Bath Tub, Rubber Keyboard, Ratpoison and Opera //at 22:23 //by abe

I recently noticed that a very good way to safely read webcomics in the bath tub is an old laptop with a big screen (e.g. a IBM ThinkPad A-series like my 15” A31 which has a nice 1400×1050 resolution), a water proof keyboard, the screen-alike, keyboard only driven (hence the name) window manager ratpoison (other keyboard driven window managers like wmii or awesome probably will do as well as ratpoison) and a good keyboard driven web browser which can bind or by default has bound a key to follow <link rel="next" ... /> tags.

Like Opera. Opera has bound the space bar to scroll one page down and if you reach the bottom of the page to go to the next page as labeled in the link tag. Additionally the full screen mode is helpful, too.

Or the dream browser of all Emacs addicts, Conkeror, which has bound the function browser-follow-next to ]]. (Conkeror packages will hit Debian Experimental quite soon.)

Or the GNOME feed reader Liferea which has bound Ctrl-Space by default to scroll down the content by one page and if you reach the bottom of the content go to the next unread item.

With that equipment I can read my favourite web comics like Questionable Content (whose content seldomly is questionable :-) or Ozy and Millie (Think of a mixture of Calvin & Hobbes, Peanuts and Kevin & Kell) in the bath tub without drying my hands before reading the next comic or fearing water or health damage by the combination of water and computer. I just press one or two keys on the keyboard floating over my lap and have a good time.

BTW: I’ve got a blue, non-branded one (packaging reveals it as “AirTouch Keyboard”, probably manufactured by SanChuan Electronics, China) with swiss-german layout from ARP Datacom (whose website offers no permanent links and insists on session cookies *puke*), but those from Keysonic or from ROCK seem to be very similar — nowadays they are also available in illuminated, miscellaneous colors and wireless, but only IP65, probably because of the necessarily accessible battery compartment.

But this kind of having fun still has optimisation potential: non-flexibel water-proof keyboard (IP67 recommended, so those IP66 keyboards and mice recently posted at UF LOTD are probably not tight enough), flat screen mounted above the bath tub, etc. ;-) Or maybe a completely water proof laptop if such thing exists — Does it?

One more note: In Debian Sid and Lenny recently a new tool called keynav has been added, which allows you to control the mouse quickly using the keyboard only. So with Sid or Lenny, I don’t even need an waterproof mouse or trackball if an application insists on mouse usage. ;-)

Google Open Source Jam and Webtuesday Hackday //at 21:01 //by abe

I was at two geek events in Zurich this week: At the Google Open Source Jam Zurich on Thursday evening and at the first Webtuesday Hackday on Saturday.

Somehow I expected both events to be quite similar, but they weren’t.

Google Open Source Jam

When I read “Jam” or “Jam Session” I think of Jazz musicians spontaneously playing together. So for me “Open Source Jam” sounded like a hack session where some spontaneous coding is done. But there was no spontaneous collaboration at Open Source Jam at all. It’s just (more or less spontaneous) talks about different topics and chatting. So I was quite disappointed from that event.

There were though quite a lot of people I knew from e.g. Webtuesday, Chaostreff or Debian. I even met some people I just knew from IRC until then.

Half of the talks were sole propaganda talks though, e.g. for Webtuesday Hackday, OpenExpo and Soaring as a geek sport. Not really wrongly placed talks, but not what I expected in talks at Open Source Jam.

The few rooms and floors I saw reminded me very much to IKEA Children’s Paradies, just even more motley. Though it felt all sterile and wasn’t by far as cool as I expected after what I read elsewhere of Google offices.

I also think that several of the Google employees showed some contrived friendlyness, and questions I asked e.g. why I have to give them my e-mail address and employer’s name (what do unemployed or self-employed people do?) got answered with answers I do not really believe – like “for security”. A leopard doesn’t change its spots. A data squid probably neither, even not at events labeled with OSS and said to be for the community.

I suspect that finding new employees is one of the reasons behind such events at Google. But after my first visit at one of their locations, this company still makes me feel uncomfortable. And I’m even more sure than before that I wouldn’t want to work there.

Not sure if I’ll attend the Google Open Source Jam a second time.

Webtuesday Hackday

Webtuesday Hackday also was not as I expected, but still more close to my expectations: the Webtuesday crowd gathers for hacking instead of having long talks. :-)

There were surprisingly many people from outside Zurich, from Munich and Belgium, from Lake Constance and Lausaunne – not only the usual suspects (who were there anyway ;-).

The event took place at Liip’s new office. They still look a little bit empty and steril, but all the toys (mini rugby balls, Wii, plush figures on floor lamps) and people around made them very alive. And they had very cool lamps in the form of their company logo in the office. They sure have a good interior designer. :-)

Although most participants found time to do some hacking, many found less time than they expected so we hope that we can glue the talks a little bit more together in regards of timing to cause less interruptions of the hacking.

The food was also better at Hackday, too, but mostly because we ate outside. ;-) For lunch we were at Lily’s Stomach Supply at Langstrasse (very recommendable!) and in 6he evening we were at Pizzeria Grottino 79 near Helvetiaplatz. Had a Pizza Vesuvio with Gruyère cheese there.

Hackday also had a surprise for me: The IRC channel at Hackday was but when I entered the channel there were someone in I didn’t expect there: tklauser aka Tobias Klauser aka tuxedo. Even more surprising, he read about my project idea for Hackday – a semantic feed cache proxy – and liked it, so he decided to come over to Zurich and join the project.

We didn’t came that far until Tobias had to leave again, but the progamming language and partially also libraries had been nailed: Ruby and it’s WEBrick framework. After the Hackday I worked on it a few more hours and it now already saves feeds to a cache. The Mercurial repository is at http://noone.org/hg/sfc-proxy.

There were several reasons which spoke for using Ruby instead of Perl (my favourite progamming language and the one I’m most experienced in): Ruby brings HTTP and RSS support already in it’s standard classes and Tobias is more experienced in Ruby than Perl. I started to learn Ruby a few years ago to look beyond my own nose and to get my hands dirty on some object-oriented and nice programming language, but I hadn’t found an appropriate project until now, so this was one more reason to not do it in Perl.

I also worked on my Debian package of Conkeror during Hackday. It’s already usable and I now use Conkeror as primary web browser on my EeePC, but e.g. the man page is still missing. As soon as I have the minimum in necessary documentation ready I’ll let it upload to Debian Experimental (since its dependency XULRunner 1.9 is also only in Debian Experimental yet). The Mercurial repository for the Debian packaging of Conkeror is at http://noone.org/hg/conkeror/debian

Those who were still at Hackday in the evening decided that the Webtuesday Hackday should become a regular institution and should take place approximately every two months, but stay a one day event (for now). I already look forward to the next Webtuesday Hackday.

Favourite Linux Desktop Applications //at 17:18 //by abe

foosel tagged me, whatever that means. Perhaps it’s the English word for “Stöckchen” (German for “small stick”) of which I always wondered how the English blogging part of the blogosphere is calling that kind of coercing blog posts… ;-)

So these are the rules:

1. blog a list with your favorite desktop Linux software (as many or few you want)
2. add links to the software project’s websites
3. post these rules
4. tag three other Linux using bloggers

Interestingly splitbrain, who started the thing just calls it “Meme”, but to me memes are the same thing just without duress. ;-)

So you want to know about what Linux desktop software I like and use, hmm? Desktop means GUI, doesn’t it? There are only a few GUI application I really use often since, as you probably know, X is primarily a terminal multiplexer and screen resolutions are compared by how many 80×25 xterms with fixed font you can get on one screen without overlapping. ;-)

But to be honest: Although I’m more the command line guy hacking cryptic lines into windows with small fonts, there are a few thing where I don’t want to miss X and the GUI applications: For all things web – that means web browser, feed reader, etc. But then there is also a bunch of GUI software I use occasionally or as alternative tool to some text mode or command line software.

Web

• Liferea – My favuorite feed reader although it takes ages to start and since a few days also starts crashing, probably since I have configured it to cache up to 1000 items per feed and have subscribed to several hundred feeds.

  I do not read them all though, but I use them togther with Liferea’s “search all feeds” feature as a Google News replacement. ;-) I though read a lot of feeds in it, since I use it for news, blogs, webcomics and to read missed tweets on Twitter. It organizes the feeds in a tree structure so I can easily group different types of content together.

• Opera – I’m back using Opera as my primary web browser since they offer alpha versions for 64-bit Linux.

  Initally I started using Opera with version 3.60 on Windows 95 somewhere about 10 years ago and I’ve always come back to it when no current free browser fits my needs.

  Although it hasn’t an AddOn possibility as Firefox has, I still prefer it over the bloaty and leaky and quite unstable Firefox 2, since it offers nearly every functionality I need (mainly mouse gestures and a flexible tab management), is fast, needs less RAM and is quite stable for an alpha version. And Firefox only offers those features I need via Addons which are often the cause for leaking or crashing. Haven’t tested Firefox 3 yet, but it’s said to be be less bloaty…

• Kazehakase – Formerly I used kazehakase as my primary web browser since I really like its user interface, but the version in Etch is quite slow and seems to have memory leaks. It’s currently the second browser I have always open. But since my browsers always have uptimes in terms of months I don’t need web browsers that are leaking, so I’m thinking about replacing it with something more stable.

• Conkeror – A Gecko 1.9 (i.e. Firefox 3) based web browser completely controllable with the keyboard. And the key bindings are those from Emacs and partially also from the classic text-mode browser Lynx. Will be available in Debian Experimental soon.

• Netsurf looks very promising as it’s a simple and fast browser with it’s own rendering engine and originating on RISC OS. But since I’m a heavy tab user (60 tabs in one window are not really seldom), a browser (yet) without tabs isn’t really that useful for me. But I hope it will get tabs soon.

• Midori – The other upcoming new browser in the Linux world is using Apple’s WebKit (which itself is based on KDE’s KHTML) underneath. Only in Experimental yet (form a Debian point of view :-). Use it on my Debian Sid machine to play around with it.

• Twitux – A simple GTK Twitter client which doesn’t clutter the screen with unnecessary icons or buttons. Just a small menu bar, status bar and the tweets.

• Azureus – In the seldom case where I need to download files via Bittorrent I either use Opera’s builtin client or Azureus. The nice thing about Azureus is that you can get nice graphical as well as textual statistics about all aspects of your downloads.

X / Desktop Environment

• FVWM – My favourite window manager for normal, big or multiple screens. I use it since more than 10 years (twm and tvtwm were its predecessors) and its configuration has evolved since then quite a bit to tinted transparent window frames and title bars, etc.

  I tried other window managers in between (e.g. Sawfish and GNOME’s own Metacity, each for a month or so and both together GNOME, also played around with KDE on one machine) and I always came back to FVWM. No other window manager is so fast and configurable in regards of keybindings. Handles multiple screen very well and out of the box, too.

• ratpoison – My favourite window manager for small screens (less than about 1024×768, e.g. on my EeePC, on the 8” touchscreen connected to my MicroClient Jr. or on my 1996 ThinkPad 760ED with 133 MHz Pentium 1) since it doesn’t waste screen space for window borders or title bars. It just maximizes all windows by default to screen resolution. You then can manage (split, resize, switch, close, kill) windows as you are used to manage shells and text-mode applications with screen(1). Doesn’t work that well with multiple xrandr managed screens though if they don’t have the same size.

• FLWM – The Fast and Light Window Manager. My favourite low-end but still DAU compatible window manager. Use that on demo and guest accounts, especially on low end machines.

• Synergy – connects displays of other computers (not only X but also even Mac or Windows) with your mouse and keyboard similar to a KVM switch. I use it at work to add my laptop as fourth monitor. ;-)

• trayer – A desktop environmen independend system tray developed by the FVWM Crystal Project. Since I changed from manually editing /etc/network/interface on my laptop each time I came into a new wireless LAN to using GNOME’s Network Manager, I needed a system tray for the nm-applet. Trayer is quite easy to configure using command line options and can handle tinted transparency as I use with FVWM and ATerms. So it fits in perfectly.

• ratmenu and dmenu – For showing generated menus together with ratpoison, I use ratmenu (e.g. as replacement for ratpoison’s non-interactive window list) and dmenu (e.g. as application menu using my own wrapper which generates the menu from some config file). Probably will publish that code once it proved itself stable.

• xtrlock – the simplest tool to lock you desktop: The mouse turns into a lock and it only goes away if you enter the right password. No screen saver included though and everyone can see what’s on your desk. I like it though. Use it on low-end machines.

XScreenSaver and Really Slick Screensavers (GLX Port) – Configurable and command controllable screen saver daemon. Favourite modes: GLMatrix and Substrate from XScreenSaver and Lattice Sky Rocket and Hufo’s Smoke from RSS GLX.

• xosview – my favourite system monitor since more than a decade.

Terminals

• xterm – there is no better X terminal emulator than the original xterm. I found no other terminal which is so fast, has no problems with text-mode applications (aterms break aptitude’s display), no problems with character set encodings, which can be embedded into other applications and which has a fully working classic Unix cut & paste.

• aterm – When I need a fancy transparent terminal for showing a fancy desktop, I use the AfterStep Terminal Emulator aterm. In that case, the system tray, the window borders, the window’s title bar and the terminal on my desktop have the same fancy tinted transparency.

• yeahconsole – A wrapper around xterm which works like the pulldown console in quake. Good for the short shell usage inbetween. ;-)

  The other similar pull down consoles I know (KDEish yakuake and GNOMEish tilda) had some issues with focus and keybindings while yeahconsole works just out of the box and showed no problems until now.

Audio and Video

• XMMS and Audacious – If I want to play a single list of files of the same file format or single stream, I usually use the command line tools mpg123 and ogg123. But if I need anything more fancy or more flexible, I prefer the WinAMP clones. Formerly XMMS, nowadays Audacious. Both with some old skin which I use since more than a decade and which I initially used with WinAMP 2 on Windows 95.

• mplayer – no fancy GUI, easily controllable with the keyboard, plays most video file formats I can remember. ;-)

Editing and Developing

• GNU Emacs – I’ve been raised with GNU Emacs and Lisp at university, so I’m quite sticked to that. I usually only start one Emacs instance and connect to it using emacsclient. I also like TRAMP for editing remote files. but I don’t need it that often.

  On machines, where I don’t want a full blown Emacs installation or under root I prefer GNU Emacs’ little brother GNU Zile (Zile Is a Lossy Emacs), but that’s text-mode and no GUI software.

• OpenOffice.org – I think it’s a really great software, but I use it quite seldom, usually only when I have to open some file in a Microsoft file format. For writing letters, articles, presentations and so I have LaTeX.

• Gnumeric – My preferred spreadsheet application. Although for some purposes I use the OpenOffice.org spreadsheet, usually when Gnumeric has not all necessary features.

Graphics

• xv – Yet another tool I use since more than a decade: No other image viewer is so fast and yet so easy to use with both keyboard and mouse. Open source, but unfortunately not (yet?) free software.

• keyjnote – fancy PDF presenter with a lot of interactive features.

• pdfcube – PDF presenter turning pages as a cube as compiz or Macs do with the desktop.

Chat

• Pidgin – I usually use irssi inside a screen for IRC as well as Jabber and ICQ (via Bitlbee), but I also often have a local Jabber client running which then is Pidgin (formerly known as GAIM).

Other Tools

• Unison – I use it to synchonise the cache and state of my feed reader between laptop and workstation. And I do indeed prefer the GUI version over the text-mode version. I use the text-mode only if I use it from some remote location.

• XKeyCaps – The ideal tool to wreck you keyboard layout. ;-)

• XGnokii – Used it to backup my former Nokia mobile phones, the 6130, the 6210i and the 6310i. Doesn’t work anymore with my new E51, though.

• Sunbird / Iceowl – Not really using it yet, but I plan to use it as my primary calendar tool.

• QEMU / KVM / KQEMU – My favourite desktop hardware emulator. (For servers, I prefer Xen for virtualization.)

Games

• ScummVM
• Planet Penguin Racer / Extreme Tux Racer (all forks of Tux Racer)
• Frozen Bubble
• Battle for Wesnoth
• cuyo, xpuyopuyo, flobopuyo
• Sauerbraten
• PrBoom / Freedoom
• Neverball / Neverputt
• Briquolo
• xfrisk
• Icebreaker
• XBomb

Non-Desktop Applications

In case someone wonders about my mail client, Jabber client, IRC client, ICQ client, file manager, notes taking application, shell and versioning system – they’re all command line or text-mode applications:

• E-Mail: mutt
• Chat, Instant Messaging: irssi + Bitlbee + GNU Screen
• File management: coreutils (and sometimes busybox ;-)
• Notes: hnb
• Shell: zsh
• Version control: Subversion (svn), Mercurial (hg)

Who’s next?

That’s difficult:

• maol would be interesting, but since a while he just blogs in Jeopardy style, so he would need pack all those programs into the subject of his blog post… No, not a good idea.
• Venty! No, has no active blog anymore.
• Dieter! No, no Linux user.

Hmmm, I think I have to look in a different corner of my circle of friends. Hmm. Ah, now I know:

• dyfa – not really a Linux user, but I guess FreeBSD is ok, too. :-)
• nion – this will be really interesting. He even uses more strange software than I do. ;-)
• alphascorpii – no idea what she prefers (except that it will be available as Debian package ;-)

And no, I don’t expect posts as comprehensive as mine. :-)

A good day //at 23:32 //by abe

Today was a good day — at least if I average all the things happened today. And since Twitter.com is currently down and there’s no way all those things fit in 140 characters, I decided to pack them in a “short” blog post:

• This afternoon one backplane of our newest backup server caught fire. :-( No collateral damages though. :-) The machine is currently at the manufacturer and should be back on Monday.
• My EeePC (more about it in an upcoming blog post) recently overheated and switched off. It looked as if it since then didn’t turn off correctly anymore, but power and the fan stayed on although the operating system was shut down. Today I found out with help of the debian-eeepc-devel mailing list that my EeePC wasn’t damaged but the snd_hda_intel driver caused the machine to not shut down correctly. One rmmod line into /etc/default/halt and it shuts down perfectly and fast again. :-) See also the hint in the Debian Wiki.
• Even more: I’m sure that it not even has been turned by being hit by something through its neopren bag inside my backpack as I initially expected. It turned out that I must have not noticed that it wasn’t properly shut down and put it in the neopren case in that condition :-( since the power button simply doesn’t work when the lid is close. The good news: It doesn’t seem to have carried away any damage. :-)
• I had the same problem as Beat had: I couldn’t import certificates into my Nokia E51 mobile phone. I already tried to import the PEM and the DER versions of the CAcert root certificates but it just didn’t work. After Beat found out (Kudos to maol who pointed me to Beat’s blog posting), which certificate format is necessary, I found out that while the CAcert PEM certificates have the correct Content-Type header (application/x-x509-ca-cert) the DER certificates have not — they are served as text/plain. Downloading them to my server, adding the right content type to the config and downloading them from there again with the mobile phone worked fine and I now don’t need to acknowledge anymore the certificate of my IMAP server each time I want to read my e-mails on the mobile phone. :-)
• One more EeePC thing. During a discussion on the debian-eeepc-devel mailing list, I noted that the maximum summed up resolution of the internal and external display seems to be 800×800, but it turned out that you can configure that in your xorg.conf. :-) The screen section of my xorg.conf now looks like this:

  Section "Screen"
          Identifier      "Default Screen"
          Monitor         "Configured Monitor"
          SubSection "Display"
                  Virtual         2048 2048
          EndSubSection
  EndSection
  

  See also the xorg.conf in the Debian Wiki.

So if I sum up the smileys in this blog posting, I get 5 happy ones and only 2 sad ones. I think being happy outrun being unhappy today. ;-)

Now I want to dive into my bath tub to get this smell of burning servers off me and my cloths. ;-)

Dilbert.com became even more better //at 16:07 //by abe

nion argued about the new Dilbert.com website now using flash instead of GIFs and I responded that it’s not as bad since Dilbert.com now also officially offers RSS feeds — without Flash.

It looks as if Scott Adams got more responses from nion type people since he divides the feedback to the new Dilbert.com site into three groups: Those who are angry about flash and bloat (mostly techies and linuxers), those who are fine with the design and features, but angry about the slowness due to overload and those who are fine with the design and features and ignore the speed. I’m in none of these groups.

But Scott Adams valued the feedback and responded especially to the first two groups of critics with something for which he couldn’t have found a better URL:

http://dilbert.com/fast

With this pure Dilbert, nion should now be happy again. I still prefer the RSS feeds though.

Dilbert.com changed - to the better //at 13:00 //by abe

nion argues about the new Dilbert.com website now using flash instead of GIFs.

Well, he hasn’t looked right: Dilbert.com offers now flash and static images. And the last ones are now much easier than ever to view or fetch, because Dilbert.com now has RSS feeds. Ok, at the moment, the feed seems broken respectively empty, but I have the last week of Dilbert comics in my feed reader. In colour!

Additionally Dilbert.com is opening its archive. (The link to the blog post currently broken, too.) Back to 2001 is said to be available now, the reminder is in the works

The new Dilbert.com site worked fine yesterday but seems to have some problems today. But I expect that they will fix that soon. :-)

Noticed it btw. because the inofficial Dilbert feed from tapestry included a broken image yesterday. (Works fine now, but no new comic in that feed today…)

New mobile phone and what the Nokia 6310i did better than the E51 //at 00:31 //by abe

Habits control our choice sometimes more than we would like to admit…

New mobile phone

Since about two weeks ago I’ve a new mobile phone. The Nokia E51 will replace my slowly dying Nokia 6130i.

I knew I needed a new mobile phone when my 6310i started to turn off itself shortly after I turned it on. I needed up to about ten times switching it on to make it stay on. Sometimes it already switched itself off before I could enter the PIN. Looks like a loose contact, but I never figured out where it is.

Although I know about Nokia’s behaviour in Germany, I still had to buy a Nokia, because after using a 6130 (the GSM 1800 only clone of 6110 and 6150), a 6210i and the already mentioned 6130i over the last decade, I got so used to how Nokia mobile phones are navigated and how you type with Nokia phones (blank on 0, point and comma on 1, case changing on #), everything else (especially those with blank on 0 and case changing on *) would be worse than the half-dead mobile phone, I’m currently using.

Spoilt for choice

So which Nokia? For a long time I refused to buy a mobile phone with a camera or radio in it. But since the E70 was no more available (and is said to have quite buggy software) and the E61 has been replaced with the E61i, there are no more smartphones without a camera, at least not from Nokia. But I also found some useful uses of camera phones. After a while I could track down the number of choices to four: Communicator E90, E61i, E65 or E51:

The picture above shows that the main differences of those models is size: Although having a QWERTY keyboard on the phone would be nice (for ssh, Jabber, the web, etc.) and the E90 being only slightly bigger than the 6310i on the paper, the size difference to the 6130i is more than only noticeable since the 6310i tapers off at the top. Besides, for the price of an E90, I get an E51 and an EeePC together… (Thanks to maol in whose blog I read about Sizeasy.)

The E61i also has a (very small) QWERTY keyboard and is primarily only much wider than any of the other phones. It even has no bigger screen resolution than the E51 or E65. (Only the no more available E60 – a normal monoblock smart phone like the E51 – had a better resolution: 352x416 pixel instead of 240x320 pixels.) And since I usually carry my mobile phone in my trouser pockets, width matters most.

So I had the choice to either get a phone which is too big for my trouser pockets or one without a QWERTY keyboard. The I remembered those foldable external keyboards for PDAs. There are at least three different makers of foldable bluetooth keyboards said to be working with Nokia Symbian S60 3rd Edition phones, so a QWERTY keyboard on the phone itself was no more important. (Only passwords will need to be entered over the number keypad since I don’t want to broadcast them… ;-)

The choice between E65 and E51 was made easier by their reviews (E65, E51) at Xonio: The E65 seems to have not that good standby and phoning times while the E51 seems to be quite good regarding endurance.

I looked through the usual shops around Z¨rich HB: Swisscom Shop, MobileZone, Phonehouse: All had the same prices (about CHF 250 for a two years contract at CHF 25 per month), except that Phonehouse had no E51 available in the shop. Interestingly digitec had a much lower price (CHF 100 for the same contract) and the choice of color (the shops always only offered one color), so I ordered a black one there.

Converting a prepaid card to a postpaid contract isn’t that easy

I wanted to change from a prepaid card to a postpaid contract, both at Swisscom, so I already own a SIM card. But digitec only offers new contracts including a SIM card or contract renewals, but no switching to a contract with keeping the number. And a new SIM card costs CHF 40 extra in their online shop. So I called their hotline and asked. The answer was: I need a new SIM card since prepaid SIM cards can’t be converted to postpaid SIM cards (but can be used with different providers).

When I came to the shop, the employee needed three tries to fill out the Swisscom form for the number migration and still did it wrong somehow. No postpaid contract acknowledgement from Swisscom after two workdays. So I called their hotline. They told me, the wrong SIM card number has been entered and I need to make digitec to enter the correct one.

A few days later back at the shop they were overextended. After a while an internal e-mail was on the employee’s screen which clearly stated that in case of prepaid to postpaid conversions (and a few other cases) no new SIM card must be given out and if this happens too often for the same employee he will be charged the CHF 30 a new SIM card costs digitec… (So they have a 25% margin of every sold SIM card…)

About one hour after they closed their doors (I was there about ten minutes before shop closing time) Swisscom had accepted the contract changes and I had a credit note of CHF 40 for the erroneously sold SIM card. And the mobile phone became even cheaper than in all the other shops. :-)

New gadget, new features

So after a week, I can say that in general I’m quite happy with the new phone. It has a nice web browser, an IMAP over SSL capable mail reader and a feed reader, it can connect to the internet via WLAN and the 240x320 resolution isn’t as bad as I expected. I already have a Symbian port of PuTTY on it and sshing into my workstation works fine, even if I currently only have the phone keyboard and T9 as input device and helper.

I also have Opera and Opera Mini installed, but to my own surprise the included web browser from Nokia (said to be based on Apple’s HTML rendering engine WebKit which itself is based on KDE’s HTML rendering engine KHTML) is way better, especially in navigation, even although Opera Mini 4.1 caught up a little bit in comparison to Opera Mini 4.0. (Hey, and you hear that from a web browser fetishist and Opera fan!)

The only thing which currently really bugs me on the builtin web browser is that even an enforced updating of my feeds sometimes just results in nothing. Maybe a firmware upgrade can help…

As barcode reader, I have installed the i-nigma Reader. (The Quickmark QR Code Reader download just showed the content of something which seems to be a Windows DLL instead of downloading it. *plonk*) It’s amazing how fast the i-nigma Reader recognizes a 2D barcode from Semapedia on my laptop screen.

Of course I also have ScummVM on my new Symbian phone.

I will also play around with Amora which turns your Symbian S60 mobile phone into a remote control for your presentations on Linux (or any other unixoid operating system) running laptop as soon as I managed to get an amd64 Debian package of it. (Currently there seems only i386 packages and no source packages available, but this may be due to the “Show all downloads” link gives a server error…) Oh, and many thanks to foosel since I found Amora in her blog.

BTW: Any recommendations for a free (preferably free as in DFSG) Jabber and/or IRC client for Symbian S60 3rd Edition? I already downloaded and installed Gizmo5, but somehow it refuses to work each time I try to create an Gizmo account.

Accessories

Since the E51 has no QWERTY keyboard, I ordered a Nokia SU-8W Foldable Bluetooth Keyboard at Brack. It was a little bit bigger and thicker than expected, but OTOH the metal case seems to be very stable and robust.

Since this keyboard is designed to fit on Nokia mobile phones it also has the two Nokia typical soft keys and the middle select key. So nearly all phone functions can be used with the external keyboard, even turning off the phone’s key lock. Only locking the phone’s keys again doesn’t work via the external keyboard.

Additionally I equipped my E51 with a 2GB microSD card. Probably a bluetooth headset for driving will come once, too.

What the Nokia 6310i did better than the E51

There are a few things which are annoying regarding Nokia’s UI consistency over the years. That the backspace key is no more the right soft-key is ok. It took me only five tries to get my e-mail account setup without hitting the abort key (no “Do you really want to abort?” questions ;-) instead of backspace key.

But what’s really annoying is that the menu navigation via number keys only works for the first level and no more for all levels. So no more “menu 4 4 4” to switch to manual network selection.

It’s also annoying that you (or at least I ;-) can’t enter phone numbers as the recipient of SMS directly anymore, at least those SMS never reach their receipient neither do I get an error message.

Same counts for the missing acoustic acknowledgment of locking the keypad. You only hear pressing the first key but not even the second key anymore.

And if you press the volume keys on the side of the phone, you also have neither acoustic nor visual feedback if you pressed them hard enough so that the volume changed. The 6310i had visual and acoustic feedback.

The alarm clock in the E51 seems to be artifically castrated: After having pressed the snooze button two or three times there is no more snooze button on the right the soft key anymore. With the 6310i you could press snooze as often as you want. Only disadvantage with the 6310i in regards of the alarm clock: the snooze time was much too long (10 minutes)…

Oh, and what’s also annoying is that I can’t move over the whole addressbook of my 6310i in one piece but have to send each contact via bluetooth or infrared and then the E51 even get’s the contact names mixed up: ‘Beckert, Axel’ becomes ‘Firstname: “Beckert,” Lastname: “Axel”’… Great! I have to edit nearly all contacts manually… The cut and paste feature helps here, but it takes about one to two dozens of key clicks to copy the whole content of a filed into the clipboard…

The E51 can run several applications at the same time and that you can switch between them any time. While that’s generally a nice feature I started using quite soon, it’s sometimes annoying that you have to wait up to a second or so after you’ve chosen some menu entry until you can do anything further. Also the screen often flickers while loading applications, showing them, then showing only the background, showing them again, etc.

… but finally

I already got used to the new mobile phone so much that I already have the feeling that my old 6310i became more thick since I have the E51. (Won’t think about how thick the about ten years old 6130 feels now compared to the slim E51… :-)