So, finally, after close to 25 years of not owning a video game console (the previous one was a Philips Videopac G7000 system from the early 1980s), we finally took the plunge and got ourselves a Nintendo Wii system. It was bundled with Wii Sports and one freely selectable game, so we chose Super Mario Galaxy, which has been getting great reviews. Also, we threw in the Cars game for Marius, which instantly proved itself an enormous success. Ka-chow!

It’s been really fun so far (The “physics” in Super Mario Galaxy is a real mind-bender!), with the possible exception of having sore muscles in places we didn’t know existed. Then again, Linda and myself shook hands on trying to stay fit and exercise more this year…

(I didn’t bother with a mod chip yet. And I resent the hardware manufacturers for making me need one. Being able to make backup copies of my legally purchased games to avoid damaging the originals should be a mandatory feature, not something you have to (in their eyes) break the law to enable. Yes, yes, I know it’s meant to hinder piracy, but copy protection shouldn’t be an obstacle to paying customers. So there.)

Here is the latest and greatest version of LastFMProxy so far. The previous version had more than a few quirks, and hopefully these have now been taken care of. Changes are mostly related to charset issues, but new features include “audioscrobbling” (submission of tracks to your Last.FM profile) and much faster metadata updates; they should be about “live” now. Download links, changelog and readme here. Happy listening.

Old news for most of whom it concerns, but I’d like to air some thoughts about it nonetheless.

My impression so far - again, as a hacker, not an end user: I like it, and I like it alot. The refreshed look-and-feel is one thing, as well as the integrated IM and Google Talk, but to me the underlying system bits are more interesting.

First, though, the device feels much more responsive. Both when navigating around on the device itself as well as when using the web browser. Good job to whomever did that.

And the new Application Manager is very nice, and having a proper package repository system up and running is invaluable. I’m very pleased they decided to drop the /var/lib/install model from the earlier versions. Also, being able to use “apt” to cleanly remove parts of the stock system, e.g. games and RSS-reader (which I’m sure are nice, but I don’t really use them) is very handy.

As for the “beta” part of the release name, I haven’t found any showstopping bugs or flaws yet, so things are really looking promising. Great work, team. Looking forward to the final release!

One small disappointment, though. It was a bit sad to see binary compatibility with ARMedslack packages go (it was incredibly handy to just drop a few precompiled binaries into /home/user/bin and off you go), but I guess the switch was done in the name of the greater good.

Well, sort of. I have moved the journal and a couple of the static pages have been added as Wordpress pages, but quite a bit of fiddling remains. That’ll have to wait, though. All in all, the move went surprisingly well.

One thing, though. Don’t try to embed javascript in a Wordpress page. Ugh.

As mentioned earlier, I recently set up a blog for Linda, using Wordpress 2.0.2. Very slick, I must say. So slick that I am very tempted to migrate my site over to it as well.

Being the geek that I am, the fact that it was very easy to customize and tweak was a big selling point for me. I added a simple gallery-like function to Linda’s blog in a matter of minutes, simply by adding some include statements to one of her theme’s php-files.

So, while you all are waiting for me to move over, sit back and enjoy the slightly improved (IMHO) look of my site while I summon up some motivation. (I was just playing with my stylesheet to see what I should aim for with my Wordpress theme.)

Nokia released a new version (0.2005.45-8) of their Nokia 770 software image today. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any changelogs around,
so I took the liberty of whipping together a small script that
compares it to the last, and lists files that were changed or added. The list can be found here.
(I have cleaned it up a bit manully; some gconf updates (which where mostly “mtime” differences anyway) and PID files have been removed.)

Next up is an attempt to upgrade my old installation to the latest one. I will hopefully get around to posting an upgrade how-to if I succeed.

I recently discovered and reported that packages and binaries from the ARMedslack Linux distribution work more or less out of the box on the Nokia 770. Even the package management tools worked perfectly, and I found this so handy that I decided it was worth a bit more attention. So I have written a small article about my findings, and you can read it here.

As a bonus, I have thrown in instructions on how to set up your Nokia 770 as an NFS client. It’s very easy. Instant storage space!

So, I have played with the new toy over the weekend, and I must say that overall, I’m fairly impressed. There are some stability issues, but the software is still under development, so I’m not going to panic because of that.

Internet browsing was surprisingly convenient on this device. Despite its rather small size, it sports an 800×480 display, which is remarkably sharp and bright. (I work with the brightness turned way low, though, to save some battery, but it’s still very readable.) The e-mail application was a bit slow and unwieldy, but it gets the job done. The lack of a calendar application surprised me a bit, but considering it’s a handheld PC more than a PIM, I’m okay with that.

But the user level stuff isn’t what makes me warm and fuzzy. Behind the scenes it runs Linux, as we all undoubtably know by now, and this is where the fun starts. After using the flasher utility to enter Research & Development mode (to enable a root shell), and installing an xterm, you’re all set to explore. And possibly wreak havoc.

For me, speaking as both a user and developer, the free and open Maemo distribution is a bit incomplete compared to the official Nokia install. The free one lacks a few things, such as a browser and the e-mail application. Then again, the Nokia install lacks some utilities for software installation and development. I found it a bit disappointing to have to choose between these two options, but I’m trying to find a way to get the best of both worlds. And I think I might have found one that suits me.

As a part of that quest, I happened to drop by ARMedslack (an ARM port of the Slackware distro), just to see how well the binaries worked on the Nokia 770. And hey, they worked very well!

This is exciting for one good reason; The Slackware package management is rather simple, especially compared to the complexity of the native deb package system (which isn’t even complete on the Nokia image). So I unpacked some bits and pieces of the Slackware package management tools, and voila, I could suddenly install (and more importantly, cleanly uninstall) arbitrary packages. I also wrote a small shell script to convert deb-packages to tgz, to make them manageble with the Slackware tools. I recently tested this with the PythonForMaemo debs, and they worked perfectly. I also tried installing ARMedslack’s “nfs-utils” package, and bingo, I count mount my workstation from the 770.

Now, despite the success with the Nokia image, I haven’t abandoned the Maemo distribution quite yet. As soon as I find a decent way to preserve my current installation, I’m willing to take it for another spin and see if I can migrate the useful applications back. If nothing else, just to see if it’s possible. And because it would rock if it was.

So, to state some kind of conclusion, I’m intrigued by the potential of this gadget. It has a lot of usability as it is shipped, but the real potential for fun lies in the hacking and exploring, and eventually, starting to develop stuff to make it even more useful.

So, I got my Nokia 770 today. Liking it alot so far. More later.

Today, after having been left out of the initial round of the Nokia 770 Developer Device Program, I got a very uplifting mail from the Maemo team; My 770 has been shipped to me free of charge! This very nice surprise was thanks to the fact that; “we have no billing infrastructure in place for successful participants residing in countries other than that where Nokia 770 Internet tablet is
available.”

As Nokia is donating the proceeds from the developer program to the GNOME Foundation, they encourage me to donate manually instead, which I plan to do.

Thanks, Nokia!