
P: Vendor=0af0 ProdID=7001 Rev= 0.00
S: Manufacturer=Option N.V.
S: Product=Globetrotter HSUPA Modem
The information needed is in the first line. You may add it to a file called /etc/modprobe.conf (which you may have to create) but for Kubuntu I thought /etc/modprobe.d/options would be a good place. For information about the syntax of the file type man modprobe.conf. There I added the line:
options usbserial vendor=0xaf0 product=0x7001
I then rebooted and the next time I inserted the card it got bound to /dev/ttyUSB0, /dev/ttyUSB1, and /dev/ttyUSB2. Almost exactly the behavior of my old card except that I now surf reliably and at a much higher speed. When will you?
It's all out there on the streets...
...you just gotta pick it up.
Well, last week I started this new blog series of mine: “Tools for fools”. Again, this is an effort to start writing some more posts on a more regular basis. Anyway, what’s the story behind it. In this series I’m trying to introduce pretty neat tools to my fellow readers. This time it’s about listening to podcasts while on the run for people without an iPod.
I have to admit that this iPod thing is pretty handy when it comes to listening to podcasts that have a certain length. Especially the feature to remember the position where you stopped listening for every single piece of media and synchronizing it between the device and a PC is really cool. But at what price? iTunes is crab, overload and for sure an information gathering tool for Apple comparable only to the Google empire. I know there are alternatives but then why should I carry an extra device around if I already have one that offers much more valueable features? Yes, now everybody’s saying: “Get the iPhone, dude”. Although I like being called “dude” I don’t like the iPhone. It’s ugly, too large and doesn’t even offer 3G. I guess the usability is Apple style again and it really rocks but 500 bucks? No way, I stick with my Sony Ericsson K750i (I know it’s 3G neither).
What a great mobile phone. I got a 1GB “Memory Stick Pro Duo” which is fairly enough for my needs. Besides making phone calls with it I mostly use it to listen to podcasts. I travel a lot by train and therefore I like long ones starting from 30 minutes up. And this is the only drawback of my K750i: the media player sucks. Why is that? Well, the fast forward/backward is non-adaptive. This means it seeks and rewinds with a constant speed and this speed is so slow it deadens your fingers. So if you are listening to a 90 minute podcast and you interrupt at 45 minutes you’re really fucked up. How are you gonna come back to that position?
My solution to the problem is called mp3splt. This nice little command line app let’s you split MP3 files w/o re-encoding. For my podcasts I like to split them into chunks of 15 minutes. I simply run a
mp3splt -t 15.00 [mp3 filename]
and off it goes. A file of a 60 minutes length will be splitted into four pieces. But that’s not all. A line like
mp3splt [mp3 filename] 05.00 58.00.23
will result in a file starting from minute five up to the 58th minute and 23 hundreds of a second. “Why would I wanna do that?” you ask again. This is where the next cool lil’ comline app comes into play: Streamripper. This tool lets you record an mp3 stream to your harddrive. Personally I use it to record radio plays from German radio stations. For example Deutschlandfunk broadcasts the “Mitternachtskrimi” (midnight crime thriller) every Saturday at 00:00 AM. On my “always-on” server I added a cron job with the following entry:
0 0 * * 6 streamripper http://dradio-live.mp3.t-bn.de/dlf_live -a -A -l 3600 -d /home/username/my_streamrips
This line starts Streamripper every Saturday at 00:00 AM and lets it record for 3600 seconds or one hour. The file is saved to the home directory of the user. I forgot the use of the other options but you will find out.
The result is a file with the news at 00:00 AM included. And not every radio play is exactly 50-55 minutes long. So I need a tool to cut it: mp3splt. We’ve come full circle.
Oh, one last thing. Both apps are available for Linux and Win. Now isn’t that something?
About
Originally this site was intended as a project site. The goal was to define standards for the perimeterless network using
open-source software. To be honest I simply do not have the time for such a thing. So what is left is a blog with sporadic
posts that are either helpful for myself or I think are helpful for others, too since I had a hard time finding information
on the Internet. Think of it as a knowledge base.
Ehm yes, somtimes I write down my two cents on any topic that may go through my mind at that point in time ;-)