Random Musings of A Useless Geek

Tablet Music Making

2009-03-28T18:51:00.000-07:00

Hello, there!

The state of virtual instruments for the Nokia Tablets has been very, very sad... (My PyAno has been very lonely!) Until these two beauties came along, that is.

Two applications have made the N8x0s into some amazing music making machines! I just stumbled across them while browsing the Application Manager. Why had I never seen these two before??

Boxar and Theremin are available in Maemo Extras and Extras Devel... Go check them out! They're very compact programs and pack a big punch. Amazing stuff. I haven't put down my tablet yet today ;)

They're in the repos... but here are direct links if you're browsing from your tablet :)

Theremin----------------------------Boxar

------------

Here's a video of Boxar, for your enjoyment...

And one of Theremin...

Even More Maemo Backgrounds

2008-11-28T13:40:00.000-08:00

Hello, everyone, I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! (And a great day, even if you didn't celebrate it :D ) I spent my holiday away from home and I took some pretty pictures that look wonderful on my tablet, and I wanted to share. Hope you like em! :)

Your Tablet as a Keyboard and Mouse

2008-10-19T05:37:00.000-07:00

Ever wanted to use your tablet as a bluetooth keyboard and mouse? I have.

Finally, someone took up this task and has succeeded. BlueMaemo turns your tablet into an input device for your PC. (And, yes, right+left mouse clicks, scroll wheel functionality, and customizable keymaps are all there, not to mention media and presentation controls.)

I've tried this baby out with Ubuntu Hardy, and works perfectly. It is also confirmed working with Windows XP and Vista. Mac, on the other hand... Well, it might be another story. If you're interested, please see the original discussion.

And, my advice... Get it now!

AirX 0.3!

2008-08-24T16:10:00.000-07:00

Hello!

AirX 0.3 from Tyler Longwell on Vimeo.

AirX is a GUI for X Forwarding. What that means is that it enables you to use any program you have on your Linux PC on your tablet. Nice, hm? There are some nice improvements in 0.3.

The original AirX was just an introduction to programming for myself, but I wanted to make something useful out of it now.

The ease of administrating my home server from anywhere without the need of a command line is wonderful.

I don't have to type in my user name, password, IP address, or anything else. AirX remembers it for me and lets me run whatever I need easily and simply.

You can grab AirX HERE and try it out. (Pexpect must be installed, too. It is on that page.

Please post any bugs, explosions, or suggestions here!

Oh, and you're really awesome if you can name the background music in the video... ;)

PyAno 1.0!

2008-08-10T13:52:00.000-07:00

Always wanted to make music with your tablet, but had nothing to jam with unless you wanted to use it as a drum stick? Well, no more :)

PyAno 1.0 for Maemo from Tyler Longwell on Vimeo.

PyAno 1.0 is a great update to the past editions. I thought that maybe I should release it.

Updates include:

- Two octaves of notes.
- Octaves can be controlled by hardware or onscreen buttons.
- Fullscreen can be toggled on or off by hardware key.
- N810 owners can now play PyAno with their hardware keyboards.*
- Each note is now in tune with a regular piano.
- Dependencies have been fixed.

Get it HERE while it's hot!

Please leave suggestion here or on the iTT forums.

Until next time... Enjoy!

* N810 owners, "z" is the lowest note, from there you can go across to "m." Next are "a" through "g."

Faster Cards, Anyone?

2008-08-08T20:36:00.000-07:00

Great news for 770 and N8x0 owners alike. A simple guide has been written on how to put quite a bit more pep into your cloned OS or other mmc fun.

The guide that bunanson wrote is perfect for anyone looking to boost the read and write on their memory cards. He tells you how to install Fanoush's 48 mhz kernel and then clone your os.

And, since you have that fancy new kernel installed... Cloning takes less than half the time it normally would ;)

This thing might even breath a whole new life into your 770. Bunanson installed the kernel and cloned his os "and the 770 is running just as peppy as my N810."

Definitely sounds good, bun.

Check it out here at the iTT forums.

XP Theme For the IT

2008-08-07T12:52:00.000-07:00

Hello, tablet junkies!

Currently under development by iTT member, MaemoBox founder, and the creator of TabletOS andrewfblack is a Windows XP theme for the tablets. This is a promising beginning for a completely new look on the NITs.

Right now it is just getting started, but if you head over to this post you can grab a .deb and some more screenshots.

Very well done for what's there! Lets hope everything else added to this theme looks just as good.

(Oh, and by the way, check out MaemoBox and TabletOS, which is still in development. They both look promising from here.)

Oh, Amazon, You Shouldn't Have

2008-08-01T20:12:00.000-07:00

Well...

Look what's up for pre-order... And it's actually from someone reputable! I love Amazon. And, it says that these babies will be shipping in one to two months.

Think this'll give Nokia enough to roll out those N900s by Christmas? ;) Hm... I wish.

Ladies and gentlemen, start your wallets! (That is, if you live somewhere near some WiMax-y goodness.)

Jott!

2008-07-11T09:37:00.000-07:00

Well, hello!

Recently, I began using Jott. It's amazing, first of all. Basically, it's super accurate speech to text from your cell phone. For free. That's right, it'll translate what you say and put it into an email, text message, or twitter/blogger/whatever and send it out automatically.

It can also read your favorite RSS feeds to you over your cell phone, again, for free. (You can now get RMUG through Jott! Check out the button on the right side of the site.)

I've been using it to call from my cell, then send an email to myself with any notes I might have. "Wow, Fernando Botero is at the Museum, maybe I should volunteer there again... Call and see."

Then, later, when I look at my tablet, it's flashing a deep blue. "Oh, I have a message." It's from me. Speech to text, there is my message to myself about that museum. Very, very nice.

And, since Jott has applications for the Blacberry and iPhone, I thought I'd write them about the tablets. This would make the N810 so. freaking. cool.

Hopefully they'll write me back and I'll post the scoop here. Until then, check out the site, sign up, and be amazed. (Oh, and don't forget to subscribe to RMUG so you can hear it over your phone!)

Until then, adieu!

KDE 4 for Maemo (Again!)

2008-07-07T10:43:00.001-07:00

Hello, hello!

Drizek at the iTT forums has let everyone know that KDE 4 runs on Maemo. Sweet.

A KDE dev (by the name of mkruisselbrink) has ported it to Maemo, and is even working on a way to have right click on a touchscreen alone. This guy is good.

Check out his post and the original article! Maemo and the tablets have been getting much more interesting over the past week. :D

Debian for Everyone!

2008-07-06T23:58:00.000-07:00

Greetings, everyone! More great news from iTT!

Now, earlier, I had told you guys about Debian for the Tablets, right? Well, now, everyone can install Debian with the click of a button. Just like that Android install ;)

All you do is install a deb, then run the installer from the Extras menu. Boom!

No partitioning, no command line, no worries. Your files on your tablet and memory cards stay completely intact! Nice! With Debian installed you of course get Firefox 3, Java, Open Office, Abiword, and IceWM. Pretty sweet, eh?

I don't want to steal Qole's (the genius who built this baby) thunder, so here it is: Easy Debian for Everyone!

"Random Musings of a Useless Geek" Wordle

2008-07-03T08:31:00.000-07:00

Yes, after I saw this post from Carlos, I just had to ;) I had no idea I mentioned Debian so so much!

Automatic Install for Android Applications!

2008-07-03T06:59:00.000-07:00

You see that? That is genius, my friend. That is some good ol' fashion magic worked at the hands of Penguinbait. Alright, so, what is that, really? That is an android application. Now, guess how I installed it?

I downloaded one file to my memory card. Then, started Android.

That's it.

Get it while it's hot! Automatic application installation! (Say that five times fast.)

Android on the N810 Made Easy

2008-07-02T18:23:00.000-07:00

Well hello, hello!

Another amazing feat by the master porter himself and the man who brought who you an "early" ;) Diablo, Penguinbait and Qwerty12. Google's Android is now as easy as installing an application. No command line. At all.

PB, Qwerty, we love you.

GET IT HERE WHILE IT'S HOT!

I've installed this little puppy and it's awesome. Touchscreen works. The browser is fully functional and pretty smooth. Maps, check. And, best of all, you can install more apps, although that may require a command line. This is an amazing step in the right direction.

In my almost-semi-professional opinion... Install now!

I still can't believe it was this easy to install! Thanks you guys!!! :D

Debian On the N8X0

2008-05-31T11:22:00.001-07:00

Yo!

More great news! Yes, lots lately, I know. All you N800 and N810 users now have an alternate OS to choose from. Debian. Yes, another member of ITT has brought the whole system to tablets. This comes complete with XFCE, Epiphany, and all the software in the Debian armel repositories. Which is a lot of stuff. That means Open Office, Gimp, and more. (That's how OO was running in an earlier post here.)

Oh, and did I mention you can run all those apps inside Maemo once they're installed, thanks to another mem? Nice, huh ;)

Just wanted to put it out there, get instruction for install and follow the progress here and Internet Tablet Talk!

So Close to Complete!

2008-05-19T19:45:00.000-07:00

Hello, hello! More wonderful news from the trenches at iTT! It seems that more amazing software is coming from the community there than ever before. So, without further adieu, I present OpenOffice running natively on a Nokia Internet Tablet :-)

Pretty spiffy, eh? Debian has been released for the tablets, and hacker Qole has set about utilizing this amazing new port. The Debian guys are awesome, porting everything they can to the armel processor (the one in your tablet).

And, if you are wondering, this is not x forwarding. It is actually running on the tablet!

Oh, that is not the only thing you can install under Debian... How about GIMP? XFCE? IceWM? All there. And what can we say about the uber-devs who brought this?

You guys rock. Hard.

XFCE sure does look pretty on that nice 800x480 screen ;)

And I hear it really purrs, too.

Gimp, from Debian, inside Penguinbait's KDE port. So much awesomeness all around!

With all these new apps at out fingertips, the tablet is almost complete software-wise.

(That sentiment actually makes me smile.)

:)

What Can Your Tablet Look Like?

2008-05-17T18:02:00.000-07:00

Well, I recently took the liberty of changing my tablet's theme around. And now, I have decided to share some other's beautiful mods to show just how awesome the Nokia tablets can look. I have really gotten tired of reading about how horrid the UI is. It's not.

It's awesome.

Firstly, lets set the geek level to ten... Star trek, anyone?

Then, how bout a nice, darker touch?

Ah, some nice home applets a la' Khertan.

Oh-ho, what is that I see? Is that a mac? No~ That is a Nokia Internet Tablet running Basilisk with a rotated screen. And, is that also a Windows emulator... INSIDE a of a Mac emulator? (Soft Windows) Dear lord.

More custom icons, nice wallpaper.

KDE in action.

My tablet. Iconless and elegant.

Well, never knew your tablet could look like that, eh? If you like any, check out the thread with all the info you'll ever need: here.

Diablo Escapes

2008-05-11T10:49:00.000-07:00

Hello!

Yes. Some intrepid hackers at Internet Tablet Talk have done it. Diablo is officially on non-nokia people's tablets. I being one of them ;)

This is very far from release, but has some improvements. Most notably is that Diablo's flash player is much, much faster. Next would be an updated X-term, pretty nice.

Oh, and did I mention that it comes with two mail clients? Odd, but Modest is there.

There is also a development tool, but it allows the N8x0 to suspend to memory. NICE!

The Application Manager is also improved, you now get update alerts in the notification area.

What I'd really like to see though, is a new build of the browser engine. Still the same old code. But, I really do like this. Even though it may be months till it is released.

Great work guys! Uber-devs at Nokia are really doing some great stuff.

All these photos are Qwerty12's! He is the genius who got this working. Check out the updates at this thread. (You may need to skip to about page 21, though ;) That many posts!)

Bright Idea?

2008-04-27T09:28:00.000-07:00

Hello, hello!

I can't believe we don't have one. Have what? you ask. An Ideastorm. That word just rolls of the the tongue, hn? ;-)

Dell and Ubuntu have established Ideastorms (Ubuntu = Brainstorm) and they have worked amazingly well, so there is proof of concept.

But, why would we as a maemo community need one? Simple: New, great ideas absolutely litter places like iTT, but there is no way to hit home with that, except bugzilla (which is official looking and scary ;) Eh?).

We need an Ideastorm as a simple and organized way to let Nokia see what their users (not developers, already plenty of input from devs to Nokia) want.

So, when does it go up? ;-)

Why Not Skip Ahead? (KDE4 for ITs)

2008-04-22T15:27:00.000-07:00

Hello, hello! Long time no see, eh? Well, hasn't been too very much exciting news in the Maemo world that I've gotten to spread first lately, but there is something quite amazing going on.

Within days of release, your friendly neighborhood uberhackers (Penguinbait and Wolf08) have already begun work on the porting of KDE 4 to the Nokia Internet Tablets. Yes, I didn't believe it either, but, a picture is worth a thousand words. Here's~ Dolphin! (The KDE 4 File Manager)

And, for the uninitiated, KDE4 is simply amazing. (I am posting this from it at this very moment, mon amie.) The improvements are much more than skin deep (but it's skin is certainly exquistite, nonetheless). The core of this release has been amped to efficiency levels beyond anything that KDE3 (and, in my personal opinion, GNOME as well) has ever, ever achieved.

Ergo (love that word, Latin geek), KDE4 should run much, much faster then Penguinbait's old KDE3 port.

You can catch the original post at ITT here, join the discussion, encourage our favorite hackers :D

Oh, and some screens (I can't help myself) of Qt compiled for Maemo. And, no, this is not from Nokia, I dragged this out of scratchbox kicking and screaming. You guys know the feeling, right? If it looks this nice after Nokia is done with it, I will embrace Qt (almost) wholeheartedly. ;-)

(Is that a decent text editor I see, running on OS2008 without a hitch, that can supposedly export as a PDF, html, rich text, or plain text? Golly gosh, guys and gals, we might have something here! These are just the bloody demos: A full Web Browser, a full Text Editor, a Media Player, and many others...)

Wallpapers From the Sea

2008-02-23T08:14:00.000-08:00

Yo!

Just wanted to share some wallpapers I made for the tablets from my vacation photos, hope you like. :-)

Hacker Edition: Reloaded

2008-02-18T20:53:00.000-08:00

Oooooh, so pretty!

Finally, Chinook has been released for the N770, and lucky for me, I haven't tossed mine away, yet. I have to say, after using my N810, the 2007os GUI was complete garbage, and I'm just so happy to have this new style available on my old clunker of a tablet.

I love this release.

All and all, it is a bit unstable, though. That's why it's a hacker edition, not a skittish end user edition.

There is still no chance in hell that I will ever put 2006 or '07 back, though. I really do love it. The browser works a million (maybe I'm exaggerating, a little) times better than the 07 default. It is a bit slower, no doubt, but it renders pages much more accurately than previously possible on the 770.

So, if you're not afraid of some small troubles... I definitely reccomend slapping this Hacker Edition on your Tablet. Thumbs up and thanks a lot Nokia and the guys at Maemo HQ.

Get it here!

Trade Off

2008-02-03T19:45:00.000-08:00

Oh bugger'

Well, hello! Finally, I am able to use my laptop again! Keyboard and trackpad are back to their normal selves thanks to a bit of mussing (and a load of luck!).

But, now, well, the bad news. (Or good, depending how you look at it.)

My N810, the device I love so much, has been refusing to turn on 80% of the time. (I know, lots of other users with this problem, too, bah!) So, I decided to return it to Amazon. Great experience, actually. Amazon was wonderful in the matter. My new N810 has already been sent out and I even received an email from an actual human (not bulk crap!) stating how sorry they were for this problem. I will definitely, definitely continue doing business with Amazon, absolutely amazing and insanely speedy.

So, expect some updates and maybe I new app I've been thinking about when that N810 reaches me :)

More Beautiful Backgrounds for the Tablets

2008-01-11T18:34:00.000-08:00

Hello, hello! (I am so glad I got this bluetooth keyboard! I won't be doing very long posts or coding for a while because my laptop's keyboard and track pad are completely dead... Good thing for my tablet, though.)

As luck may have it, I stumbled across some more wonderful backgrounds for my Tablet! These are from GreyGhost at the ITT forums. Be sure to leave a comment or just a thank you for GG if you decide to use them!

Here They Are!

KDE .debs!

2008-01-08T14:54:00.000-08:00

I really should limit my posts per day... (So much interesting activity, though!)

Well, here it is, what you've been waiting for: KDE on your internet tablet with no partitioning or extra tools required. Yep. That's right, KDE, Koffice, and CUPS are now as easy as opening the application manager. Here's the announcement and directions from Penguinbait:

"Testing this has only been done on my device (n800) running 2008OS-50-2. Lets start be first saying that the reason I made this is because of the overwhelming requests for KDE in a DEB.

KDE can not be made into a deb easily, so this install is itself a hack. The main goal for this is to provide a way to install and run KDE without having to know anything about sd/mmc cards and partitioning. The second goal for this is to provide a way to remove or uninstall KDE.

This took quite a bit a playing around on my end, but it appears to be working well. There are two changes that installing and removing this software leave behind.

NOTE: This is the same software in the tarball, so no need to run out and upgrade. Newer KDESUP should be coming soon.

Testing this has only been done on my device (n800) running 2008OS-50-2. Lets start be first saying that the reason I made this is because of the overwhelming requests for KDE in a DEB.

KDE can not be made into a deb easily, so this install is itself a hack. The main goal for this is to provide a way to install and run KDE without having to know anything about sd/mmc cards and partitioning. The second goal for this is to provide a way to remove or uninstall KDE.

This took quite a bit a playing around on my end, but it appears to be working well.

NOTICE
There are two changes that installing and removing this software leave behind.

It will add ALL=ALL NOPASSWD for user in /etc/sudoers and it will remove /usr/sbin/docpurge.

1) I did not want to try to remove the ALL=ALL and end up possibly leaving a device not working because of a messed up sudoers file. If you want to, you can remove this line manually.
remove this line --> "user ALL = (ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL" (its echoed in to /etc/sudoers during install)

2) docpurge is a useless script someone at maemo wrote to remove documentation from /usr/share/doc and other locations. CUPS (cups printing package) html website resides in /usr/share/doc so not removing this renders CUPS inoperable. /usr/sbin/docpurge is moved to /usr/sbin/docpurge-orig during install of kde-mmcX

NOTICE,
First of all, lets be clear. KDE on n800 or n810 is a hack, and for now it should be treated as such. This may cause you to end up reflashing and lose data (Just to cover my butt) (poop happens)

INSTALL INSTRUCTIONS

PREREQUISITE 2GB or bigger MMC/SD card formatted FAT (formatted in windows)

In order to install you need 2GB free space

Copy the install files to your 2GB mmc/sd card

MMC1
http://www.tablethacker.com/software/local-mmc1.deb
http://www.tablethacker.com/software/kde-3.5.8-mmc1.deb
http://www.tablethacker.com/software/kdesup-3.5.8.deb
http://www.tablethacker.com/software/KDE358.tar.bz2

or

MMC2
http://www.tablethacker.com/software/local-mmc2.deb
http://www.tablethacker.com/software/kde-3.5.8-mmc2.deb
http://www.tablethacker.com/software/kdesup-3.5.8.deb
http://www.tablethacker.com/software/KDE358.tar.bz2

Now to install them, using application manager and install them in this order.

local-mmc1.deb (install time about 8 minutes on mine)
kde-3.5.8-mmc1.deb (install time about 20-30 minutes)
kdesup-3.5.8.deb (Install time about < 1 minute)

local-mmc2.deb (install time about 8 minutes on mine)
kde-3.5.8-mmc2.deb (install time about 20-30 minutes)
kdesup-3.5.8.deb (Install time about < 1 minute)

Now start KDE from extra's menu. You can delete the deb and the tar.bz2 file from your mmc/sd card. DO NOT DELETE local.img or swap.img swap.img is swapspace local.img is /usr/local ext2 filesystem"

Click here to give feedback and say thanks to PB!