Aehso's Output » n800

Asus Eee 701 vs. Nokia N810

aehso — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 11:47:52 +0000

Here’s a great comparison of two innovative products that, despite their difficult to categorize nature, are highly appealing to us geeks. Personally I’d go for the N810 though as I own a N800 I’ll just go for the free OS upgrade instead of forking out on new hardware. Maybe when the N820 appears…

N810 released, ‘Chinook’ OS upgrade for N800 users.

aehso — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 20:26:47 +0000

Nokia announced their new N810 Internet Tablet today. The good news is the Chinook OS, running the full gtk-2.10 stack, will also be available for the N800.. The bad news is that existing applications need to be updated as they’ve broken API compatability and as expected Chinook won’t run on a N770. At least it isn’t a Hacker Edition, it seems Nokia have learned from their initial decision to leave N770 users behind when they released OS 2007.

N800 and UPnP MediaServers for Mac OS X?

aehso — Tue, 29 May 2007 20:25:58 +0000

Canola and the Media Streamer on the N800 are apparently both capable UPnP control points/players so I recently decided to set up a UPnP MediaServer on my Mac Mini, where all my media(photos/music/video) lives. I drew a blank though:

MediaTomb – open source but I couldn’t find a universal binary anywhere.
EyeConnect – the N800 could see the server, it did not list any available media content.
TwonkyVision – music and photo streaming worked but I had no luck with streaming video and then the trial expired. It’s hard to justify buying commercial software when a major feature doesn’t appear to work in my environment.

Today, I notice the PS3 modders also have a list of UPnP Servers but alas nothing new there either.

Maybe I’ll have a go at building MediaTomb on OS X or maybe I’ll have to install Linux on my Mac Mini?

Update: I took the plunge and compiled and installed MediaTomb on my Mac Mini (using Apple Xcode development tools) following the instructions. There is a bit of prep work required to install the prerequisite zlib, libmagic, libjs, taglib, id3lib, libexif libraries though so this approach is not for the faint-hearted! I did hit a minor snag getting the MediaTomb configure script to use libjs v1.6 but resolved that with a little help from Jin. Streaming music and photos works great with Canola but some streamed DIVX-encoded AVI files won’t play – I’m assuming that is an N800 codec problem though…

Update 2: A day later, Jin announces that MediaTomb is now available via Fink. That should makes it easier for the rest of you to compile/install. Thanks Jin!

Google Reader on the N800 and Wii

aehso — Mon, 28 May 2007 18:15:21 +0000

I was trying to use Google Reader on my N800 at the weekend and it just didn’t work well enough to be usable. The page layout and text size really isn’t suited to a 800×480 display, I was scrolling far too much to reach important buttons/links and some of the AJAX controls (such as the tree nodes) just did not seem to react to touchscreen input.

However Google Mobile Reader has more than saved the day. This stripped down version of reader is designed primarily at mobile phone handset users, but it works very well on the N800.

The main page, once logged in, shows the ten most recent posts with convenient page-forward and mark-as-read-and-page-forward links:

The Subscriptions page is simplicity itself – a flat list of feeds, with feeds that contain new posts at the top of the list.

Each Feed page (http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed%2F>) is almost as simple but with one line of the entry body under each item, and additional navigation/mark links at the bottom:

Each Entry page (as above with additional query string) is also simple, with convenient links to see the original feed entry page, along with links to star, mark as read and move to next. Note my recurring use of the term ’simple’. In this environment, simplicity really does win the day and in this case it adds up to a very usable service. The fact that it is perfectly synchronized with my laptop feed reader is a significant plus. I left NetNewsWire behind a long time ago because I just couldn’t coordinate reading sessions across my home mac and my work pc. This is really another type of client that I want to read the same data access the same service with. And then I noticed that they have a custom Google Reader for the Wii too, with bonus Wiimote integration! It is going to take a lot to get me to ever switch to a different feed reader.