Category: Nokia e71

3g · location · mobile · mobile network · Nokia e71 · ubiset

ubiset

jukkasoftLeave a comment
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Building your own ubiset:

– buy a modern 3G phone
– install the following software:
* Google Maps (http://www.google.com/mobile/)
* Tweets60 (http://www.tweets60.com/)
* Glogger Lite (http://m.glogger.mobi/)
* Fring (though it’s a battery drain)

This set gives you access to a lot of info on the road. You can keep in touch
and document (Glogger) what you see. Fring is quite on drain on battery, so be
careful with that. My mobile was sucked empty in 1 day instead of normal
3-4 days (at that point of its life).

Also, read EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) instructions about how
to preserve your location privacy. At least if you decide to give away
information you know how it can be (ab)used.
http://www.eff.org/wp/locational-privacy

[ubiset = equipment needed for ubiquitous presence, the ability to stay in touch with a network of services and friends]
3g · assembly · Commodore · eyetap · mobile · Nokia e71 · traffic

non-intravenous ED

jukkasoftLeave a comment
Reading Time: 2 minutes

No, don’t open your mail. You have about 400 unread messages, of which
luckily 98% can be deleted without going further than a mere flick.
I won’t suggest that you’d be reckless, but I once deleted over
600 mails and the decision brought no pain whatsoever. It relieved
me a lot.

There’s a better way nowadays. You can Archive, with GMail. So
if you have second thoughts, you can always access your killed mail.

Mail hurts your brain. It’s a constraint to the creativeness we all
have inside. Unless Google Wave changes that dramatically. Well,
of course you have to be realistic. It’s our garbage that we
create, so I don’t expect a product to clean it all up.

But wait a second; am I really talking this? I live basically out of
mail, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. They are part of me.

The news company I was working for had a telecaster set up today.
It looked like a torture machine out of the 1930s, with a pole and
all those electrical cords attached to it. But it was high-tech,
I’m sure of that. And I really don’t mean to say that it wouldn’t
be efficient, it’s just that I think there’s going to be
a challenger around the corner.

I’ve been a geek since 1983. In the end of 1990s, there was a new
toy on the market: PDA. A personal digital assistant. Don’t let
the name fool you. It’s silicon alright, but not that kind of.
The machine consists of a screen, memory, cpu, keyboard, and
usually no direct mobile network connection. Essentially it
was a 8 megabyte address book.

It ran EPOC, which became Symbian. I remember that the operating
system excelled in being very tightly coded, and thus didn’t
hog up memory much.

Years roll by, but the amount of trash I carry doesn’t go down.
This is one point which will change. With things like Eyetap
(from Steve Mann) the user will be liberated from carrying
electronics around. I have to admit I have been quite
addicted to the concept. It’s such cyborgish! And provides
real benefits, not just geeky humour stuff. The eyetap
is something that has been waited for decades.
Did you know that the movie Terminator was partially inspired
by this technology? You can see a scene in which the Terminator’s
point of view is projected; the reddish scene, in which
Commodore C=64 assembly language statements scroll! 🙂
(Ok, it was called Apple II assembly, but they both
use the MOS 6502 cpu).

I’m currently riding a bus. With me, I have Branson’s newest book,
as Irvine Welsh’s; there’s an ED, my dear Nokia e71, a wallet, and my laptop with
3G card. I consider myself mobile. But I still want to trash most
the these gadgets, and start using a single one. Would be my
dream come true. Still, ED non-intravenously, please.

Amen.

calsync60 · certificates · download · hard · hassle · installation · Nokia e71 · sisx

To synch or not – that is the Question!

jukkasoftLeave a comment
Reading Time: 3 minutes

Sometimes you need a specific thing. One of these for me is a synchronization
software between my Nokia e71 and Google calendar. Then I’d like to have
Roboform play with Chrome browser. And… and… (Roboform is a catchy
utility that stores passwords and feeds them into your browser when you need
them).

In this story I describe how I spent an hour doing “installation” instead of
actually using the software. The plain need to have a software on my phone
turned out into an adventure where passwords, websites, ftp programs and what
not play a big part. Having moved on from the software based solution into
a web-based one was no help. I kept receiving synch errors.

It actually brings light to the bigger problem of these
giants (Nokia, Google) not being able to co-operate enough so that users
would benefit from the situation. It seems Nokia phones don’t have a decent
software for calendar synchronization. Please correct me! I would so much like
to be wrong in this case. What my experience tells is that trying to search
for good software and getting it right is sometimes a horribly frustrating
experience.

Each one of the installations is an adventure. You can never quite be sure
you will reach the target. It took about 20 years for Windows software
installation process to settle down and get standardized. Mobile phones have
a head start. What I’ve gathered is that there are some sort of standards
right from the beginning for eg. Symbian installations. I really liked exploring
the Nokia e71 right from the beginning, since there were much pre-installed
software. I liked Widgets. -ED. It turned Ovi.com, me not like! I haven’t digged into it but I really do miss the ease
of use of Widgets.

I’m probably the only one on this planet to be specialized in doing things
the hard way. Or then tech really is complicated. I want Calsync60 on my
Nokia phone. It’s available on the network, and I’d like to just download
it directly to my phone, since I don’t have the sync cable nor working bluetooth.

Well, turns out I can’t find a .SIS installation package on the whole net.
All articles point to this one location, which has a .zip file. It contains
two things: the real installation package (a .sisx) and an information file (text).
It’s plain irritating that software installation is this laborious.

I next need to install Filezilla to get ftp connection. So downloading yet
another 3.8 megabytes. After installation, I connect to my own site in order
to store the installation .sisx there. Need login information, which I rarely
use. It’s on another machine, stored in the Filezilla profile. Well, a couple of
minutes later I had my installation package on my server, ready to be downloaded
to Nokia. I took it. The download went fine. Then, it opened the .sisx into
notepad. And crashed (jammed). The phone didn’t respond to power off anymore.
So I took out the battery, and booted that way. It’s amazing I’d spent approx. an hour trying to get a single software into my phone. This must be on the hot agenda with
Nokia. They’re really in trouble with software installation usability. It ain’t
satin smooth exactly, as this story has revealed. I hope they get it right with whatever the solution is. Because it’s getting more important by each day.

The good working solution was to do installation of PC Suite, and then install
the .sisx package from a local directory. Because PC Suite makes your PC understand
the file extensions, thus it identifies the file correctly and you can install the
software to your phone. I should’ve known and skipped all the extra steps, but you
never know unless you try. 🙂 But wait. The story goes on. I had to tweak my phone’s
date and time back to 2008, so that the Calsync60 didn’t expire. And thus the calendar functions of course deteriorated. Putting it back into proper date,
the software wouldn’t play ball anymore. I was stuck.

Back to software business..

I dream of a system where I could just tell what I want, and the right software
would be offered. Today it’s a lot of googling around and checking the details
when you need something. And there’s often a big negative surprise about an
installed software: it has some viral marketing, crippled functionality,
time limitations, and most often functional mismatch. But I don’t know whether
software could be put into a feasible property matrix. Like: I need sync between
Nokia e71, and Google Calendar, no limits, free of charge. The system would weed
down possibilities according to my criteria.

And please, make installations easier. Away with the certificates hassle, away
with searching all day along, and coming up with strange circumventing. I don’t know
how, but installation of software should be completely free of location, circumstances, whatsoever. It should be as simple as breathing.

I would just like plain software, nicely packaged, easy to look it up, so that I could enjoy it as soon as possible. There, the challenge has been thrown!

EDIT: on 25th June 2009, in the morning, I got GooSync.com to work with my phone.
The previous systems error (not giving much clue) was due to the lack of connecting
my profile with my Google Calendar. So perusing the user interface at Goosync I noticed there was a kind of to-do list of things to do, so I filled in the information and thus authorized GooSync to access my calendar.

iPhone · mobile · Nokia e71 · user interface

iTouched the iPhone

jukkasoftLeave a comment
Reading Time: < 1 minute

Been there! Done IT!

The iPhone is way cool. I took a short test ride today, on 23rd June 2009. The authorized Mac reseller in Helsinki downtown had one these gems, that everybody
has been buzzing about for.. ages? I’d seen the gadget live twice before this. But never actually got a feeling for it.

The phone is visual. It’s very visual; nice contrast, good resolution, and the
navigation (since the keyboard is virtual – onscreen keyboard) is done completely
on the screen. Only a back-button exists, which you can push to get one level up in
the menu hierarchy. The functions (Stock, maps, photos, etc.) responded quickly – this is what I really like. It makes the user interface much more usable, when you don’t
have to stare at silly progress bars telling you the wait time.

The virtual keyboard is pretty nasty. I couldn’t do fast typing with it at all; a thing that I’ve accustomed to with ordinary computer keyboards as well as the Nokia e71 keyboard.

Would I take an iPhone? You bet! Waiting for my current mobile lease to unleash me. Perhaps it’s going to be the 3rd gen iPhone then.