Ever on and on

There are some things that would make my Nokia N810 better or easier to use (for my purposes).

1. Line-out. Apple got this right, there’s line-out on the iPods (and even then you need to buy the right adapter). I plug the N810 into an FM modulator wired inline into my car’s antenna; in order to get the audio loud enough, I have to turn the volume on the N810 and on the car radio way up. There’s an audible background noise from all this, and I need to remember to turn it down before I switch back to headphones (N810) or an FM station (radio).

   I could use a USB audio widget, plugged through a converter to get down to the N810’s mini connector. But the USB connector on the N810 is only accessible if the easel-legs are open, which isn’t exactly car-friendly. Plus I might have to fool around with kernel modules. I haven’t tried any of this yet.

2. Working GPS. ‘nuf said.
3. gphoto. When I’m on vacation I’d like to be able to pull pictures off my camera, and view them on the N810. I could also push them to my home server next time I found a network (WiFi or 3G, using my phone). To do this I need gphoto, or something like it. This is probably a simple matter of setting up the cross-dev environment and porting it, I haven’t gotten around to trying.
4. fsck in the boot menu. I should ask fanoush, or hack it together myself.
5. Automated podcast downloads. It would be nice if gpodder would do this for me, instead of having to be manually triggered. It’s on their roadmap.
6. Polishing: I wish the keyboard were a little better, that it had a Tab key, that I didn’t need to use the Fn key to get to “/” (come on, if I’m typing it’s likely to be URLs or filenames!), that the directional-button-thing were on the front of the tablet and not buried on the keyboard. None of these are killers.

To reiterate, I’m happy and I use it alot. In fact the screen protector has gotten scarred up and I may need to replace it – I’ve never had to do that before. This is just the “room for improvement” category.

Herewith my hard-won knowledge on setting up a Nokia N810. You want to boot off the removable memory card – partly because it’s replaceable (when the flash memory wears out), and partly because it’s removeable (for backups, and when you need to reflash it).

1. Learn how to reflash the tablet. I do this from my Linux box.
2. Get root. My favorite way to do this is by installing OpenSSH, which sets the root password as part of its install process. Then you can open an X Terminal and ssh root@localhost.
3. Prepare the removeable card. Mine is an 8GB SDHC micro card (with the mini adapter), formatted as 1GB for the bootable ext2 partition, and the rest as VFAT for N810 data. This is also a good time to practice with fsck on the two partitions, and to define your backup strategy (I use tar).
4. Set up to boot from the removeable card. Download and follow instructions from fanoush’s site.
5. Shutdown the tablet, and back up the removeable card.
6. Put the card back in. boot up, and start installing and configuring software.

I use these apps daily:

1. gpodder
2. claws-mail
3. mediabox
4. maemo-mapper
5. omweather on the desktop
6. openssh

I also have iodine installed, but use it less often. I gave myself sudo access as well. Beware the published recipes for sudo access – believe it or not, the ones that were current 6 months not only didn’t worked, they soft-bricked the tablet so I would have to reflash, or at least reboot to the internal card (see why we did that?) and undo my changes.

Six months ago, when I was between jobs, I bought myself a Nokia N810 tablet. I’ve had time to get used to it – it no longer “smells new” – and I still like it. It took me awhile to get the software setup just right, I’ll cover that in a separate post.

There has been an iPhone in the house for several months now, but I’m still happy with the N810. In fact, I use it several times a day. I use it for:

music and podcasts: this is the real winner, I’ve basically stopped using my iPod. While the iPod interface is easier to use, especially without looking at it, the WiFi connectivity of the tablet makes it much easier to get the content on. iPods are tethered to a Mac (for iTunes) or some other computer, the tablet isn’t.

I use gpodder for podcasts, and mediabox for my music. I used Canola2 for months, but although it’s prettier and integrates podcasts and music together, it’s slow, and doesn’t do a great job with the podcasts.

email and blog reading: it’s smaller than a laptop, but quite usable for reading and for short-to-medium replies. I couldn’t live without the slide-out keyboard. I use claws-mail with its RSS and HTML plugins.

GPS: the open source maemo-mapper app is fantastic, but there’s some sort of impedance mismatch with the N810 GPS, and it takes forever to get synced up. (The system GPS software seems to get a location long before maemo-mapper.) So this is the weakest app, and it doesn’t get much use.

Web surfing: The small screen starts to become an issue here, but for many web sites it’s OK. I use the builtin browser.

ssh: for the obvious reasons.

Connectivity: I already mentioned the WiFi connectivity. I also have it paired to my phone, so I can leach off the AT&T 3G data networking. I also have iodine installed, although it hasn’t been very successful when travelling. With the phone pairing, I don’t really need it.