Categories
Free Software My Media System Personal tablet

Nokia 770

I recently bought a Nokia 770 to use as a remote control for MMS (among other things). The first thing one notices is the screen: very clear, big and with great contrast. The built-in IM client is great. It’s excellent for when you’re not near the computer but want to chat with people anyway. It’s quite easy to write on the screen, I’m currently using the virtual keyboard but have also tried the recognition briefly without much succes.

The Opera browser included is very light-weight and quite fast but doesn’t work correctly on all pages, so sometimes one needs to use Minimo (firefox port). Sadly Minimo is a lot more heavy on the system and can cause the system to spontaneously reboot?! I have no clue how a browser can cause the whole system to come crashing down. I thought we cured that when we moved away from Windows 98? 😉

Furthermore the built-in rss reader is quite nice. The font is nice and big which makes it easy to read. I like to read the latest news on the device when I’m eating breakfast in the morning and it saves booting up the computer. The Nokia is ready in seconds.

Before I bought the device, I read in a lot of reviews which claimed that the battery time sucked. That might be true if you’re using it constantly, but if you’re not using it for a little while it will shut down the screen and will wake up in ~1 second again. That way it can easily keep running for quite a few days of rss feed reading and browsing. So you get battery lifetime comparable to a normal phone.

A last thing that I have been using the device for is VOIP. The device has a built-in microphone and speaker so one doesn’t need anything extra to make it work. I would have liked to use my headphones but it appears that for the time being that is not yet supported. By downloading gizmo project software one is able to make very cheap (even free) phone calls to phones in Denmark (and to almost any other part of the world). The sound quality is comparable to Skype.

I havn’t started hacking on it yet but from the brief encounters I have had with the documentation and development enviroment it looks quite nice. To be continued 🙂

Categories
Books iola marketing

Purple Cow

I finished reading the first marketing book, Purple Cow. The book is truly remarkable and gives a lot of food for thought. He gave a talk at google about the subject, which also brings up some extra points. It’s a good teaser for the book but I think one will appreciate it even more if one has read the book beforehand.

The purle cow?

Categories
Books

Finished reading The Wealth of Networks

I just finished reading The Wealth of Networks:How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler. It’s a great book that puts the whole social production, such as wikipedia and free software, into a much greater perspective than what one normally sees and analyzes it from several new angles which I havn’t read anywhere before. The only weak points of the book is that its quite long and at times somewhat repetitive.

Categories
Gentoo

Stepping down as a gentoo developer

For the last couple of months, the amount of time I have spend on gentoo has been smaller and smaller to a point where it has completely stopped and thus I decided to step down as developer. Furthermore I put my dxr3 card to rest when I bought my projektor so I didn’t have the hardware anymore to maintain a lot of the packages I was maintaining. I still like gentoo a lot and still use it some of my machines at home.

Categories
iola Personal

New home for my homepage

My normal homepage has now been relocated to the iola domain. I also updated the information on it a little bit. The old domain should work until about end of January 2007. This blog will for the time being stay at the same location. Be sure to update your bookmarks in time 🙂

Categories
Free Software

Have to praise Rockbox again

I blogged about rockbox two months ago when I bought my Ipod Nano and praised it to the skies. After a lot of use (almost daily) I can say that it almost just keeps getting better and better. I havn’t had a single crash or sound issue in the two months. The only weak points are the navigation which is a little to complex (or maybe I’m just stupid :-)) and a theme reset bug when it’s done charging and I unpluck it. The rate of improvements are very impressive. It’s very easy to upgrade so it has almost become a monthly ritual that when I charge it and put on new music I also update the software. Upgrading is just unpacking the new version on the Ipod so it couldn’t be much easier.

Categories
My Media System

My Media System 1.0.8 released

Mpeg Menu System v2 has changed name to My Media System to better reflect the functionality of the system. The old name was related to the initial goal but which has since been broadened quite a bit. The new release is the fruit of much of the work I did this summer but it also features two very nice additions from outside people. One is a game module so one can play old Nintendo or Amiga games and the other one is the integration of VDR. It’s funny how easy it has been to integrate it all this time and it’s only after someone wrote a patch that I got around to configuring VDR. It’s really a great system and has been perfect for watching NFL on zulu 🙂

Categories
Books iola marketing

Marketing books

While working on a business plan for our project at iola, it has become apparent that none of us have a good deal of relationship with marketing so I have been looking around the net for some tips/books. In my so far very limited study I have found a list of recommended books from Martin Thorborg (sorry the reviews are in danish, but the books aren’t). If you know any good ones please don’t hesitate to either write me or write a comment 🙂

Categories
On the web

A creative commons succes story

I stumpled upon this today, creative commons music succes. A truly inspiring story.

Categories
Movies

Who killed the electric car

I watched a very interesting movie today. The most fascinating thing about the movie was the prototype peoples love for the car. No one wanted to give the car back when they were asked to deliver them back. The people even did a small demonstration when they found out the cars were being destroyed. Most companies would kill for such a loyal following, makes you wonder just what the hell was going on…