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Monday, 28 November 2005

Saw some screenshots of the unreleased (and never will be) Psion netBook Pro running Linux. GPE looks very nice on it, so it's a shame we'll never see it released (unless the 770's a phenomenal success and Psion Texlogic decide they want a piece of the pie). The only downside is probably the lack of Bluetooth: having your mobile in your pocket and accessing the net without having to align IR ports is a incredibly satisfying (well, if you're a geek like me).

Sunday, 27 November 2005

Have decided will need to start a 770 software page to hold not only my Vim port, but also things like the Mac OS X flasher GUI I started writing today.

Tuesday, 22 November 2005

First ante-natal class, or ParentCraft as it's known.

Friday, 18 November 2005

Children in Need had a Doctor Who crossover. These usually don't bode well (thinking of when Sylvestor McCoy's seventh Doctor visited EastEnders, or the Rowan Atkinson -> Joanna Lumley series of regenerations).

This time, however, it was effectively the start of The Christmas Invasion: the Doctor had just regenerated, we saw Rose's initial reaction and even heard the Cloister Bell. Very cool :-)

Even better was rewatching it on my Nokia 770's video player off bbc.co.uk.


Sunday, 13 November 2005

Sunday lunch at Mum's with the whole family. Very cool.

Saturday, 12 November 2005

Big shopping spree to Mothercare with Anna & Mark. David & Alison joined us for dinner and then Robert came round afterwards to say hello.

Thursday, 10 November 2005

Ported vim to Maemo so I had a text editor on the Nokia 770. Porting console applications is trivial: take the Debian/ARM deb and its dependencies; create a new control file; run appinstallize-build on them; install to device.

Had a bit of fun trying to get /home/user/.profile executed: unfortunately osso-xterm doesn't start login shells. I made have to hack at it to make that configurable.


Tuesday, 08 November 2005

Mel joined me in Redhill. Roger, Dan and I had mixed grills in Wetherspoons whilst Mel had something veggie ;-)

Monday, 07 November 2005

In the office today - and not just for the delivery of my new toy, which arrived and is generally fantastic. More on that in a minute...

Whilst walking down one of the flights of stairs, slipped off the bottom step and very, very badly twisted my ankle. Complete with "crunch" noise and lots of swearing. Hobbling across London to try and get the train to Redhill at least proved it wasn't broken. Very swollen and bruised, though. Fortunately, could use the pack of peas I had to ice it, and the ibuprofen gel I had with me anyway to try and get the swelling down.

The Nokia 770 made up for some of the pain, though. It's a very nice, simple box (complete with a Tux logo on the back). Opening it up revealed the device itself, its removable cover, RS-MMC card, stand, charger, spare stylus, USB cable and instructions. It's smaller than I expected, but the screen is wonderful. Unfortunately, the 800x480, 225dpi resolution means less information is generally shown on screen at a time than with the Psion netBook's 640x480, but larger,screen. Web browsing is fab: Opera's quick and comprehensive, unlike on the netBook.

Downsides:

  • The RS-MMC card was very difficult to get in: the card-cover is secure, at least.
  • The low information content of things like gpe-calendar when installed is somewhat frustrating, as I explained above.
  • 64MB of RAM isn't enough for what is effectively a pocketable desktop Linux computer and sometimes the processor's a little slow.
  • The GPE software suite is very basic compared with the spoiling provision built into EPOC. But, hopefully, it'll come along.
  • The handwriting recognition is entirely useless with my scrawling, left-handed, mess. However, the onscreen keyboard is quite cool.

Upsides:

  • The screen.
  • The well-thought out interface and set-up.
  • The hardware feels robust and well-made.
  • It's a pocketable desktop Linux computer!
  • It's good value for money.
  • Desktop, polished, reliable apps like gaim Just Work: talked to Mel over MSN via GPRS to my Sony Ericsson T630 whilst sat on the train to Redhill.
  • Built-in wireless and Bluetooth seem to work very well.

Overall, I love it - but it needs more apps. Hopefully now it'll get into the hands of more developers and we'll see some really good, innovative, uses of it.


Sunday, 06 November 2005

Amelia's Christening in Folkestone.

Thursday, 03 November 2005

Just after 5pm, the Nokia 770 online store opened - and I ordered one. Should be in the office on Monday.

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