Fleamarket bargain !

Heh, sometimes you get lucky. Got a Playstation 1 with a game for 3.5€ :) Not bad.

play.com DRM free music

It was very nice to hear the play.com has started selling DRM free mp3s. I've been using them for some books and DVDs (much cheaper than here in Fi). Too bad the DRM music is UK only... I hope they open it for rest of Europe.

The Nokia N810

I got my N810 a bit over a month ago now and been using it daily. Ever since I got it, it has been very stable, no need for any reboots or anything in a while. Uptime is a nice 31 days now.

Look and feel
The look and feel is very good, I like the brushed metal front. It also feels very solid. Speed is very good, interface is much more responsive than on the old 770, the extra 200 or so Mhz really helps, as does the double amount of memory.

GPS
GPS works ok, only the initial fix took it's time but that's expected. After that it been working just fine.
The default Map program is pretty basic. And unfortunately to get any proper routing out of it you need to pay, and then it would still be quite useless as you can't save your track. (For openstreetmap purposes). But Mapper(or maemo-mapper) is very good replacement.

Misc
What else.. the screen is as good as on the 770, no change there, touch feel is a bit different but not that much. The default theme is ok, but I don't understand why every OS release need to have different themes, I liked old ones and I would prefer to use one of them still.

Software
Skype is now supported and Gizmo should support video calls. I haven't tested any of those yet as almost nobody I know uses any of them that much, almost all are on MSN only. Pidgin is ported so I can chat with friends, would be nice to have pidgin as a default install. And now with the beta update of rfcomm it's possible to use other protocols from the integrated IM framework. Been using MSN with it for a while and it work nicely.
I just tested a video call with Gizmo on windows (Version 4 is no longer a beta, yay!), works quite nicely. Video quality is a bit bad but ok.


The browser is no longer Opera but instead Mozilla based and now heavy ajax sites like Facebook finaly work ok (same with the latest OS2007). And such useless things like youtube works with the new flash.

Interface
The new transparent desktop applets look very good, but they take much more space now and the RSS reader won't display a preview anymore, just the title. Also the speed contact only displays as many as can fit, for me that's only two, not very nice.
The interface is now much more thumb friendly, it's pretty ok, but not consistent with all apps and sometimes the interface feels a bit cramped with BIG buttons. I would have liked to have the OS2007 adaptive style for the main menus back.

Keyboard
The keyboard is ok, as good as one can get in such a small space. Some special characters are in odd places but otherwise pretty ok. But I miss the cursor pad on the side as I'm used to the 770. Some say they have a problem with using the top row but I haven't noticed anything, must be my fingers or that I'm typing with the tip of my nails as I'm used to on my N73 with it's small buttons.

Anyway, I'm happy with it :)

N810 discount code works!

Yay, the N810 is finally available in the Nokia online store and the discount code works (for Finland at least)

This and that...

Been too busy with work (and school) to do anything really interesting for Mapper the last couple of weeks. I'm rewriting how Mapper handles paths (tracks and routes) to be a bit more generic. And for routes be more suitable for handling routing internally. Also gypsy seems interesting, need to add support for that.

Oh, and I finally gave in and joined facebook, should be easy to find me.

g_convert (iconv wrapper) transliteration

I was playing with the g_convert iconv wrapper to get rid of all öäå and other special characters so searching for, lets say: "Hämeenkatu" would work with just "Hameenkatu" in Mapper. All I got was a bunch of ?????? instead.
Anyway, this blog post explains it.. annoying.

Some Mapper progress...

Mapper has now a pretty nice feature list:
* Can uses OSM data for Places, Streets and POIs
o Importer converts planet XML file to sqlite database with selected features
o Reads bzip2 compressed 0.5 API planet XML files
* POIs and Streets can be searched
* Displays street and place where you are
* Setting arbitrary destination point
* Setting destination to POI or Street
* Display rough estimate of distance to destination
* Periodic distance to destination announcement
* Show a bearing to destination in heading compass
* Show a bearing to next way point in heading compass
* Quick POI Add interface (Hard coded list for now)
* Click POI for information
* Displays GPS sky and signal information
* Route way point list with directions
* Simple Track point filter (by HDOP, VDOP and angle)
* Speech output for route way points and destination information
o Uses espeak+gstreamer
* Supports both normal Desktops (plain Gtk+) and Internet Tablets (770, N800, N810) (Hildon)

Unfortunately, I haven't had enough free time to work on routing just yet, but it will come soon I hope.