Deciding on vacation destination and mapping the destination

Me and my gf finally decided where to go this summer, first the country and the final destination. We where to Parga, a nice little village in Greece, last summer and fell in love with greece. Friendly people, very good and cheap food, especially the sea food.

So, it was easy to decide on Greece for the country this year too. Then to pick the destination. After looking around in various (finnish) travel agencies we found Limnos (or Lemnos) (Λήμνος). Aurinkomatkat had a cheap 2 week package, but when we finally had decided, it had gone. But who cares about packages... so we just booked the flights EFHK-LGAV-LGLM-LGAV-EFHK from blue1 and now we are looking for somekind of hotel.

Anyway, I beeing an openstreetmapper (and semi-active geocacher) checked out the map of Limnos.. google maps sucks, bing sucks and openstreetmap sucked, but not anymore ! Thanks to the Bing satellite images available I've been tracing roads couple of hours per day now for almost month and it's starting to look like something now.

My target is to have every single road that I can see from the satellite images drawn before going, so I have about 3.5 months time to do it :)

Unfortunately there are only on geocache on the whole island.

Arduino and a 16x1 LCD (Displaytech 161A)

Got myself an Arduino last year, unfortunately I didn't have time to get into it that much yet, but I started playing with my LCD display today. You would imagine that the LiquidCrystal library would take care of the 16x1 display but no, it needs a bit on tweaking as you have to address it like a 8x2 display.
Below is my very simple serial monitor testing code. It will just take whatever comes in from the serial line and write it to the display and wrap to the beginning every 16 character.

/* Testing code for using a 16x1 LCD display with Arduino LiquidCrystal library.

   LCD used is a Displaytech 161A 16x1 display.

  See this page for an explanation how it works (161A is a "Type-1"):
  http://web.alfredstate.edu/weimandn/lcd/lcd_addressing/lcd_addressing_index.html
*/

#include 

LiquidCrystal lcd(12, 11, 5, 4, 3, 2);

int c=0;
int r=0;

void setup(){
  lcd.begin(8, 2);
  Serial.begin(9600);
  lcd.clear();
  lcd.cursor();
}

void loop()
{
  int i=0;
  if (Serial.available()) {
    while (Serial.available() > 0) {
      i=Serial.read();
      if (i==-1)
        break; 
      lcd.write(i);
      c++;
      if (c==8) {
       r=(r==1 ? 0 : 1);
       c=0;
       lcd.setCursor(c,r);
      }
      Serial.print(c);
      Serial.print("\t");
      Serial.print(r);
      Serial.println("
      ");
    }
  }
}

N900 RSS reader hacking, part 2

Making some progress, now with pannable feed list, pannable folder management (that broke the folder management, sigh) and more finger friendly text entries. First try at stopping the annoying connection dialog spamming didn't work, I must have missed something somewhere. No surprise there, the code is a mess.

Testing packages available at http://ftp.tal.org/pub/maemo/testing/fremantle/ you need both osso-rss-feed-reader-lib and osso-rss-feed-reader debs.

Finger friendly text entries

Pannable feed list

N900 RSS reader hacking, part 1

I'm pretty happy with the RSS reader in the N900 (and 770+N8x0), it works pretty much ok and does what it's supposed to do. But Nokia didn't do a very good work in porting it over from the old tablets. A lot of non-fingerfriendlyness, no portrait mode, and does not really follow the windowing method used by for example the e-mail app.
I've been thinking about doing something about it for a while now and the CSSU work inspired me to take a look at it.

First was to get rotation and portrait mode working, that was pretty easy, pretty much a copy&paste job from my rotation code in Mapper.When rotated it hides useless functionality from the toolbar.

Next up is fixing the layout in portrait mode, as currently it sucks, as you can see below:

"The Wise Man's Fear" is out !

I've had it on pre-order from play.com since the summer of 2009. Now it's finally out, just got mail that it has been posted. Yay :D

Maemo CSSU in images

Fortunately for the N900 the maemo community is very much alive still. And now with some proper updates to the system itself with Community Seamless Software Update or CSSU. Main focus has been on enabling much requested features (portrait mode) and bug fixes. The textual changelog is a bit dry and searching the forum is a pain, imho.
So below you can find some of the new features of the CSSU in pictures. Enjoy!

Portrait USB connection dialog

Application manager is patched to support portrait mode properly.

Portrait mode Application Manager

Settings now supports portrait mode. Two appplets, osso-applet-notificationlight and osso-applet-display have been replaced with FOSS clones. And a new applet for displaying credits for the CSSU has now also been added. The reason for not changing the system version that is displayed in the "About product" dialog is to keep the system compatible with Ovi requirements.

Settings now supports portrait mode

Rewrite of Display applet, in portrait mode

Rewrite of notification light applet, in portrait mode

New CSSU about dialog

Application list supports portrait mode too

System main menu works in portrait mode

Wine extras building progress

Got the wine package building on extras as you might have noticed. Next is to tidy up the package a bit and make it semi usable.Adding a winemine desktop entry that is :)
Not much else that you can do currently with wine on arm, unless someone likes to port some windows apps.