Smartphones, redux.

My “new” Nokia 8850 arrived today. As expected, it was completely refurbished, which is to say that it was an original chassis and circuit board, with new after-market covers. It also came with a UK specification OEM Nokia power supply, and two brand-new lithium ion batteries.

The phone is exactly as I remember it, though the covers lack the quality of the originals. I think the original OEM covers were made from titanium, whereas these covers appear to be largely some form of plastic. Update: The original cases were made from plastic and aluminium, but the standard colour finish was confusingly called “Titanium”. My covers are also made of plastic and aluminium, but definitely not as good quality as the OEM items would have been. However, without looking very closely, you’d never know the difference. And I can’t imagine that there are any original OEM covers left that haven’t been scratched to pieces by now, so it’s a reasonable compromise for what is really a ten year old phone.

In use it is exactly as I remember it. By todays standards it’s severely lacking in features, but it meets my requirements perfectly. It’s tiny, it makes phone calls, and it sends and receives SMS text messages. And that’s all it does. Total retro-style for only £27. So far I’m loving it.

The only problem I’ve found is that my Blackberry is unable to write its address book to my SIM card, so I have no simple way to get all my phone numbers transferred to the Nokia. I always thought the Blackberry was rubbish, but honestly, how poor is that?

Smartphones – revisited again

I just got notification that my Nokia 8850 has been dispatched, along with the tracking identifier so I can work out where it is, and what’s happening to it.

Currently it’s in Hong Kong, awaiting international departure; I’d hope that it will make it to the UK by the weekend, clear customs on Monday, and perhaps arrive here just before the postal strike starts on Thursday next week. But that rather depends on whether it runs into the backlog of parcels that already exists in London from the existing one-day strikes that have been ongoing since mid-September.

If it does then I expect I won’t see it for quite a while.

Update 1: As of the 16th October, my Nokia 8850 is boarding a plane for the UK and leaving Hong Kong behind.

Face to face with Karmic Koala

One thing that does irritate the heck out of me with the new Karmic Koala release of Ubuntu is the new “face greeter” that Gnome have introduced with version 2.28. This shows up when you boot your system as a list of users that you might like to login as, with a customisable icon next to each. You then have to click on one of these entries with your mouse before an input field opens up for you to enter your password into, allowing you to login.

Although the screens are pretty, it’s nowhere near as convenient or as fast as being presented with an input field into which you just type your userid and then your password. It’s also almost identical to the login process that Windows XP introduced a few years back, which I always felt (perhaps uncharitably) was designed for people who couldn’t remember their userid, and needed a little picture instead.

Anyway, me being me, I want my login process back the way it was thank you.

However, the GUI that Gnome have provided to customise the login screen is somewhat deficient in this area, despite a bug report asking for some improvements. You can either have the “face greeter”, or you can select a userid to be logged in automatically without any user interaction (optionally after some time-delay). And that’s it.

Fortunately they provide a command line tool which allows you to customise many, many characteristics of the Gnome environment, called gconftool-2. And after some digging around it turns out that there are some settings related to the login panel (also known internally within Gnome as “gdm”) which can be adjusted using this tool, including one setting which disables the new “face greeter”. So if you, like me, don’t like this new behaviour, simply open up a terminal and type (on a single line) :

sudo -u gdm gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/gdm/simple-greeter/disable_user_list 'true'

The result still isn’t exactly the same as it used to be, as the login screen now comes up with a single button, labelled “Log In”, which you must click before being given the old, familiar password/userid entry field. Which is also deeply annoying, as this breaks a fundamental of user interface design, namely why ask the user to press a button when there are no other options available? Just take them to the next decision point in the process. Fortunately, a bug has been opened against Gnome to fix this, so hopefully we will see it resolved, but whether it will be in time for the final release of Karmic Koala Ubuntu is another matter entirely.

Smartphones – revisited

Well, my heart finally won. I decided to buy an old refurbished mobile phone to replace my Blackberry for everyday use. I know it doesn’t make any kind of sense, and that in every way the Blackberry is technically superior. But I just don’t need all that technology. I just want a compact phone that makes calls, and sends and receives text messages easily and reliably.

I found a company that refurbishes Nokia 8810’s – which was the mobile phone that I remember so fondly. But the 8810 is single band GSM only, which is a bit of an issue these days, where all the networks in the UK depend on using both 900MHz and 1800MHz bands to ensure good coverage in both rural and city settings. So in the end I gave in, and went for the Nokia 8850, which was the follow-on from the Nokia 8810. It still has the same overall style as the Nokia 8810 (designed by Frank Nuovo, who now heads up the design teams for both Nokia & their insanely expensive Vertu sub-brand) but packs in a dual-band transmitter instead.

I figure that since it only cost me £27 for the default silver version (rather than black or gold), even if my heart is completely wrong I won’t have wasted too much money on it. And who knows, if it’s as nice as I remember my old Nokia 8810 to be, it may well help me recapture some of the pleasure I used to get from owning & using it.

Now, I wonder if it will arrive before the start of the Royal Mail strike or not? Hmmmmm.

Smartphones – geek toy or useful tool?

Over the last few months I’ve been spending some of my time looking into Web 2.0 and the mobile internet. On the back of that I’ve found myself being pulled into examining some of the social networking services on the web, which has naturally led me to the whole Twitter phenomenon. And I have to admit that having now spent some time using it, I just don’t “get” it. Or at any rate, not for it’s purported purposes *

There seem to be two main classes of “normal” (ie, non-celebrity) user for Twitter out there; the people who are using it as a very restrictive instant messaging system (and this class of user seems to lock their updates and strictly manage their followers), and the people who seem to be “collecting” as many followers as possible, and broadcasting their every thought to them in the hope of becoming some sort of celebrity themselves.

And this brings me to how these people do that broadcasting, and the real point of this post; the more prolific “tweeters” appear to feel the need to broadcast their every thought, no matter where they are or what they are doing; and the only convenient way that they can do that is by using internet-enabled smartphones.

And I find that very interesting because IBM gives me a smartphone; a Blackberry Pearl. And it’s dreadful. It’s not powerful enough to do anything useful with the internet, the screen is too small, the keyboard is unusable, and the battery-life almost non-existent. And yet, because it’s supposedly been designed with the internet in mind, it’s also a very poor mobile phone, with absolutely terrible usability. In short, it’s the worst of all worlds. It’s so shockingly bad that I’m thinking of actually spending my own money to replace it with a really good “ordinary” phone.

This then got me wondering; who are smartphones actually targeted at? I see lots of people with Apple iPhones, but with a single exception (my oncologist) they are all owned by people who I would class as “geeks” who work in the IT industry. Is that because that’s just the people I happen to see with them, or are they much more widely accepted? And if they are more widely accepted, are those people actually using them for productive work, or (like a lot of Apple products) are they just being bought because they happen to be stylish, and therefore desirable to be seen with?

One thing’s for sure; from my initial perusal of the current cellphone market it’s looking like all the major manufacturers are concentrating a huge amount of effort on creating ever more complex smartphones. I suspect that it might be extremely difficult for me to find a high-end mobile phone at a sensible price that isn’t a smartphone. Which leaves me wondering if the solution to my quest may be to buy an older (second-hand?) high end mobile phone from the times before smartphones became the “in thing”.

I’m actually quite tempted to see if I can track down an old Nokia 8810, simply because I had one about 10 years ago when they were the pinnacle of mobile phone design, and loved it. All it can do is make phone calls and send SMS messages, but it did both of those things exceptionally well. Using an 8810 these days would certainly be making a statement, if nothing else! Given that thought, any comments or suggestions for ordinary “non-smartphones” that you’d particularly recommend, along with your reasons why, would be welcomed!

* – the thing that I do see Twitter being very useful for, is to act as a cheap and simple notification fabric for applications that want to notify people of events via SMS. For that purpose, it’s great, though probably not what Twitters creators were expecting it to be used for.

Toys!

I’ve been monitoring my whole house power consumption for some time using a currentcost meter, connected up to my home server. However, I’ve been meaning for a while now to pick up a meter for measuring the power consumption of individual devices to help me fine tune my power consumption. This week my local Aldi were running a special offer of a (fairly sophisticated) meter for £8. Turns out that it can measure voltage, current, mains frequency, power consumption, and power correction factor, which indicates how efficient a device is. Since then I’ve been wandering around the house measuring things, trying to work out what we leave running all the time that we actually need to turn off.

So far I have been unable to find a single “wall wart” adaptor that uses *any* measurable power when idle, despite the media talking about how we should all go around and disconnect them all. Things like my powered speakers for my laptop however, draw 10w all the time. Ooops.

And while I was in Aldi I also picked up one of these blood pressure monitors too. I wasn’t sure how accurate it would be, but on trying it out, it seems to give approximately the same readings that I’ve seen the nurses record during my hospital visits. So it may well be surprisingly accurate.

However, my view is that I’m less interested in the actual readings, and more interested in any marked changes in the readings; because if I see any significant increase or decrease then I’ll be needing to go visit my GP anyway.

Archiving data files to DVD

IBM has been using Lotus Notes as its email platform for the last 14 years or so, and during those years I’ve seen the size of emails increasing dramatically, mostly due to the ease with which people can attach large (and often unnecessary) attachments. IBM meanwhile would like us to minimise the size of our mail databases to minimise the cost of storing all this email across the corporation. However, at the same time, keeping many of these emails so they can be referred back to is very useful. Consequently I’ve been archiving all my email from my mail database to my local mail archive database. Unfortunately, the larger that database has become, the slower it becomes for certain classes of operation, such as opening or searching it. The actual file that represents that database also starts to become very unwieldy for the operating system; my email archive database was nearing 6GB in size.

I recently decided to do something about it, and split that single large mail archive database into a series of smaller archives, each covering a two year period, limiting the size of each to a GB or less.

I currently back these up to my NAS, but I’d like to have extra copies somewhere less accident-prone than spinning media. A couple of sets of DVD’s, preferably stored “offsite” from where my NAS and laptop are kept (ie, at work, not at home) seems like a good extra insurance policy. Which leads me to the question of how to burn some very large files to DVD under Linux.

It turns out that Ubuntu comes with dvd+rw-tools already installed, which provides command line utilities to do everything that is required.

dvd+rw-format -force /dev/dvdrw Formats the DVD-RW, allowing it to be used. Doing this too often can seriously shorten the life of your DVD-RW media, and it isn’t necessary to format before each reuse – just overwrite the old contents with new data.

growisofs -Z /dev/dvdrw -R -J /etc/*.conf Initialises and writes an initial set of files to the DVD-RW. If there is already data on your DVD-RW, this will overwrite it.

growisofs -M /dev/dvdrw -R -J /var/log/*.log Adds some more files to the DVD-RW. On a DVD-R I believe this will create another session, and write the data into that.

Note that with DVD-R media you skip the formatting step, then use the same growisofs commands as with DVD-RW media, EXCEPT it appears that you can’t easily add files to an existing DVD-R without creating a multisession DVD-R, which looks like it could be a heap of pain. I figure it’s probably best to just save all the required files in a single write.

For maximum compatibility, close the DVD-RW off with growisofs -M /dev/dvdrw=/dev/zero once all the files have been written to it, and just for completeness, it’s possible to get detailed technical information on the contents of any optical disc, by using the command dvd+rw-mediainfo /dev/dvdrw

Note that in all cases, these commands must be run by a “normal” (non-root, non-sudo) user, and the DVD media must be unmounted at the time.

Mobile broadband on Karmic Koala Alpha 6

Today I decided to try out the latest code drop for the next release of Ubuntu. This will be released as Ubuntu 9.10 next month, under the codename Karmic Koala. There are some rough edges, but so far I am extremely impressed. This release has moved to some very new technologies, and yet even at this early stage almost everything is basically working.

Under the current version of Ubuntu getting my USB mobile broadband modem (a ZTE MF627) working was quite awkward. It required quite a lot of configuration work, and the installation of some additional programs. Whereas under this newer version it is almost (but not quite) working out of the box. One simple configuration file needs to be added, called /etc/udev/rules.d/ZTE.rules, containing the single line:

SYSFS{idVendor}=="19d2", SYSFS{idProduct}=="2000", RUN+="/usr/bin/eject %k", OPTIONS+="last_rule"

Once the system has been rebooted (or udev restarted), inserting the USB modem causes the udev system to automatically detect it, and switch it to the correct mode, at which point Network Manager recognises the broadband modem becoming available, and allows you to configure it with your provider details. From then on you can connect by simply selecting the mobile broadband connection in Network Manager.

All very simple. As it should be.

Hampshire Linux User Group meeting follow-up

The non-working Vodafone SIM problem has been resolved. It turns out that Vodafone don’t simply have contract mobile broadband and PAYG mobile broadband, they also have “Top Up and Go” mobile broadband. Which seems to be some sort of PAYG mobile broadband with some port blocking, implemented to stop you using VoIP or P2P services.

Anyway, that’s the SIM that I have.

Knowing that, a simple google on the settings of the various offerings shows that the APN, userid and password are different from the normal PAYG offering. Changing my connection properties in Network Manager to use the correct settings resulted in an immediate connection to the internet @ 3.6Mbps, though admittedly I could see the Vodafone mast from where I was connecting.

My next problem is to work out how to top up my credit as I use the service. Vodafone appear to have set this up so everything is done through the software that they supply to make their dongle work on Windows. Which of course, I don’t (and can’t) use, as I’m running under Linux. I was really hoping that I’d be able to check my credit & top it up via the Vodafone website, but it’s looking like it’s pretty difficult to register the SIM on their website unless you’re running their desktop software, which requires Windows. And if you’re not running Windows there is very limited support, which is rather frustrating.

I’ll keep working on it for a while longer, but it’s starting to look like I might have to install Windows and their dashboard software on a spare partition just to get the SIM registered on their website, which is not exactly ideal.

Update: I finally managed to work out how to register the SIM on the Vodafone website so that I can check my credit balance, and top up the credit on the SIM using my credit card. The website is quite large and complex, and there seems to be more focus on advertising and upselling of products to their customers than on the usability of the core function of managing existing products, which didn’t help much. Still, I got there in the end.

As a Linux user, wanting to register a “TopUp and Go” SIM without resorting to Windows, this is the process I suggest you follow:

• Register for “My Account” on the Vodafone website. This simply gives you an account on their website, but doesn’t associate any products with your account.
• Now put your data SIM into an ordinary (Vodafone) mobile phone.
• Enter *#100# and press send. The network will now tell you what mobile phone number is associated with your data SIM.
• Login to your account and register a “Pay As You Use” phone. The website will ask you to enter the phone number of the phone. Enter the phone number you obtained in the previous step.
• The website will now send you an SMS message, containing a secret code. You can read this on your mobile phone.
• Enter the secret code back into the website (proving you own the SIM you are registering), and the website will ask you for the remaining information it needs to associate the SIM with your account. It automatically works out that you have a “TopUp and Go” data SIM rather than a standard PAYG mobile phone SIM.
• You can now see your credit limit by logging into your account.
• You can also associate a credit card (or your bank details) with your “My Account”, and use it to top up your SIM as required.
• Remember to put your data SIM back in the USB dongle, and your voice SIM back in your mobile phone.

Hampshire Linux User Group meeting

The Hampshire Linux User Group held their monthly meeting at IBM Hursley today. I’ve been meaning to go along to one of their meetings for over a year now, and never quite been able to make it as their meetings have either clashed with other commitments, or more recently not been high enough up my list of priorities. However, since the meeting was being held at my own company offices, and I was feeling pretty good this morning, I decided to just turn up and see what they got up to.

It turned out to be quite an interesting crowd of people, with the meeting structured fairly loosely around a series of presentations with some free time to mix with the other attendees. This gives people the opportunity to help each other out with problems they are experiencing. In my case, I’ve a couple of unfixed Linux problems that I’ve been working on for a while, so it seemed like a good opportunity to share them and see if anyone might be able to shed some light on them and help me to get them resolved. A couple of the presentations were quite interesting too, especially the one about packaging applications, given by Anton Piatek.

As it turned out, I got a solid hint about one of the problems I’ve been playing with, related to the hot-plugging of monitors that don’t properly report their characteristics and capabilities to the operating system. That usually prevents the OS from using the full resolution of the monitor (or projector), and I needed to find a way to override the reported capabilities with the actual ones, using the xrandr extensions to the X windows system. The hint sounds very promising, I just need to do some more work on this to see if I can now finally solve the problem or not.

My second problem relates to a 3G mobile broadband adaptor that I’ve been playing with. This is a USB device about the size of a USB pen-drive, that contains a 3G modem capable of providing a 3.6Mbps connection over the mobile telephone networks. These are great devices for allowing portable broadband internet connectivity for occasional use, albeit at quite a high cost.

In my case, I got an adaptor via a special offer arranged through www.broadbandshop.co.uk, paying nothing but £5 for the postage and packing. That offer consisted of a ZTE MF627 modem, which is locked to a “3″ pay as you go (PAYG) SIM. This was quite a good deal on its own, but unfortunately I have no “3″ coverage near either my home or my normal work locations, which limits its usefulness somewhat. In addition, the PAYG offering from “3″ is not terribly good for occasional users; you have to buy credit at £10/GB, which expires after 30 days. So keeping credit on the SIM requires a constantly recurring £10 a month investment. Not ideal at all; probably better to just invest in a pay monthly contract instead.

It transpires however, that it is possible to unlock this adaptor so that it can work with a SIM from any network operator. And it turns out that I have good coverage from Vodafone at most of the places I spend time, and that they offer a better PAYG offering for occasional users; £15/GB, which does not expire. Ever. Much better. Of course, one has to get hold of a Vodafone PAYG SIM, but I was able to pick one of those up from a colleague at work for nothing (thanks Dave!)

It’s then a not-so-simple matter of making the adaptor work with my operating system of choice, Ubuntu linux. And this is where I’ve been struggling. Despite the clear instructions provided on the updates that are needed, the combination of my unlocked 3G adaptor and Vodafone PAYG SIM were resolutely refusing to work.

In the end a colleague who had the same device working with a Vodafone contract SIM spent some time with me swapping SIMs and adaptors, and testing various combinations of each others setups on each others laptops. The end conclusion was inescapable. My adaptor is definitely now unlocked, and “SIM-free”. And it works perfectly with my colleagues SIM on my laptop. My SIM does not however, work in his adaptor or mine, on my machine or his. In short, there is a problem with my Vodafone PAYG SIM (Sorry Dave!).

Initially I wondered if there was a SIM-lock set, but by placing the SIM in an ordinary (but network unlocked) mobile phone I can see that there is no SIM-lock set. In addition, I can query the credit on the SIM by entering the network code *#1345#, which tells me both that the SIM still has its initial £15 credit installed, and that (presumably) the SIM is still valid on Vodafones systems. So it should be good to go. But it isn’t. So I guess I need to contact Vodafone on Monday to see if they can help me. In the meantime I got the phone number associated with the SIM by entering the network code *#100#. That will hopefully make the conversation with Vodafone a bit simpler.