More about battery life on my n900

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This battery life situation is kinda pissing me off. 🙁

I wrote a script to get charge, battery %, and cpu load. Made it run every 10 mins to collect the data. I unplugged the phone at 9:40 am. No 3g, no wireless, very few interaction. About 10-20 mins phone conversation. And at 15:30 the battery was completely drained. It gives me 6 hours of battery life under normal conditions.

The handset runs very warm. I found a temp sensor in the /sys folder but I don’t know if it’s telling me the truth since it’s constantly at 38° C. I contacted the Nokia support, I hope they can provide me something. Maybe I have a defect battery.

Here are the charts since I love them… 🙂

Discharge graphic

Battery %

System Load

Nokia n900 review

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Background information:
All and all I’m definitely a Linux person. That means my expectations from n900 was primarily to be hackable 🙂 I’m also coming from the world of blackberry. My previous hand-held was 8320. Other than being an extremely well designed smart-phone for business and email, it was pretty much useless for me. In this review i will also try to compare them.

I actually wanted buy the new google nexus one, it turned out that being a T-mobile customer for almost ten years would actually not allow you to qualify for the discount price of $180 with a two year plan renewal. So I said phukitol, and went and spent my $500+ to a Nokia n900 instead of a Nexus One.

N900:
N900 is the flagship product of Nokia for 2009-2010. It’s running maemo as the OS. It’s the “other” linux based handheld OS currently developed only by Nokia (well apart being open source for most parts of it). It’s debian based. So ubuntu/debian users will find theirselves pretty much at home. (System wise of course. UI is completely unrelated)

It has a full qwerty (for US) keyboard. The screen slides up to reveal it. If you don’t want to use the physical keyboard, it also offers a virtual one. It’s kinda weird though because the virtual keyboard is a full screen keyboard 🙂

It also has a great camera. Very good widescreen 800×480 resolution. It works with t-mobile 3g, which is first for me. I had a chance to test the 3g around Washington, DC and Providence, RI. I’m not very impressed. But when it really is on 3g things get super fast.

Goods:

  • Awesome environment if you are a linux person.
  • Great user interface. Very smooth and shiny. Almost never slow and never frustrating.
  • Basic applications are already bundled out of the box. Nokia default software repositories are setup. (Apt-get with a good UI) if you want community supported apps you have to enable the Extras(-devel|-testing) repositories. (Which is setup but disabled for Extras) More infor here and here.
  • Killer web browser. It has the new fennec in it. Fennec is basically mobile version of Mozilla Firefox. So far i had no issues opening any web page! It supports flash player, javascript… If you need one reason to switch from blackberry, this would be it. Zooming, Copy/Paste, Hovering are very well implemented.
  • The maemo SDK and emulator was very easy to install on my ubuntu. I will soon start hacking 😉
  • It has all the beauties of a linux box. I mean ssh, sshd, terminal, vi, grep, more, busybox, etc… you get what i mean 🙂 It’s a great feeling to port forward your home machine’s web server to localhost and open the web browser to browse your home machine through the ssh tunnel for example 🙂
  • The media player is very very good. One really great thing is that it has an FM transmitter built-in! You can transmit your songs to any usable FM frequency and listen on a car radio for example. Including the network streaming radios! (Bridge between conventional and internet radio!) It also comes with a good in ear headset with microphone.
  • Great contacts management. With some tricks you can import your google and gtalk contacts and manually merge them. The contacts become a unified messaging system. You can call, gtalk IM, gtalk voice, skype, SIP call from the very same contacts manager. Merging contacts are also very intuitive and easy.

Not So Goods:

  • Battery: It is better than a laptop, but worse than a smartphone. OK, I’m heavily using the phone, meaning browsing, SIP, IM… And I was expecting a not so good battery life, but I wasn’t expecting this bad 🙁 This is the only thing that is on the frustrating level. With daily usage (whatever that means) I get around 6-10 hours of battery life at max.
  • Email Client (Modest): It’s an OK client. It displays your emails, it let’s you write an email, if you are offline, it let’s you queue them and it knows how to send then when you get online. But it ends there 🙂 There is no search! You cannot search your emails. If you are a blackberry convert, you would be dissatisfied. It needs improvements.
  • Applications: As you could imagine, there are not many applications à la iPhone or Android. But there are a lot of good, stable open applications. For example, there is no google maps. (But there is a nokia maps app which is not that bad) I think with the popularity of this phone, there will be more apps out. Ovi Store is a good start.
  • Keyboard: It’s a good slim keyboard. But the top line of keys are sometimes hard to press because they are very close to the sliding “lid”. There is very little space to fit your fingers.

Overall, I think this phone has a lot of potential. It sleek, very sexy and user friendly. Absolutely a great potential for linux hackers and developers. If I would have an option to return it, I probably wouldn’t. And I’m happy that I didn’t buy a Nexus One. 🙂

Note: Wow it looks like me and engadget did a review at the same time 🙂

WOW OTP Goodness

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OK, the title means: World of Warcraft One Time Password Goodness. 🙂

I just got my OTP generator from Blizzard. It has a nice horde colors touch. The activation was very simple. I was expecting that it would replace my static password, but it didn’t. Instead it asks your password first (what you know) then it asks the code generated by the token in a second window (what you have).

It’s very nice to see from a computer game vendor to use two factor authentication. And here is a picture 😉

WordPress 2.9 – Carmen is out

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The new features are automatic upgrade of plugins, automatic check for their compatibility, image editing integration (Crop, flip, rotate, etc…). Including videos on your posts are also much easier. All you need to do is to paste the video page URL of the supported web sites (youtube, dailymotion, etc…)

The posts are not going to disappear when you accidentally delete them. The new version brings a trash notion where the deleted posts now go there.

Here is a good video of the release!

http://wordpress.tv/2009/12/21/introducing-wordpress-2-9-%E2%80%93-carmen/

Digital Frame or bust…

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I’m writing this entry to push me to finish my neverending story about the digital frame project I started. I’m hoping that the entry will give me some sort of ignition after more than a year.

I had an old Dell Latitude c600 sitting at home and collecting dust. Like many other old hardware I have at home… So I decided to convert it to a digital frame that I can hang it somewhere.

Here are my goals:

  1. Have a low power, low cost digital frame.
  2. Ability to manage it wirelessly.
  3. Make it easy to use
  4. Have fun.
  5. Make an old hardware happy.

The very first step was to dissect the laptop and remove the guts. It turned out to be somewhat challenging, but with the right tools and time, things moved pretty good. I’m not going to go into details on how to dissect a c600, but here is a picture in the late stages of the dissection.

Guts and glory

Next step was to remove all the unnecessary parts like battery, CD-ROM, and some mini pci cards like ethernet/modem combo. I kept the pcmcia slot for the wireless card, and while there, added some leftover RAM to it. After neatly placing them all together, here is how it looks with BIOS setup on. The image is tilted to get rid of the flash glare.

bios view

Now the software step. Of course my OS of choice is Debian/Linux. I installed bare minimum Debian with fluxbox as desktop manager. Al I needed to do was to find a low cpu/memory usage image viewer. At first I thought about not having a Graphic User interface, and use zgv from the console, but then I gave up since it was too much trouble. (Still I think it would be cool to have a console only picture frame, maybe on the next version)

Instead, I decided to use feh. I must say i’m extremely satisfied with feh and recommend to everybody 😉 The only issue I had was that the mouse pointer was showing in the middle of the frame which was not a good sight. I used unclutter to get rid of that. (I had to hack the program a bit to my taste)

I wrote some scripts and changed some config files for all this to start automatically. I will share the scripts later when the whole project is completed.

Now that the computer part is done, I need to take the measurements and head home depot or similar place to create some base for the frame and also buy a nice looking frame to place everything inside. So I guess there will be a second part of the blog entry.

Here is how it looks like as of now:

Haris and me

Blackberry email reading tips

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  1. This is my favorite: If you press J and K on the email list or while reading the email, it moves between previous and next emails in the context. (just like in the vi 😉 )
  2. While reading and email, if you press N it goes to the next email, P to the previous email. And if you press same keys on the email list, it goes next day and previous day consecutively.
  3. Space key and Shift+Space key scrolls page by page the email list, or the email.
  4. T and B are shortcuts for Top and Bottom, no more scrolling like crazy to go to the end of an email 🙂
  5. R is to Reply, L is to Reply All.
  6. U is to go to the oldest unread messages.

I hope this is useful 😉

The new 80’s

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Adidas BagEnough with eighties revival! The only thing good about eighties was the music. The whole eighties fashion was horribly wrong and was a mistake. Please let’s learn from our mistakes.

The shoes with weird color combinations were wrong. Same thing for the big sunglasses! Shirts with big metallic buttons all over and wide shoulders for women, oh my god please stooppp!

We went shopping with Ebru last weekend and all the brands are racing to bring back the eighties. It makes me wonder if they hit the innovation wall. Even the fake shiny leather curvy adidas bags were back. I wanted throw up in them. 🙁 All the teenagers who were either a sperm or two-three years old when this horrible fashion was “rocking” the world are now going crazy shopping in urban outfitters for fake eighties stuff.

I’m ok with bringing back the 8 bit music, heavy metal, pixel art, synth music, etc.. But please please not the fashion!

Fun with Google Translate

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I was playing with google translate, I wanted to get some turkish proverbs and translate them to english, then translate them back to turkish and back to english and so forth… Here are some of the results: 🙂

Bilmemek ayip degil, sormamak ayip.
Not to know not shame, shame not to ask.
Değil, sormak ayıp ayıp değil değil bilmek.
Not, not shame shame not know to ask.
Değil, değil ayıp ayıp istemeyi bilmiyor.
Not, not shame shame not know to ask.

Sinek küçüktür, ama mide bulandırır.
Sinek is small, but it is sick.
Sinek küçüktür ama hasta.
Sinekli is small, but sick.
Sinekli, küçük ama hasta.
Sinekli small but sick.
Sinekli küçük ama hasta.

Sürüden ayrılan koyunu kurt kapar.
Separated from the herd the sheep off the wolves.
Bir kurt kapatma koyun sürünün ayrılır.
A wolf’s flocks are separated off.
Bir kurt’s hayvanlarını kapalı ayrılır.
A wolf’s animals are separated off.
Bir kurt’s hayvanların kapalı ayrılır.

Misafir umduğunu değil, bulduğunu yer.
Guests are not expected, found place.
Konuklar bekleniyor değilseniz, yer buldu.
If you are not guests are expected, was found.
Eğer ziyaretçi bekleniyor değilseniz bulundu.
If the visitor is expected if you are not found.
Eğer bulunamıyorsa Eğer ziyaretçi bekleniyor.
If you can not be found if visitors are expected.
Eğer ziyaretçi bekleniyor Eğer bulunamadı.
If visitors are expected, if not found.
Ziyaretçiler bekleniyor, eğer bulunamadı.
Visitors are expected, if not found.
Eğer bulunamadı Ziyaretçi, bekleniyor.
(OK I’m tired here! this is not going anywhere.)

So the morale of the story is: Don’t trust the translations.