Stefan aka Noneus

I sort of got upset with Android. A side from the usability issues there were two major problems, which made me a Palm user:

• The web experience on Android is horrific. After watching the browser comparison on Engadget’s Nexus One review, I was surprised. The 1GHz Snapdragon wasn’t any faster then my G1 in webbrowsing. Seems like Google has a major problem with browser-performance. I guess the problem is network related.
• The Android-Market is a mystery. Just google for android market problems. Some phones weren’t authenticated devices after a OTA-Update. As a result all copy-protected apps wouldn’t show app in the market.

I put my eye on the Palm Pre for some time now. It’s quite similar to Android. Linux-based, hackable, easy to develop, multi-tasking and perfect Gmail integration. After playing with the palm-emulator (it’s in the webOS SDK) for a while I decided to buy a Pre. That’s one and a half month ago.

I won’t write a full review. There are plenty in the internet. However I will list my major up’s and down’s with the Pre.

Up’s:

• Exchange and Gmail synchronisation are flawless. It was never that easy to handle appointments for work and private life. And the most important part: It all syncs automatically via internet. No manual sync required.
• Really easy to hack. Just check out webos-internals and PreCentral. Way easier than on Android. No flashing of custom system-images required.
• Touchstone Charger: After I got my Pre I ordered a Touchstone charger. I just love wireless charging. Much easier than stupid cables.
• UI is pretty and constitant: Overall the whole UI looks much nicer than Android’s UI. It’s very smooth!
• The use of gestures is amazing. No UI is clonked up with buttons. The gesture-area helps with that.
• MyTether: MyTether is an app that requires root access to your Phone. But tethering never was that easy. And I love USB-Tethering. It just works!

Down’s:

• No navigation solution for Europe. Google Maps is ok. But a full fledge navigation software with offline maps would be great.
• App Catalog looks so empty in Europe. This will be fixed in March, when Europe will get payed apps.

Google just announced a phone sold through a new Google Webstore called the Nexus One. Go to http://google.com/phone to buy one. Google sells it unlocked without a carrier contract for 529$. BUT: ONLY to the US, UK and Hong Kong! What? It is unlocked. So why not sell it to the rest of the world, even if there is no dataplan here in Germany? All I get is this stupid page:

Last decade (it’s really just a month ago) Google released the Linux (and Mac) Google Chrome Beta. Since then I use Google Chrome on top of my Ubuntu 10.4. I wanted to share my favorite extensions for chrome:

1. Xmarks Bookmarks Sync

I allready used Xmarks for Firefox. Xmarks is so awesome. It syncs bookmarks for all important browsers. For my Android Phone I use Xmarks Mobile.

2. Xmarks Thumbnails

This plugin puts an image of the website next to every search-result. This makes the search-results a bit more appealing.

3. RSS Subscription Extension (by Google)

With this you can easily add RSS-Feeds to Google-Reader, if there are any on the site.

4. Easy Youtube Video Downloader

If I’m browsing Youtube for music I want to be able to download them. Sure there are many desktop-applications that do that. But this extension is easier. It adds dowload-links right on the youtube page. You can download all available formats. Including 1080p, if available!

5. Google Translate

If you search in Google sometimes you get foreign websites as results. This extension makes translating pretty easy. When on foreign website just hit the translate button and boom!

6. AddThis

I just found this extension yesterday. It lets you post the current website to a bunch of places. Its made for tons of social-networks. I will use it for my blog. I really want to write for it more frequently.

Cyanogen release a new version of his mod, that is legal. It features the latest Donut release. Check it out here. I didn’t have Cyanogen’s Recovery Image, so installing this version was not very easy. 4.1999 won’t install without Cyanogen’s Recovery Image. I always got an “Installation aborted”.

• Get the cm-recovery-1.4.img from here
• Get fastboot tool from here and follow the instructions below the downloads:

On OS X and Linux, you can store the fastboot executable anywhere on your machine. On Windows, you must store the fastboot executable where it can find the AdbWinApi.dll file (included with the Android SDK), otherwise it will not work properly. The recommended place to store the fastboot executable on Windows is with the other tools in the Android SDK, in the <sdk>/tools directory. On all platforms, you may want to add the location to your PATH, for convenience.

USB Driver

If your development machine is running Windows, you should make sure to update your USB driver before continuing. For your convenience, the Android SDK (1.0 r2 or later) includes an updated USB driver that you can install. For more information, see Setting up a Device for Development on the Android Developers Site.

• Get the device in fastboot mode:

To enter fastboot mode, power up the device (or reboot it) while holding down the BACK key. Hold the BACK key down until the bootloader screen is visible and shows “FASTBOOT”. The device is now in fastboot mode and is ready to receive fastboot commands. If you want to exit fastboot mode at this point, you can hold down the keys MENU+SEND+END (on the Android Dev Phone, SEND is the “Call” key and END is the “End call” key).

• fastboot boot cm-recovery-1.4.img
• now you can apply the update.zip for 4.1.999

I just printed some stickers for my Lenovo X200. I probably add more stickers to it soon and replace the ones that are on in the process.

First stickers for my Lenovo X200

I just got my Arduino I ordered at watterott (http://www.watterott.com/). Watterott is a german shop, which sells arduino and accessories for it. I orderd the standard Arduino board: a Duemilanove.

I also ordered a book for it. It’s called “Getting started with Arduino”. But this book is for people that never had anything to do with programming, electronics and programming. So it’s pretty much useless to me. I gave it to me father. Perhaps it will get him interested in electronics and microcontrollers.

But the board itself is pretty cool. You don’t have to know that much about the microcontoller for settings of special-function-registers and so like with the mikrocontrollers I tried at home or university. You just have to download the Arduino software. Then put in a sketch, which is basicly writing C++ with some addons for the mikrocontroller. Now connect the Arduino with an USB-cable and upload the sketch. As a first test I connected 9 leds to the arduino board. Each in series with a 1kOhm transistor. I wrote a short sketch, which now outputs predefined patterns to the 9 leds. For the full sketch take a look under the more link.

Here are some pictures and an animated GIF showing a pattern I display with my sketch.

Getting Started with Arduino by MAKE

Arduino with some LEDs

The patterns I programmed:

Read the rest of this entry »

I recently installed the latest Fedora release. After installation sudo was painfully slow. About 30 seconds until the command executed. The problem was, that the hostname was missing in /etc/hosts:

Before:

127.0.0.1               localhost.localdomain localhost
::1             localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6

After:

127.0.0.1               localhost.localdomain localhost noneus-laptop
::1             localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6

In my case the hostname was noneus-laptop. You can figure out your own with the command hostname.
Happy sudoing!

I found a funny poster yesterday at university:

I got 1337 Pounds in Killing Floor today! WOOHOO!

To better understand what exif tag is in which ifd I wrote a little exifviewer. A simple little programs which list all exif-tags from one picture and the ifd’s the tag belongs to.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <libexif/exif-data.h>

void display_entry(ExifEntry *entry, void *null) {
	char b[1024];
	exif_entry_get_value (entry, b, sizeof(b));
	printf("%s: %s\n",  exif_tag_get_name (entry->tag), b);
}

void display_content(ExifContent *content, void *null) {
	printf("\nEXIFIFD: %s:\n---------\n\n", exif_ifd_get_name(exif_content_get_ifd(content)));
	exif_content_foreach_entry (content, display_entry, NULL);
}

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
	ExifData *data;
	data = exif_data_new_from_file(argv[1]);
	if(data == NULL || argc != 2) {
		printf("Argument must be one valid jpg-file!\n");
		return(1);
	}
	exif_data_foreach_content (data, display_content, NULL);
	return 0;
}

Build it with(Install libexif-dev):

cc -lexif -lm -o exifviewer src/exifviewer.c