Exchange Student

Oh well! It’s about time I write something non-technical to my blog!

This Sunday has been quite amazing! Not only the fact that it is a day off, but it’s sunny, and quite warn, too! So, in the morning me and my girlfriend decided to go out and run! As I (we) haven’t run in eons, it was painful. Literally. But in the end it was worth it. After the shower we felt better than in a long while!

Then we made something I should have tried a long while ago. We cooked eggs and bacon, and made coffee. We didn’t have any beans (I don’t even know the right type), so it wasn’t really an Irish breakfast, but close enough, I’d say. And it was tasty! I also heard that as a breakfast it is healthier than “the usual one” that contains plenty of carbon hydrates (?) (as in toast, potatoes and pasta), say cereal and toast, for example. Well, at least it kept the hunger away for several hours, so I think I’ll try it every now and then, when I have the time…

After the breakfast (about 1 o’clock) we took the bicycles from the wintertime storage, pumped air to the wheels, lubed the chains and got going! I remembered why the bike was so expensive: it felt still like new! We went to this big second hand shop in the city centre and spent about an hour and a half digging the shelves. It was full of people looking for tiny treasures. I believe that it is a Finnish thing, as the three second hand shops I encountered in Carlow were small and for charity…

After that we did some foodstuff shopping and came home. The trip was quite unstable, as I had two bags full of food to bring, but we managed to do it. Then we took a nap and two hours later started cooking. We had potatoes, spicy steak in a sauce, fresh green salad, rye bread, cheese and red wine. Oh, the taste! Oh, the wine! And oh, the company, of couse! The dessert was blueberry pie, by my mom, and now we’re stuffed. The rest of the day is going to be spent in front of the telly, watching Desperate Housewives, Prison Break and House M.D.

The best Sunday in eons.

Technology has taken leaps so fast, that terminology just can’t keep up without “It’s a phone! No, it’s a NIT!” type of cat fight.

Well, first of all, all cell phones have inputs (mic/keys/GSM), outputs (speaker/screen/GSM), memory and processor(s) – therefore they are computers. Well, they qualify as computers. Certainly N900 qualifies as one, too. Personal computer is a whole different concept.

To me, N900 is a phone. Why? It can “natively” (it eats a SIM card) perform calls over cellular network and send/receive text messages. (About MMS support, that’s extra, and not a requirement for a device to fit in the “phone” category.) And the most important factor is that I can rely on it as a phone. It has proven to be a reliable fella that Does The Job.

N900 is, to me, also an Internet tablet. It’s small, has great web browser, Flash support, email and Skype/MSN/younameit. Because it supports the things listed, I haven’t needed to power up my laptop in weeks! Seriously! For “the usual surfing” I most certainly want to use my desktop computer, but when on sofa, N900 is the thing.

N900 is also able to play music and videos. It therefore qualifies as a portable media player. Hell, I wonder why no one has yet started shouting It’s a freaking MP3 player and I’m right! The media capabilities are extreamely nice when traveling by a bus or a train, and the ability to play Internet radio stations is a killer feat in a party!

N900 acts as a USB mass media device when plugged in a computer and the correct mode is selected. Therefore, it is also a USB key. Also, because it eats a MicroSD card, too, it is also memory card reader.

As you can see, the list could go on and on. Oh, yes, it’s a camera, too…

I don’t want to spend my time whining about the terminology. N900 is not just a phone, nor can one succesfully claim that it is not a phone. Nor it is just an Internet tablet, because it eats a sim card. It holds a Linux distribution, not Symbian. It is really more than sum of its parts. And that’s why I like my N900 so much.

This is a little modified forum post of mine. Just my fuel for the flames.

Yes, it’s possible. You can overclock your Nokia N900. It might damage your device, too, so be warned!

Long story short, one simply needs to install a custom kernel and reboot. You can choose your clock rates from a post made by Maemo Talk user Lehto. When you have grabbed the kernel image of your choice, get the firmware updater tool and check the flashing instructions here, for example.

And just to make it plain and clear, this will void your warranty!

There are pros and cons. While some (very few selected) devices can cope with 1200MHz, I’d recommend – based on forum talk – to try 800MHz version first. If you overclock less, it is more likely to work correctly. I have now 900MHz core speed with 500MHz DSP, and I have noticed no glitches so far. Also, the general outcome seems to be “works for me”. The speedup is very welcome with Flash videos, browsing pages and making menus slick, not to mention video playback and emulators. The difference is very notable!

The cons are damaging the device, or bricking it. You had better know how to flash the kernel back to stock, when PR1.2 hits the repos. There are already software incompatibilities (I cannot install Maemo Mapper, for example) so it must be close… It will break Nokia Software Updater, at least. Overclocked components are bound to produce more heat, so keep your, uh, hands peeled…

There you go. Happy bricking!

Edit #1: There is someone totally bonkers, probably with a bucket full of N900s to fry, bake, cook and roast. How would you like your N900 run at 1.7GHz? PS. The heat sink is about 3x the size of the device, so yeah, YMMV.

Edit #2: I’m back with the stock kernel. It seems that the battery life is best with the stock kernel. The 125MHz step could be nice, too…

I’ve used Nokia N900 since Dec 2009, so I think it’s time to give a bit back to the community and give some feedback of the device. I chose to list 14 things I like the best. Why 14? At first I wanted to do 11, because I like to go over the top. When I was finally finished, I had highlighted 14 different thingamabobs.

Please note, that some of the applications listed may be harmful to use. You use them at your own risk. I use them, and they work for me. Guess I’m lucky! And yes, I consider myself at least a power user.

14: TV out

The device is capable of TV-out. And the cable is bundled with the device! That’s great! I don’t need to copy images over to my laptop and hold the two-kilogram heat generator on my lap if I want to show a pic or two on the telly to my mum. Also, using the web browser or playing some games from the big screen is darn awesome! It makes me only with it could do component output or HDMI… Oh well, maybe the next device!

13: FM radio transmitter

This is very nice. I want to play some Internet radio through my living room sound system – a few clicks and it’s done. No more “honey, where’s that cable again” stuff. And it works practically everywhere! In the car the roof sadly blocks the signal, so it’s no use there, but when in friends house, especially during party night, it’s priceless. Oh, and the FM booster lets me boost the power, if the reception is bad for some reason.

12: Ovi Maps

Ovi Maps is not perfect, but it is certainly good enough. If I had mobile broadband right now, it would be on the background all the time! Ovi Maps are evolving, and I’m sure when the next version hits the shel…repositories, it will have the long-missing features, and then it could be raised for a few ranks. It’s certainly a good enough way to find from place A to place B, and it covers pretty much the whole world, for free. A good piece of software!

11: Idle battery life

This might not seem like much at first, but in the event of power outage it’s a nice thing to have a cell phone, that can stay alive, just sitting there just in case, for a long time. I tested this myself. I did a fresh reboot to the device, didn’t open any applications, and I even removed the wireless network card kernel module using Wifi Switcher. Then I checked the battery status a few times a day using Battery Eye. I only had the patience to test from 100% to 50%, but extrapolating that doesn’t seem too wrong to me. I fully charged the phone on last Saturday at midnight (or on Sunday at 00:00) and yanked the charger cable. On Wednesday, about 3 o’clock it still had just over 50% left. A quick calculation yields to 7d 6h. I still had it wake me up every morning, and occasionally checked the time, but that’s all. I think I’m close enough with saying “one week”. Plus minus whatever. YMMV.

10: Digital camera

This is pretty much non-surprising. The N900 has a good camera, and it can even geo-tag the pictures taken due to the built-in GPS receiver. The picture quality is good, way enough to print them out and put them in those old-fashioned, ever lasting photo albums. The video would be quite as awesome, too, but there seems to be audio syncing problems, which still need to be resolved before I get myself into video world. And it’s very easy to share the pictures in, say Facebook. Or email them. Or just browse them! The thumbnail view is just plain awesome, too!

9: FlipClock

The splash screen says it all: FlipClock – the ultimate time piece. This basically emulates those old-fashioned clocks or calendars, which had little metal plates with numbers printed on them flip every so often. There is another skin, too, pretending to be just the usual 7-segment display clock radio – but with customisable colour! You just simply don’t need anything else to give you the time – be it day or night. And the very final touch is that you can actually set the loudness of the selectable tune! That way you can wake up and just listen to the song, without waking all the neighbours and blowing your ear drums!

8: Media player

Now this is just a piece of gold! The bundled media player is actually one I’m very satisfied with! Sure, people keep complaining that it doesn’t support playlists, but I’m more an album-per-album listener myself. I also tend to tag my MP3s properly, so finding them is easy enough without playlists. Actually, I’ve never used them, even with Winamp. (No, you can not install Winamp on your N900.) The hardware is powerful enough to play just about any clip I had at hand! And should the player give me artifacts, I just open the video file with MPlayer. No further explanation needed! That piece is also just plain gold!

I considered giving a little app called headphoned (headphone-dee) it’s own rank number, but instead I decided to dedicate it a paragraph. That little daemon just sits in the background doing precisely one thing: listening. It listens for the event for removing the headphone plug from the device. When it sees it, it does the precisely other thing: It tells the media player to pause. Result: I go to class, headphones on my neck, music still playing. I start taking my stuff to desk, and decide to put my headphones into my bag. Thanks to this little daemon, my classmates no longer give me sorry faces concerning my taste of music.

7: Keyboard

There are mixed comments about the keyboard flying around all the time. Some people are extremely happy with it, others just complain about the missing umlaut or the arrow key compromise and want their money back. In my case, I don’t feel sorry for losing the dedicated arrow keys. I have hardly ever used them! And whenever I do, it’s usually for changing the text cursor position on the screen, so it can be replaced by a screen tap most of the time. I’m Finnish. I need my ä’s and ö’s way more than the arrow keys. I wish I had a key press analysis program… Oh, wait, I could make one myself! Well, the actual point was that the size and shape of the keys, and the key press response are both very well balanced. Compared with Nokia N810, which had much larger keys, but less bumps on them, and they required a LOT more force to press, I very much prefer the keyboard of N900.

6: USB charging

The fact that the N900 is chartable from the usual USB port – I don’t even have to enable the file transfer USB mode – is underestimated. It is extremely handy! The cable bundled is much smaller than the bulky charger (seriously, someone show me a tiny, portable and truly handy travel charger, right now!) and don’t take up all the space in your pocket. What it comes to my friends, they all have computers, but none of them has a cell phone chargeable by MicroB-USB port. I just carry the cable with me all the time. Simple and efficient.

5: Angry Birds

Remember part 14? Combine Angry Birds with that! The game is so addictive I actually missed a few days from college, because I played it the whole night! The graphics are cute and happy, the gameplay suits very well the size and shape of the device, and because of multitasking, I can have it running in the background all the time, consuming virtually no power (I hope)! I can’t wait to get back to Finland, so I can show this game to my fiancée. She’ll love it almost as much as she loves me! Well, anyway, I hope Nokia fixes Ovi Store soon, so I can buy the extra levels! (A pirate I’m not.)

4: Open software

One of the fundamental existential qualifiers of the whole Maemo (MeeGo, sorry) platform is open source. The important thing here is the openness – not Linux. The fact that it is a system running on top of Linux kernel, is a great thing, because that allows huge amount of existing applications to be ported with quite little effort (save the finger-optimised GUI, of course). The key issue here is that the whole platform is open. You can send texts from your app. You can write an script to block certain callers. Not happy with the media player? Get another one! Want to save battery? Yank some kernel modules. Want to support VoIP calls? Pretty much done now! See what I mean? Apple, your ways will come to the end soon.

3: Web browser

The web browser is seconded only by two others. The top three was the hardest one to put in order… Anyway, the web browser in N900 is awesome. MicroB, as it is called, can eat any web page I can imagine. As it is Gecko-based, it’s capable of displaying most sites perfectly! As opposed with Firefox now that it’s out, too, it’s just so simple and functional, that all the bells and whistles (save Weave Sync) seem useless! The browser is fast, capable and scrolling is very nicely done. Zooming using the rotate gesture is still too awkward for me, so I just use the double click; it’s much better and very functional! I cannot emphasize enough how great piece of the base system the browser is. It just kicks ass. Big time. Sure, it won’t pass Acid 3 test, but neither does Firefox 3.6 or Internet Explorer 8!

2: Unified messaging

One thing I was absolutely thrilled was the messaging capabilities of the device. It would combine cellular text messages and Internet messaging services and wrap them in a very well thought out view. No matter if it’s an SMS, Skype message, MSN message, Jabber message (read: Facebook), Morse code or smoke signals – it’s all uniform. Your favourite protocol not listed? It might be available as Telepahty plug-in already! And the same goes for the SIP/Skype/GSM/UMTS calls, too! For numerous times I haven’t even realised that I was speaking on Skype! I just answered the ringing phone! Now, that’s how to do things! Full marks for Nokia!

I would like to include email here, too, but I really haven’t used it, since I don’t have mobile data right now (I’m in Ireland, remember?) and it doesn’t use the uniform messaging views. Instead, it uses its own application, which by reviews seems very powerful! Anyway, if I’m home, I have my laptop. If I’m at college, our group has a “private” computer class (they call it software development centre) with decent computers. I just don’t need it at the moment, but I’m quite sure it is well done and functional! Maybe back in Finland…

1: Multitasking

This is by far the best feature of the device. I can write an SMS, have a Skype chat going on, a video paused and Angry Birds on the background, too, with a high score one bird away! It’s just amazing! Now, some of the listed things exist for iPhone too (Angry Birds, USB charging…) and some things not (idle battery life, keyboard…) but multitasking is the only feature that you just have to have, no question about it. If you lose a high score once in a game because of a incoming call, something just isn’t right.

There you go. I can’t do the final read through right now, so I’ll just post it and fix the fixmes later.

Yes, yes, it’s been a while. Too long, one might say. And that’s just the right thing to say…

Well, anyway, I’ve been quite busy with the college. We had a few bigger assessments and the final exams are done 5/6 now. I’ve literally felt like crushing under the load, but I managed to pull through – with quite good grades, if I may predict… Anyway, a lot of nothing has happened here, so let me try to squeeze the past two months in one post. (I’ll sure I’ll come up later on with new material.)

Where should I begin…well, January, or course! When I came back here, it felt very very strange. I know I ranted the house in the previous post, but anyway I felt like I had come back home. Well, “home” may be a little too emotional word here though… I wasn’t actually too cheerful getting back here, but it sure felt like “getting back here”.

And then it hit me. The best guess would be a cool-server chicken panino (No, it’s not panini! Learn your French!) but the reason does not really matter, the effect does. My stomach went absolutely bonkers for five days! All I could do was rest, drink juice and water, hallucinate and pray. It began on Monday 18th, if I remember correctly (well, how could I ever forget). On Friday one of my classmates offered to give me a lift to the local health centre. Well, it was very fortunate, because of my E11 health insurance card I didn’t need to pay a penny, and the medicine I got were quite effective. Well, I went to Tesco’s to get the medicine and to buy something to digest. It was the longest 200m walk in my life! On the way back I tried a smoothie – fruit, juice and yoghurt blended and served. Boy, I fell in love in those yolks! Well, I got better, but I missed a week in the college. Nothing too important, luckily.

And another thing. We received quite a large assessment with deadline set to February 1st, last year but I made the choice not to begin it I got back. And oh dear, I had gotten sick, and I had just two weeks to finish it! Well, thanks to little sleep, I did finish it in time. I still don’t know how I managed to stay up to 6:30am, without coffee, but I did and finalised the report. Now that I look it, the report was quite a horrible draft, but I got what I deserved… Time will tell the results.

What else now… Well, I got screen protectors for my Nokia N900 and N810. And my precious Nokia N-Gage died on me! Nooo! I’ve just kept it off then, no one contacted me in three months using that number anyway.

And beer. Oh, yes, beer. I still think I drink way less than “the normal Finnish students”, but I sure have a pint to ease stress a few times a week now. I first like the “cheap beers”, as in the lagers, then the darker ones, and now I think I’m somewhere in the middle. Depending on the day, one of them tastes good and the other one bad…

And then one very scary thing: I think I’ve gotten myself into English so deep that it has pushed some Finnish aside! I was talking, in English, about the Finnish language, and I found myself constantly pronouncing the words as a genuine Englishman would! I couldn’t switch it off! And when I type (not write) in English, I sometimes invent new words. That is, I write a word that sounds the same, but might or might not mean the same thing! Now, that’s confusing, too!

The apartment has the questionable honour to be the final business this time. I have settled all the matters with the landlady. I’m happy to leave, and she is happy to let me leave. She even told me to give a call should I need a place to stay in the summer! Who knows, I just might get back here just for the fun of it! (When it’s summer, TMP-DUB with Ryanair is cheap again…

I’m back here at Carlow, so it’s time to look back at the past three weeks.

My holiday in Finland was great. Just plain awesome! I spent some time with my and my fianc̩es families, saw pretty much all the friends I hoped I could, delivered all the souvenirs (some as Christmas presents), and the most important thing; spent vast majority of that time with my fianc̩e. I even managed to push the final year project a bit further! I did everything I wanted to Рexcept visiting my home university. Well, the proper time to advertise IT Carlow is actually March, so no harm done!

It really makes you see the everyday things differently when you get back home after being abroad for longer than a few days or weeks. You need the culture shock (I still can’t tell if I have really experienced that, propably yes) to appreciate the things you are so used to! To me number one is the art of building houses.

No offence, this is a nice house! It’s just so hard to wash your face in the morning: there’s no plug, so I need to use running water. And because I can only choose between cold and hot water, the result is either very painful, or extremely unpleasant (but it does wake me up). Also the usual arrangement of the front door lock – you need the key to open it from both sides. I had been back here for maybe an hour, when the doorbell rang. Soon after I heard a shout “Does anyone have the key at hand?” No matter how hard I try, it just doesn’t make sense other than preventing people from leaving the houses with the keys inside.

Oh yes, back to the vacation part! When I left Ireland/UK, there was a bit of snow. Less than 10 cm (4″ for the Imperial unit users) I’d say. The whole country was in a panic/halt! It seemed so funny, when I got back to Finland: we had 25cm (10″) of snow, temperature of -10°C, heavy snowing and strong wind. And I drove home, some 100 km (60 miles) with no trouble. And now when I came back, I noticed that in no house along the way the snow wasn’t cleared from the front yard. Not in one I saw. Yes, having snow in this country is quite unusual, but still one should be prepared. Even with just one wide shovel to clear the path from the front door to the car! Oh, now I enjoyed the -26°C day in Finland… No, really, I did!

As a final note: As the temperature in Ireland hardly reaches 0°C even at wintertime, using air source heat pumps makes perfect sense. Yet, I haven’t seen single one of them (or then the outside condenser units are well hidden).

It has been a week already for me in Finland! Time hasn’t been flying terribly fast, though! Chrismas Eve has come and gone, and it was very nice: sauna (a separate building made of logs, of course), traditional food (and LOTS of it), presents (lots of them, too) and the families of me and my gilfriend. The weather was rather chilly, altough there was only less than ten degrees celsius below.zero. The blowing wind wasn’t nice, made my face cold… We walked a few miles through the forests and the fields to visit my cousin. It’s actually very relaxing; there’s no-one else, not a sound, just you and the woods.

And Guitar Hero. Oh, yes. My girlfriends little brother borrowed Xbox 360 from me and Guitar Hero Metallica from his friend. Last night we played it ’till 3AM! My left hand feels correspondigly sore… But I thought Stepmania and co. were addicting, but GH is for sure far more enjoyable, and also prolonged playing sessions don’t (always) end with a sweaty, smelly man! I think I have to get one, too…

My Nokia N900 has proven to be a fine device. I haven’t inspected every single feature and app of this thing, but just used it on everyday basis instead. It hasn’t failed me as a phone and SMS device, but the standby time seems quite low, some two-three days… And on active usage maybe less than a day! Well, I knew that beforehand, fair enough! The web browser is a killer! It eats anything! Even Facebook works to the fullest! Some crappy-Flash-embedded higher quality movies look like a slide show, but that’s no surprise! Bounce looks very promising, but the camera has some issues (as in every game). The graphical performance looks stunning, so it,s the quality of the game that defines the game itself, not just the looks!

And one very important opinion about the Finnish keyboard of N900: The arrow key arrangement is NOT an issue. Why, say you. Because I still haven’t still needed up and down keys, not even just once. For gaming keyboard, plug in a USB/Bluetooth one (if possible).

As Eino-Mies Porkka-Koski from Alivaltiosihteeri says; Täältä tähän.

It’s about time to get back to Finland for a while. A well-earned Christmas vacation. I’m getting more and more anxious about it! I can’t concentrate (to studying for my test tomorrow, sadly) and I even didn’t sleep well last night (which is very unusual to me)!

And a word or two about Ryanair. I don’t know (how could I) what’s your precise opinion about that company, but I have so far only positive things to say. I have now had three flights, and they have all went just fine. What’s more, I bought my return ticket to Finland like ages ago, and now I needed to postpone the return flight by one week. What’s even more, I had to book two flights back then; DUB-STN and STN-TRE, both return tickets, because Ryanair (this is pretty much the only weak spot) doesn’t do DUB-TRE on wintertime. So I had to take a detour.

Anyway, there is a link on their website that allows one to manage the booket ticket. Mind the radio buttons on the bottom: Add bags etc., view details, change flights, change passanger name and check-in. They actually have the option to change the flight date(s) online! Now, that’s convenient! Sure, it’s not free; I was charged 25EUR and 25GBP (~28EUR) for the changes. That’s not actually quite cheap for fully automatic on-line service, but if I was to just buy new tickets, it would cost way more than that. Now, the positive side is, that I didn’t need to argue with over a telephone, but I just could make the changes needed myself – in a matter of seconds (okay, minutes, I triple-checked the details)!

So, now I have even more reasons to be anxious about the holiday, because I have an extra week to spend!

I used to have StepMania installed on my laptop while I was back in Finland. I also had bought two dance mats. I had all forgotten about that fine way to combine gaming and sports, until I happened to see Dance Dance Revolution arcade game in Kilkenny. Then I started to long for StepMania on my Ubuntu.

I have a 64-bit installation (even though I don’t really need 64-bit memory mapping with my 2GiB of RAM), so it’s not an easy task to get it running. However, I happened to spot StepMania 4 alpha 3 package for x86_64 architecture. 32-bit users, there’s also a package for you.

No matter how hard I tried, I didn’t get it running. The 64-bit version didn’t produce any sound. The 32-bit version did produce sound, but failed to recognize my OpenGL acceleration. So, I’m out of luck here, because even manually compiling it didn’t succeed. Darn. Back to 32-bit Ubuntu, I guess…

This, by the way, is the best and the worst part of Linux: Things update quickly. However, it may make older things incompatible with the newest changes. I guess I could use Ubuntu LTS, but I’d be missing all the fancy new features… Choices, choices.

EDIT: I have now Ubuntu 9.10 32-bit installed, and the Stepmania binary linked above works almost like a charm. Almost. The sound seems not obey the global PulseAudio settings, but instead I have to pre-set the volume using alsamixer. Or, I could just crank the volume and adjust it in-game. However, the audio stutters and cracles a bit while in the menus… Might be PulseAudio issue, but luckily the sound in the stage works just fine. Sweet!

OK, I’ve been talking about Mozilla Thunderbird 3, but this is the last-ish time. Promise. Because the final version is out.

Source: MBNet