fjellstad.org

I received a Nokia E-65 for work. These days, at least in Norway, people don’t get a desk phone. Rather, they get a mobile phone. It does make it easier if you have to move around according to which project you are in, since your phone number then always stay with you.

The initial impression is that’s it’s a really good phone. It feels nice, with the leather back, really light-weight, really clear screen.

Functionality wise, I don’t think there are any complains. It syncs with my Notes calendar, which make it much easier to remember all the meetings you have to go to. The email functionality has also been upgraded, compared to the Nokia N-70. That is, you can custom define the different ports you need to use to email. Wireless works great, and it’s a great way to save money on my the surfing habits. I installed Google Maps on it, and it seems to work pretty well.

E-65 comes with a mapping software, but you need to have GPS receiver, which kinda defeats the purpose, I think. If you have a GPS, you don’t really need the E-65 to show you the maps, do you?

The one thing I don’t really like about the phone is the camera. No, not because it has a “low” quality camera, but that there is a camera on it in the first place. It seems to me that a business phone like the E-series try to be, shouldn’t have a camera. There are places where you aren’t allowed to bring a camera into the office. And a camera doesn’t really fit in to the functionality of a business phone. Not that the camera is that good either. So, it seems Nokia put a camera there just to get past the reviewers that would complain about it, but not that good of a camera that would make it unusable in a business setting (no zoom, no flash etc).

Looking at the Nokia E-serie offerings, they have all cameras. I would love to get a phone with the functionality of E-65 without the camera. But other than that small thing, it’s a fine phone.

Spent the day trying to install a PCI USB2.0 card into the computer I use for the server in Norway. The problem is that we have a HP LaserJet 1022, and after some extended testing, it turned out that if you print using an USB1 connection, one A4 page will take about 30 min to print. Too long. So, I bought a USB2.0 card to plug into the server. Sounds easy enough, right? Nope, of course not. Turned out the server didn’t have enough power to both power the USB and the rest of the system (230W). So, I’m back to the old system with the printer connected directly into the Windows machine, and none of the other computers on the network can print.

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been almost 6 months since I updated this site last. Time really flies when life is interesting. Not that I’m going to write much about that here (what do you think this is, MySpace?)

I’m not going to be able to graduate this spring as originally planned, mostly because I didn’t finish one of my required classes. Not fun. Looks like I will be graduating March next year. Oh, well…

I bought a new laptop, when the old one started dying on me (sorry, but a system shouldn’t shut down because of overheating just because I’m compiling the Linux kernel). I’m more or less happy with the buy. It’s a very nice system.

Otherwise, I spent the day today, learning about subversion. In fact, I moved the all the homepage files from CVS to subversion. One of the reason I hadn’t moved to subversion before was because there didn’t seem to be very good support for it in my favorite editor, Emacs. Fortunately, subversion does come with en Emacs extension that lets Emacs manipulate subversion repositories, even though it’s not as nice as the default revision control controls in Emacs (no ctrl v v).

So far, I really like subversion. It does let you do stuff that was hard to do in CVS, like deleting or moving directories or files. On the other hand, subversion does seem to impact your project layout, something that CVS never did (ie. branching and tagging is not meta data in subversion, but rather a copy of your trunk, intersting concept). I need to play with it some more before I know if I really like it, but so far so good.

I bought a new cellphone, the Nokia N70, replacing my Nokia 7250. One of my criteria, is that it will work both in the US and Europe (must be tripple bandwidth support). I also wanted one that could play MP3 files, because I don’t always carry my Ipod with me. So far, I must say I really like my new phone.

One of the new applications I really like is the world clock. This makes it possible to have the phone keep track of the timezones. All I need to do is specify the city I’m in, and the time gets updated accordingly. Really nice when you cross timezones a lot like I do. Especially, if you are moving from England to Norway, and you can’t really remember whether you updated the clock yet or not. The music player is not too bad. I can’t really hear anything wrong with it. The screen is big and bright, and the keyboard is pretty comfortable. The updated menu system is somewhat confusing, especially compared to the Sony Ericsson, but it might just me not being used to it.

I love the fact that N70 uses a RS-MMC. That means that, although you can use the Nokia PC Suite to put software, pictures and music on the phone, you can also copy the media over to the multimedia card. It’s nice, since I’m using Linux, and it means I don’t have to find a Windows machine to update my phone.

One of the things I don’t like is the battery life. I bought my phone Saturday morning, and by Monday morning, the battery was dead. I hadn’t even used it that much. That’s pretty bad. The old 7250 lasted at least one week without a recharging the system. This means that I can go away for a weekend without bringing a charger with me. This is pretty silly, since Sony Ericsson seems to be able to have much better battery life on their phones with the same basic functionality.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with my phone.

I’ve been back in Norway for almost a month now. As much as I love my parents, living under their roof again is a pain in the ass. Now, maybe if you are from one of those Asian countries, you don’t mind living with your mummy until you get married, but I just find it really restricting. Maybe it’s because I’ve been living alone for so long. Or maybe because I spent a year at home least year. In any case, I’m thinking of spending a week off somewhere on the European continent, not Norway. Prague sounds nice, or Dublin… Haven’t really decided.

I recently purchased a iPod Color. Really happy about that. The battery actually lasted the whole trip from San Francisco, USA to Oslo, Norway, with stop-over in New York, a little over 12 hours trip. The harddisk is big enough so that I didn’t have to listen to the same song twice during that time. Pretty nice. The only thing I didn’t like was iTunes jukebox. Don’t see what’s so impressive about the program. It might have been great when it first came about, but something like amaroK has pretty much surpassed it now. It doesn’t matter really, since I spend most of my time in Linux, so I essentially use amaroK all the time. amaroK also automagically converts the music I have stored in FLAC format to mp3 that the iPod can play, something iTunes can’t.

I so love my toys…

I finally found the time to rewrite the gallery section of the site. It’s good, but not good enough. I still want to set up a navigation for going through the pictures. Haven’t really seen any navigation code I like, though.

I recently got myself a universal remote, so I don’t have to live with five-six remotes on the table. Really nice. I found that there are two main problems with universal remotes. Either, the remote is touch screen, which really doesn’t give you the tactile sense of the buttons, or it’s a normal looking programmable remote, which means that you lose functionality on your device if you use it.

Fortunately, the good people at Harmony fixed both these problems. I got myself a Harmony 688 (company got bought by Logitech). It’s programmable, and it has assignable buttons on the display, that at the same time give you tactile support and custom buttons for your device. It’s the best of both worlds. I really love my Harmony remote. The programming of the remote is a snap. All you need to do is go to the Logitech website, set of what you want to do and download the new software image to the remote. All automatically.

There are only two downside. One is that it’s currently only for Windows (there is no way to transfer the software image to the remote from Linux, where I am most of the time), and sometimes the timing of the remote is off (as in, I have to push the the button several times for the device to react). The former problem is apparently being worked on, and the latter problem I can problem fix on the website. Just have to get around to it.

All in all, I really like this remote, and would highly recommend it for anyone who is looking for a universal remote.

I just bought my parents a Nokia Mediamaster 260 S, so that they can watch Hotel Cæsar without hurrying through dinner. The Nokia system is one of the first DVRs in the Norwegian marked (I think).

Having owned a TiVo while I lived in the US, it was really difficult watching tv again without a DVR. Once you tried one, it’s kinda like watching movies without sound. Sure, you can live it with, if you never knew better, but once you get a taste of the sound experience, it’s hard to go back.

One of the thing I love about my TiVo is the Season Pass. It means I can program my TiVo to record the whole season of a tv-show, say Buffy, The Vampire Slayer. Note, I mention Buffy, as in I record the show based on the name. That means, if the show is moved to a different time or even different network, TiVo is intelligent enough to know it. It also know when a show is in rerun, and skips that episode. If a show are on more than once in a week, or are extra long a given week, TiVo knows this and adjust accordingly.

The Mediamaster only records shows by date/time. That means it won’t be aware of shows moved in time or network. You are also limited to how often you want to record a show to daily or weekly. Some shows, like Hotel Cæsar or The Daily Show, are on weekdays. Which means you have to create five record entries.

The Mediamaster also have some annoying features. I was watching a record of Scrub, when another show I had set up for recording started. Instead of just record the show in the background, the Mediamaster stopped the playback, and showed the live-show. I know better than the system what I want to watch.

TiVo’s program list is by date and program name. It also have a short description of the taped show. OTOH, the Mediamaster will only show the name of the show you have taped. There are no indication when the show was taped, nor what the content is. Very annoying. Coupled with somewhat frequent crashes, it is somewhat an exercise in frustration.

The Mediamaster is a nice first try. Unfortunately, it’s not the first DVR on the marked, and I fail to see why Nokia didn’t just license the TiVo technology, instead of coming out with such an inferior product. Basically, the Mediamaster is an glorified VCR, and nothing like a DVR heaven that TiVo is.