number 9

I’m a bit of a Luddite, but sometimes things converge. 3 weeks ago:

1. I thought seriously about getting a PDA
2. I got junkmail from T-mobile
3. someone signed up for myspace, knocking me off my #1 slot

I wanted a PDA as I’ve become heavily dependant on rmilk (having outgrown tadalist and a free backpack account) and unfortunately I’m only sat on my ass in front of a monitor about 85% of my waking hours. The problem with a pda is that it’s another thing to lug around
(Ok, lug is a bit strong. But if it’s large enough to have to consider picking up in the morning, I usually won’t).

Then there’s the issue of syncing handheld <-> rmilk. My 1100 has reminders, alarms and notes that I sync by hand, and none of the Palms I saw improve much on that.
Besides, can you bang in nails with them? Do they have a flashlight? Exactly.

Screw the PDA, then.

The dead trees t-mobile sent were about Flext . Essentially you buy 34 pound of credit up front for 15 quid (normally 20, but 25% off till end of April) then spend it on whatever you want (text/talk/mms). My virgin pay-as-you-go costs 10 for virtually nothing (always too many talk minutes and not enough text, or vice versa).

I think GPRS is counted separately, but luckily I live next to an internet.

Plus of course you get a spanky free phone. Thought I’d pick something shiny so when it inevitably turned out to be a flimsy piece of shit I’d ebay it and just use my 1100.
Since google had spoken, I’d get one with bluetooth for syncing and maybe a half-decent camera (ours is inevitably at home whenever I meet Elvis).

First: the motorolas. SLVR, RAZR, etc. They’re the Apple of the phone world – great looks, great marketing. Amazingly, every review I could find said they were this seasons technically godawful (shitty camara, flimsy, poor voice quality, crap reception, awful UI) must-have accessory (because they were a bit thin, apparently?).

Nokia, then (the, uh, Volvo of the phone world).
I was about to, when I spotted a review of the w800i . Sounded awesome and it was on the 15/month plan.

Now, it’s a Sony Ericsson phone, and they’re not my favourite evil multinational. But open is as open does. I can honestly say I have no desire to install linux on it.

It plays well with others which is more than I can say for my old Zaurus.

Main features are:

• bluetooth 1.2 (decent profiles too. can be a mouse + keyboard if you’re insane enough to want that)
• builtin mp3 player (so decent sound quality all round)
• buttons are in the right place
• feels sturdy
• good size and weight
• reasonable battery life
• good speakerphone
• handsfree kit with a 3.5mm jack (to use your own headphones)
• 2.0 megapixel camera (video recording too)

• ‘joystick’ menu selector (much comfier than a d-pad)
• FM radio
• sound recorder (combined with a 3 year old, you need never download a ringtone again. It’s hidden under ‘entertainment’, thought I’d mention as google drew a blank.)
• SyncML support
• charges off a USB cable
• shows up as a USB (2.0) disk (no need for root kits )
• GPRS with xhtml browser
• flashlight (Score!)
• supports iTunes with a little help
• decent pim apps : calendar, tasks (todolists), notes etc.
• contact book supports email, birthdays, postal addresses, etc.
• usable utilities : calculator, stopwatch, timer
• can send MMS to email (handy as no-one else I know has a picture phone)
• the mp3 player goes off in your pocket when you sit on the phone (I’ve killed 2 phones that way)
• 512Mb core duo memory stick included (this is the same stuff the PSP uses, so it’s commodity prices too)
• J2ME (hey, if I can play Space Hulk on the train it’s a Good Thing)
• decent documentation (for a proprietary device)
• bounces when you drop it onto the carpet from head height (won’t be trying it on the dining room tiles anytime soon though)

So far t-mobile have been alright too. I couldn’t send MMS with attachments when I got the phone, and they sorted that quickly. Moving over my virgin number was a doddle too Their webpage has itemized online bills and you can send SMS through it too.

Only downers so far are :

• you need the handsfree in to use the radio (the rats nest of cables I carry around makes a bluetooth headset seem almost worth the ridicule)
• haven’t found a way to lock the screen (*, then choose ‘lock’)
• the colour scheme is a bit silly (get the D750 if you really hate it – but then you only get a 64Mb memorystick )
• can’t seem to record more than a few seconds of video (enable ‘high quality’ video shoot mode – they’ll be too big for MMS, but it’ll let you fill the stick)
• you can’t delete the picture of robbie williams that comes with the phone (I’ll crack that soon though)

All in all, really pleased with it, and I’ve had it about a fortnight, so I was expecting to hate it by now.

Expect it to break by Tuesday.

So, SFA came through with my birthday present.

Sweet Zombie Jesus.

I now have slightly under 3 months to somehow match this:

(thanks to setantae who nicely covered the worst case scenario and bab who arranged a getaway just in case)

UPDATE: I’ve gone off the idea. I don’t roam, I don’t want all the family to have to know the WPA passphrase to use their laptop account, and I like wmii , where applets don’t really make any sense. I prefer the system-wide way of doing WPA myself.

Here’s the Ubuntu Dapper (or better) ‘WPA Howto’:

$ sudo apt-get install network-manager wpasupplicant
$ # edit out the NICs in /etc/network/interfaces
$ # that you want to be managed by NM
$ sudo reboot
$ # after reboot, run up 'nm-applet'

NetworkManager is great. The daemon runs in the background, watching for HAL events, and uses the best connection it can.

Plug in ethernet, it uses ethernet. Yank it out, it scans for WLANs.

If it needs help (e.g. unlocking the WPA-PSK or WEP keys stored in your keyring) it asks the user via a GNOME or KDE applet². It uses a local DNS forwarder and can notify apps (over DBUS) of network state changes.

This setup has a few implications. The most obvious is that you don’t get online until after you login to the GUI.
It also assumes the user is the one with the knowledge, not (whoever is root on) the laptop (suppose that’s how other OSes handle it anyway, just feels odd).

I imagine if you run many non-DBUSed servers that need a network at boot, or have hardcoded IPs in your firewall, it might piss you off a bit. But would you roam with that setup?

Although the applet is by default the font of all knowledge, you could easily run a non-GUI userland component as part of the usual boot If ubuntu-installer had one, WPA wireless users could net install at last.

¹ seems 256Mb isn’t enough RAM (!) to hibernate. Shut down firefox first and it’s fine.

² the applet works in fluxbox (and other window managers I presume) too, but it’ll ask you for the passphrase every boot. You can Google up some gnome-keyring voodoo if that drives you mad.

Flashing openlink went alright (takes ages though. It’s not kidding about doing it over a crossover cable and it’s terrifying doing it from XP).
Somehow /dev/console isn’t created, which has, er, interesting consequences but is easily fixed .

Adding NFS was a doddle (keeping uids in sync is another story but what’s new).
Multicast DNS works when it feels like it (mDNSresponder ships with a handy admin tool called ‘kill -9’); might play with the toolchain and have a go at rolling my own.

Disappointed that the eMac doesn’t do NFS service discovery – that looked like a really neat hack. Perversely, the Mac seems to find and mount Samba more easily than Appletalk so I’ve given in; once I shovel a few Gb of MP3s out of the way I’ll Tiger it up and see if that’s any smarter.

(UPDATE: it is. NFS is way faster than Appletalk or CIFS too.)