In the last few days as I’ve started to miss it I decided to write a ‘Top Ten Roundup’ with a difference, the top ten that I miss. I’ve reverted to my Windows Mobile smart-phone so I still have a few luxuries. I expect that I’ll mention several things which made me prefer my G1 to the HTC Hermes I was on. Firstly though I’ll compare a few core components that I miss.

• The email program. When I first used Android I wasn’t that excited about the email app; sure, it had starring which Windows Mobile didn’t, but that was about it for me. However I’ve come to really appreciate the way it synchronises and the way that I can apply labels and generally use it as I do the computer front end. Windows Mobile makes me synchronise manually or set a time, this is nice and I used to find it very useful but I really appreciate being able to use Locale with the Gmail application to trigger synchronising only in a WiFi hotspot.
• The contacts application. There are some trade-offs here. Windows Mobile supports a birthday for a contact, unless I’m severely blind my G1 does not. Windows mobile however attacks my contacts list on Gmail adding Mr’s and Mrs’s which in turn adds extra contacts. This is fixable, the G1 lack of birthdays will surely be fixed in a future release. Incidentally the birthdays can be shown on the calendar with a small work around. Simply go to the calendars listing under settings, click browse interesting calenders and find your birthdays under ‘More’.
• The browser. I really miss the Android browser and its speed and zoom features.
• Marketplace. Do I even need to say anything here? The ease and simplicity is so nice.

Now for my top ten list of Android applications that I miss.

1. Locale. I had rules set up to do everything I needed all based on where I was. It came into extra brilliance while abroad where I couldn’t use my normal data connection.
2. ConnectBot. Having a well rounded SSH application is essential.
3. Android IRC. Who can exist without IRC? I mean, what true techie can exist without IRC? Android IRC supports SSL, multiple servers and message notification, what’s more it doesn’t die if you leave it and open other applications.
4. AndNav. This is my most memory heavy application, it uses tiles instead of vectors so pre-download is essential for any sensible routing. Also routes are calculated away from the client which causes network use. However, all this is well known to the developers and is being worked on. I would personally love to see (for example) POI search for off-line (maybe import gpx POI’s). I would be even more excited to see off-line routing, maybe data sets could be split further just to contain roads with no additional data? However all the Windows Mobile alternatives that I’ve found have not done what I needed or had some major problems.
5. Quickipedia. Wikipedia has become the defatico source of information these days. Want cable layouts? Check Wikipedia. Want information about a penguin that flies? Check Wikipeida. Having a mobile client is like carrying it around as a book… just without ink or weight or that book smell or worrying about pages falling out.
6. Movie Finder. It’s great to be able to quickly find out the times of a movie or check which ones are on locally. This isn’t a new concept I know but I found this the easiest to use, far easier than my previous experiences on Windows Mobile.
7. Telegraph.co.uk news. Although this requires a connection and can’t horde its data off-line it’s still a great application. I’ve used other news applications and I’m open to suggestions but I found this to be the best. I do miss Viigo.
8. Listen. I’d only just started using this but I’d become adicted pretty quickly. It’s a nice product from google themselves and it provides me with a stream of podcasts straight to my device. What’s more it can be run offline.
9. FML. This would be one of two things that I use to entertain myself.
10. Lolcats. This would be the other.

There are more I miss, there are more I used regularly and there are more I’d probably like to put on this list in the future. A couple in the running were:

• My Tracks. A GPS tracking application that I’ve found to be absolutely excellent.
• Beeb Player. BBC iPlayer application, not much use here as I have a US IP but it was great when I was in the UK.
• Meridian Player (and now Meridian Evolve). A great player. Unfortunately I don’t watch much on my phone as my laptop has a better resolution for that.
• Dizzler. A music on demand player, very useful for those moments where someone doesn’t know a song and you want to *show* them.
• Barcode Scanner. Most sites about Android offer 2d encoded barcodes for content, I think this is a great way to move stuff from one device to another.
• Better Keyboard. A great on screen keyboard. I certainly miss it.

That just about makes up my little Android tear story. Hopefully I should see a new G1 working perfectly within the next few weeks and I’ll be able to tell you which applications I’m adicted to right from the word go.

Kind regards, Robert.

• AMD Turion X2 Dual-Core Mobile ZM84, 2.3GHz
• 4GB of RAM, I haven’t checked the brand but it seems fast
• 320GB of hard drive space on a Western Digital drive
• ATI M92 (Mobility Radeon 4500 series, 4530), seems to have 512MB of RAM
• eSATA, USB and FireWire
• ExpressCard
• XD/MMC/SD slot
• HDMI and VGA
• QuickDock (v3 I think)

HP Blurb

The biggest problem so far has been the graphics card, so far I’ve been unable to get it working with fglrx. I have the standard X drivers working and they give me full screen output but that too was a bit of a fight. However under Vista the card seems incredibly powerful for a laptop and it has no problems playing DVDs using the standard X drivers under Linux. However the iPlayer will not play without major chopping. Hulu plays but only at standard resolution and without full screen.

The sound works perfectly using the snd_hda_intel module and one small adjustment to its config. In fact I’m quite impressed with the volume and power the speakers can create. The file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf now contains:

options snd-hda-intel model=hp-hdx

eSATA, USB and FireWire all appear to work correctly. All I’ve noticed is that the eSATA port’s USB functionality seems to be a little low power, I can use everything except for hard drives which act as if I’d plugged them into a USB 1.1 port.

Strangely I can’t get the XD/SD etc slot to work, this is pretty normal though so I’m not too bothered. It does seem to help if I disable the power saving for them and FireWire in the BIOS. No idea why, maybe someone else will have more information on this.

The laptop can take two hard drives and I’ve found a second miniPCIe slot. Unfortunately the second hard drive needs a ‘kit’ to be installed, I’ll blog more about this when I get a chance to install one. However, with hard drives the size they are these days this makes for at least 1TB of space without too much heat overload.

I haven’t yet worked out the obligiroy IrDA, it seems it’s somehow hooked through the BIOS to allow the included remote to function (including the luxury of a power button). I haven’t had any other problems with it yet, the ExpressCard slot seems to work perfectly as do the other various ports.

Over all this is an excellent laptop with a lot of power, although it’s large enough to watch DVDs on it is also small enough and light enough to be portable.

Kind regards, Robert.

Just a quick blog to say that I’ve added a few things to Chute Stick. I’ll thin down the number of packages as soon as possible, but we’re still well within the 1GB memory stick so I can spend time doing that later.

I’ve added all versions of Skype. Skype provides a reasonably secure method of getting a message to someone; it also permeates firewalls better than most viruses. I added 7zip as it seems to be a good free alternative to WinZip, the 7zip compression itself is remarkable. In some of my experiments with it I’ve experienced almost 50% smaller files than standard zip (using `zip -9`). Because of this excellent compression I’ve included a copy of p7zip (the *nix port). CamStudio may seem like a strange choice, but it does offer a way for you to quickly record a video of how to do something, this could be essential if you’re unable to tutor someone face to face but need them to (for example) administer a box for you. I’ve debated if a Linux desktop recorder is needed, but if you have ssh you can probably do most administration through that.

Well, that’s all so far, I’m snowed under with work at the moment so I was just popping this through. Most of the additions have been related to things I’ve needed for work over the last few days. I will be blogging about some other things (mostly work related) soon, when I escape anyway!

Kind regards, Robert.

http://www.robertsmall.org/wiki/index.php5?title=Chute_Stick#The_Software

 http://www.robertsmall.org/wiki/index.php5?title=Chute_Stick#The_Software

I will provide more information on each item in the near future including versions and links. I expect a few of you are thinking of cloning my setup until I release a script.

Kind regards, Robert

http://www.robertsmall.org/wiki/index.php5?title=Chute_Stick

If you’re in a situation where you only have one memory stick, what’d you want on it? If baggage handling lose all your bags and you just have the encrypted hard drive in your jacket pocket and the memory stick round your neck, what do you want on the stick?

You’re stranded on an island (or somewhere with a really poor internet connection) and you want to acquisition a computer for your own uses, what do you want on your stick? Someone else on the island wants you to fix their computer, what do you want on the stick?

In general, what do you want on a memory stick when you don’t trust or want to use your internet connection? This is what the Chute Stick project is meant to provide.

Although there are many different situations where this may be of use and some of them wont require most of the software provided this is meant to be an ‘in any event evacuation plan’. I know a lot of you have already contacted me about this and so there probably wont be that many comment; however, there are several things which I’d love to be posted here:

• Situations where you might need a rescue stick.
• Software suggestions/requests.
• Things to stay away from.
• Suggestions for replacement software, I know I may not have picked the right stuff all the time.
• Suggestions about ways of packaging or unpacking software.
• Ways to make things more accessible to more people.

Of course you could just tell me I’m doing something useful!

Which brings me to another point, what am I doing? Well I don’t intend to distribute too much software, I’d prefer to write a script which downloads and updates software to a memory stick for you. Much of the software I’m looking at is either not free/libre and so I don’t expect to be able to do more than provide a script to get the end user to download and use the software correctly. If anyone is familiar with the gentoo ebuild context they’ll understand more of what I mean, my script wouldn’t require pre-built packages but do it’s own work.

The wiki page is: http://www.robertsmall.org/wiki/index.php5?title=Chute_Stick

Kind regards, Robert.

We hope to provide information on the protocols we come across and the ways they can be made to ‘play’ nicely with Linux. In the end we may develop programs to provide unavailable features to Linux users. Although there are several projects which seem interested in providing GPS support for Linux they seem to lack a central place for a user to start, a place for you to pick what you need and get everything working; Linux GPS is being developed with this in view.

www.linux-gps.org

Your support would be appreciated.

Kind regards, Robert.

However, not everything is good, although I’m pleased to be returning home with the view of working on some new projects, seeing my parents again and enjoying some – hopefully more productive* – fishing; I’m not pleased to be leaving my girlfriend and she’s not pleased to have me leave. Luckily for her I left some chocolate and most of a pack of digestive biscuits, luckily for myself my mum sent me a text saying she was making cake. My mum’s cake is good. I predict the next few weeks being taken up solely with comfort eating and work as I did far too little while I was on holiday.

A friend of mine has told me that while going through regular separation I’ll love every little thing that reminds me that we’re together when we are. then when we’re permanently together they’ll start to annoy me. The example she gave me was snoring, my girlfriend doesn’t snore so I’m sure I’m safe from this problem.

(A break of a few hours.)

The plane continues to be involved in quite some turbulence, I don’t mind turbulence unless I’m trying to drink at the same time, then it’s just annoying. One of the things I really enjoy about KLM is the service, I actually get a decent meal with real knives and forks. The dinner was a nice Italian pasta served with cold chicken and rice salad and a nice chocolate cake.

‘Oh the weather outside is frightful,
but the fire inside is quite delightful,
and since we’ve no place to go,
let it snow, let it snow’

This song will definitely bring memories for the next few months, it seems a popular one on US radio and with those creating Christmas CD’s; fortunately I like it. It has a lot of good times from the last month attached to it and I will find it a pleasant trigger to remind me what fun I’ve had.

It’s always sad to leave somewhere you’ve really enjoyed being, I never knew how bad it was to know that you’re leaving someone behind. The last time wasn’t quite so bad, I’d spent a lot less time with her, this time it was every minute possibly. The lesson I’ve learnt is that it’s very important to scope your view on life. You can waste your life looking forward to something which lasts for a few minutes or you can enjoy every moment as it comes. There’s always a silver lining.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Watch The Shawshank Redemption, he crawls through a long pipe of sewage and other undesirable muck and as he exits he raises his palms to heaven basking in the rain and the storm. He is free. If he’d not had that to look forward to he’d never have done that fete of human persistence and perseverance.

What I’m attempting to show is that all the time there’s something to comfort yourself with and drive yourself forward with. Whatever your lot is you have to extract the good bits out of it and live them up. If you don’t scope your life to the good bits and be very careful to always check the bigger picture then you will waste days sitting staring at the wall. I know, I’ve been there. Life is always worse when you don’t have perspective on it, Looking in the short term today I was leaving the arms of my closest and best friend, but put into perspective it’s a brighter day than it may seem. When I return I can contact the American embassy and start applying for a Visa, I can start working harder and get some of the big projects I’m working on up and running. So by going through the tunnel to the light I’m giving myself the ability to stay for more than 90 days and to earn the money to make my stay more enjoyable than it might have been otherwise.

If you ever have anything you want to talk to me about or you’re feeling a bit down in the dumps then please contact me. A lot of people have found it very helpful, but don’t expect to hear what you want because I have no problem with telling you what you need to hear instead of what you want to hear.

I’ll be announcing a few new projects and possibly even some milestones soon, I’m sorry that I’ve neglected nearly everything over the last month. At least I can return to my work totally refuelled and ready to create some great things. I expect the Linux GPS site to be off the ground soon, get your content ready!

Those of you who know about openhardwaredatabase, John has done some incredible work on it. Kudos and a very big thank you to John for this. I’ll be publishing some more about this soon and showing you how it (hopefully) will transform the way you decide which hardware to buy for whatever machines you have. Again John; thanks, great work so far!

One thing I’m loving is having a laptop sitting here running at 600MHz with no fan activity, very little disk activity and averaging just over 7W power usage! Having 1GB RAM does help this, having a system I’ve tuned finely to do this also helps, but I think that my choice of hardware has really helped too.

I’m flying just below the eastern tip of Iceland at the moment, It’s dark, It’s been dark over most of the journey because I’ve been quite northern and it’s winter. Although my ticket says that it’s a windows seat there was someone already in my space so I’m sitting by the aisle, I’m not objecting as my cabin luggage probably weighs about three times the prescribed amount.

People will always ask me – unless their name is James** – what the differences are between England/Europe and America. There are a lot of small ones, all of which seem to boil down to a very close score if someone were to be keeping count. One big difference I’ve noted is that Americans seem to generally be far more patriotic and of the opinion that there’s nothing too interesting out there, Europeans and the English seems to be generally more metropolitan; we realise that there are other currencies and that the world is not completely contained within our country. Please remember that these are generalisations and not stereotypes.

Another difference seems to be the environmental orientation, it could be due to the greater price of fuel or the greater media coverage. This seems to cover cars, lights, heat, and flying.

In England we have pretty boring coffee, it could use some cheering up, some excitement. In fact, the best coffee I’ve had in England would be one I’ve made at home using a percolator or maybe one Lloyd gave me a while ago – Lloyd being rather a coffee nut. American coffee is far more interesting and enjoyable, you can have far more than coffee, weak coffee and milky coffee. I’ve never really bought coffee in Europe, nor have I discussed the practise, it may be different in other countries. Still, I like American coffee.

Clothes are in general somewhat cheaper, however, they don’t come with free medical insurance and all the rest that we get from our heavier taxes. They’re generally the same quality and a reasonably compatible style.

The way that we pay for our medical care is another big difference, I think the standard of care is probably pretty similar, the only difference is the method of payment. In England most people pay for their care from their taxes, in America their insurance. I do like the concept of public health care, I believe that it should be a common human right to receive reasonable medical care, whatever your health or income. One area I can see that this might not be entirely applicable to is cases where people are smoking or drinking and it’s making their condition worse while they’re refusing to be involved in any plan to remove them from their addiction.

I arrived safely at Norwich airport around 9:30AM GMT0 DEC3, this was as far as I’d got writing so I left it as is.

Kind regards, Robert.

* Two fishing trips got nothing.
** James recently asked me if they had eggs in England.

Airports are interesting places. As a man who’s rarely travelled abroad they posses a curious attraction. I hate security, I really hate being put though all the things that they deem necessary to make sure that you’re not a terrorist or maniac. Being entirely mad I always wonder why they let me through without question, the world is most certainly a strange place. As I write this I’m directly over Belfast, or so the GPS tells me, Several thousand feet above it I admit, but still above Belfast, I don’t feel anything special because of this, I suppose I should really.

I know a fair few people who’re scared of flying, I am not. I’m not really scared of airports, turbulence, flying meals, Dutch, or English security; what gets me is American security. I dislike being bullied, I dislike being made to feel scared and suspect, I dislike American airport security. My experiences have, on the whole, been OK, I’ve never been shot or had anything confiscated and I’ve never seen anyone shot or confiscated; my gut feeling dislikes being involved with people who refuse to look me in the eye and carry a gun while looking rather bullying. It’s strange, I’ve never actually had anything bad happen but I just don’t like their attitude.

I don’t like DVDs which contain advertisements telling me not to download them and I don’t like people requesting to ‘mark’ my receipts. I am not a thief, please stop treating me as such

I’m somewhere around half way through the second flight now, I don’t find it the most enthralling pastime but between watching the in flight TV and considering life my time has passed reasonably well. More fortunately I have no worries about my laptop giving out as I have two extended life batteries and three standard ones, today a long time of computer life tomorrow the world! It also helps that I’ve done a lot of work on making my laptop as energy saving as possible, It currently is using around 8.4W, this includes some (a little) disk usage and a fair bit of keyboard usage. I have all my cunning plans to create marginally better laptop yet to implement, the unfortunate fact is that the X31 only has one PCMCIA slot and one CF (CompactFlash) slot; this is a perfect amount for one GSM/UMTS modem and one GPS device, leaving no space for a CF boot card. Other cunning plans have involved putting my swap space onto CF or moving my log and tmp directories onto one, this all relies on a CF card and I like my GPS. Some of you may suggest a USB based solution, but this would also eat power and eating power is bad.

Still, around eight watts is a sensible usage and provides me with many hours using my dock and spare batteries, what’s more I have TuxOnIce working nicely and can switch between batteries without even bothering to reboot! Life is wonderful, well, maybe not wonderful but at least mediocre.

I’m currently passing over Greenland. I love the Dutch and their language, and their airlines. They’ve provided me with a ‘vegetarian pasta’, I didn’t really mind what the pasta had eaten, but it tasted very nice. KLM food generally is nice, they provide me tomato juice and pepper to go with it, they provide hot towels – i have to provide the hands to use them, they provide a nice meal with real cutlery. In fact I’m not that sure that I’m that far from being at home and in comfort. That is if it weren’t for my nose. My nose feels like it is likely to explode, and my neck on the same side is echoing the emotion, I presume this is some issue with the pressure up here.

To distract myself I’m analysing the scientific impossibilities within the dramatisation of Harry Potter, I personally have preferred the spin-off comedies.

Some of you may know that I’ve recently purchased an IBM X31 and that I’ve been trying to get the best battery life from it possible. One of the things about this is not having to restart whenever you have to change a battery, hibernation as it was dubbed by the windows developers is a useful trick for this. I can wait till my battery is almost run out, hibernate, change batteries, then start up again and resume where I left off. This can be done in a short enough time to preserve a net connection and not ping out on IRC! I’ve actually considered creating a ‘blank’ suspend image which has the main core of the OS and the DE loaded already and simply resuming to that instead of ever starting a new session, the problem with that would be resuming from a different partition when I’d actually suspended. I’d also have to create a new version of this image each time I updated my kernel or certain bits of core software, this will take some thought before I decide to go into it but it does provide something for thinking about.

I’m intending to build my father a media centre, this will (of course) use a Linux core and a probably a MythTV front end. This project would greatly benefit from a suspend image booted from a CF card, in fact, it would be almost instant boot and instantly be usable from where it last was. This might be a method of producing a very fast unalterable distro, your entire filesystem could be on ram-disks and your entire operating system could be stored on a suspend image, all you’d need is an initrd image and a kernel. The entire system could be updated by a bootable dvd which simply replaces the suspend image. If anyone has any comments on this then please do leave them as I’ve become interested in the concept within the space of writing it. Before I get attacked for breaking freedom and closing an OS, it wouldn’t be closed at all, the suspend image could be disassembled and edited with absolute ease; to prevent this some for of checksumming or signing would have to be implemented and I would not support that. Tell me your thoughts.

I used to use Suspend2 when I first experimented with Gentoo a few years ago, now I’ve returned to it for my IBM X31 I’ve resumed my interest (pun not intended). Back then I was looking to completely replace windows and show my school that it was possible. Although I proved this to myself they were still cynical and blamed every problem on Linux, even when the camera refused to work on their windows PC’s. There are none so blind as the willing. I do find it both sad and somewhat frightening, people believe what they’re told by the people they believe are right; even after being shown categorical results to the opposite. I’m rambling.

Do leave my any thoughts on the suspend image based OS.

Kind regards, Robert.