The Fall of Nokia. The Magic of Preenv.

With the whole Microkia debacle I'm feeling at best very disappointed with Nokia. They had something special in Maemo, but instead of driving it forward, they drove themselves into the ground by doing stupid shit. Meego was unnecessary if they had just focused on Maemo. Symbian was a dead-end they kept wasting money on.

So I feel they really deserve to die. Or get swallowed by Microsoft (according to some conspiracy theorists) So I'm left with the N900 in-hand, a great device with great potential, but largely unrealized due to Nokia's incompetence.

Since my N900 is still under a year old. I will be keeping it for a while. I love the platform & hope to stay with it for as long as I can.
Luckily for me, there is Preenv. This magical little program lets me enjoy many Palm Pre games on my N900. Especially Angry Birds (Who can live without Angry Birds?) Rovio stopped supporting the N900 a while back & we did not get Ham'em High Levels or the Seasons. But thanks to the work done by the Preenv guys I am happily playing all the current games released for the Palm Pre.

Also, recently the community got together & started to develop the Maemo 5 Community SSU. Which aims to develop Maemo 5 further after Nokia dropped the ball. So there is hope in the platform, at least I can put off going to Android. (A platform I never liked, cuz it's just so NOT Linux)

Corrupted Conversations Database

One bad thing happened to my phone just a few nights ago. Somehow due to receiving a malformed SMS, the conversations and call history database was corrupted. This prevented the Conversations windows from working. I could not access any of my previous messages & new messages were not stored anymore.

It was not pretty, but this is what I had to do to fix it. I first copied the database file out to my PC to back it up, the file is ~/.rtcom-eventlogger/el-v1.db

Then I deleted the file, ran touch to create a new empty one & rebooted.
This fixed the issue, however all the messages & call history was lost.

Fortunately it is possible to access the data inside the el-v1.db from a PC, because it's an SQLite database file. I used SQLite Database Browser to access the file & retrieved the imported stuff. They're all in the Event table.

It was a nightmare, I hope nobody else gets this problem.

Wow 4 months since my last post

Wow. It's been like 4 months since my last update. A career change in October threw me out of whack & now I'm just starting to get back in gear.

PR1.3 was released on Oct 25. It was a smooth upgrade but did cause some small problems. Several apps had font/color issues. But all were resolved with updates within a few weeks.

Alot happened on the Ovi Store. Many new apps were release & many new comic book apps are now available. Someone figured out how to get WebOS games running in Maemo & created the Preenv app which became quite a phenomenon.

I've discovered & started using a whole lot of new stuff.
Here's just a sampling:

grr - Google Reader App
cuteTube - YouTube App
Ansel-A - A Digital Darkroom
StellariuMobile - Mobile Planetarium
Accelemymote - Play Any Game with the Accelerometer.
swappolube - Tweak the swap & other setting to improve responsiveness
BlessN900 - Enhanced Camera Firmware

N900 - More Apps

Here are some new apps I've discovered recently:

MediaBox - An excellent All-In-One Media Center. A while back zoutube just stopped working, it's no longer being developed & seems like no one is stepping up to the task. So I started looking for another YouTube client & it seems there's only one left that still works, that's MediaBox.

FCamera - Advanced camera app that shoots RAW and allow full manual control.

Movie Finder - Find theaters, movies and show times on-line. Works very well even in Malaysia.

qTranslate - Translator app that uses Google Translate.

Faster Kinetic Scrolling in Menu & Phone App UI Fix

If you are like me, you might be slightly annoyed by the much slower scrolling in the main menu on the PR1.2 firmware. Well fortunately there's now an unofficial hildon-desktop update that addresses the issue.

Read more about it here.

This is how to do it:
You'll need to have rootsh installed first.
Download this file to the N900.
In the terminal:
$ sudo gainroot
# dpkg -i /home/user/MyDocs/hildon-desktop_kinetic_2.2.138-1+0m5_armel.deb

That's it. Reboot the N900 & it's done. The kinetic scrolling is now about the same speed as before the firmware update. Also as a bonus, the little UI twitching glitch in the phone app has also been solved on this update.

N900 - Missing GTK icons after upgrade to PR1.2

I had encountered this anoying little bug after i upgraded the Maemo firmware to PR1.2. It only happens in a few apps so I didn't immediately notice it. The issue is that a few stock GTK icons used in some apps such as cbrpager, abiword, gnumeric and kmplayer were missing. A broken link icon was shown it their place.

Took me quite a long time to look for the solution and I had almost given up. Today by sheer luck I finally came across the solution posted in the maemo.org forums just 3 days ago.
Here's the Link

In short, here's the solution. In the Terminal:
sudo gainroot
mv /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/mimetypes/gtk-* /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/hildon/

That's it. I'm happy now.

N900 - Applets, Widgets, Plugins and Utilities

My last 2 posts have been about the useful applications and fun games you can expect to find on the Nokia N900. Today I'll be listing some of my favorite little applets/widgets/plugins and utilities.

Status Menu Applets:

• Wifi Switcher - Lets you totally switch off the Wifi chip by unloading the kernel module. It will save some power when you don't have wifi.
  
• Flashlight - Turns on the LED Flash permanently for use as a makeshift flashlight.
  
• Simple Brightness Applet - Quick access to the screen brightness controls.
  
• Wi-Fi Signal Applet - A simple 1-10 number beside the Wifi icon to indicate signal strength.
  

Home Screen Desktop Widgets:

• systeminfowidget - CPU & RAM usage percentage.
  
• Desktop Command Execution Widget - Run arbitrary shell commands and output on the desktop.
  
• Personal Dataplan Monitor - Displays mobile data usage stats.
  
• Personal IP Address - Just displays your IP address.
  

Plug-ins and support add-ons:

• MSN (pecan) protocol plug-in - Support for MSN Chat protocol in Conversations and Contacts. Pecan version works better for me than the standard or pidgin versions.
  
• Extra Decoders Support - Support pack for various media formats. Such as ogg, flv, rmvb, mkv and WebM.
  
• Subtitle Support - Adds subtitle support to the media player.
  

Utilities:

• Extended Call Log - A more verbose call log list.
  
• QCPUFreq - Allows CPU frequency scaling adjustments.
• Shortcutd - Lets you assign shortcuts to the proximity sensor & camera focus key.
  
• tweakr - Enables some small tweaks, such as desktop align to grid & additional profiles.
  
• maenotify - Displays notifications on the lock screen.