demod.org blog

Mini-Review: Nokia E71

demod — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 14:12:12 +0200

A while ago I finally got tired of my old cellphone and bought a proper one, a Nokia E71. This is a short mini review of it.

Hardware

The phone itself measures at just 114x57x10mm, weights 127g and is enclosed in a very, very solid feeling steel casing. Besides its keyboard, a 2.4” 320×240 screen and a 1,500 mAh battery it also got a fast 369 MHz ARM11 CPU, includes a GPS receiver, a 3.2MP camera, a micro USB port, a micro SD slot and other gizmos. Additionally it supports UMTS, HSPA, EDGE, WiFi, Bluetooth, Infrared etc.

The only real complaint I got about the hardware so far is that the screen's resolution is just too small to comfortably read PDFs or browse the web (soup.io just isn't fun on it) but I guess I can live with that . Apart from that the keys are a tad small but I got used to it after a short time – also while I originally would have preferred a slide-out keyboard it's actually quite nice to have all keys available at all times. Last but not least the d-pad is a huge improvement over the usual nokia joysticks.

Reading slashdot with Opera Mini

Software

The phone comes with SymbianOS 9.2 / S60 3.1 and TBH I am not that impressed by it. Due to not having used any other smartphone OS for any extended period of time I might not be the right person to judge this, however, there are quite a few rough edges and usability issues which is just sad for an OS that has been around that long.

Besides the OS related issues I~~'ve yet to find a single good theme for the phone~~¹⁾ and the included ones all are more or less plain fugly. The software download tool (“Laden!” for us germans) provides a rather laughable small collection of semi-useless software, there are no commercial games available for the E71²⁾ and it just takes too much time to fix annoying default behaviors (like preinstalled programs using GPRS&co per default without even asking if you maybe would like to use WiFi instead).

On the upside Symbian is by far the most common smartphone OS which guarantees having most software available for it. Also, despite its small flaws its just fine for day-to-day tasks.

Calendar

The E71's homescreen and default calendar application

Having a synchronize-able, electronic calendar to manage all my appointments (and lectures!) with was one of the many reasons I wanted to get a smartphone – sadly its never just that easy.

The preinstalled standard calendar is sufficient for basic usage but isn't exactly great on speed, configurability or providing an overview of anything. Luckily there are (commercial) alternatives: SBSH's Papyrus (aka Calendar) and Epocware's Handy Calendar which both use the built-in calendar to store their data. On the upside this allows you to use the built-in calendar synchronization tool and the appointment-widget on the phone's homescreen. On the downside the built-in calendar can't handle categories or multiple calendars which isn't exactly great for appointment management or getting an overview.

Additionally there is no easy choice between the two calendars. On one hand Papyrus got categories (which are not saved in the default calendar and therefore not synced) and numerous configuration options but on the other hand it lacks a widescreen suitable monthly overview (which Handy Calendar got), is rather ugly (if that matters to you) and often just can't keep up with the clean interface of its competitor.

Handy Calendar and Papyrus

Synchronization

Synchronizing the calendar is sadly not as easy as it should be – while the E71 supports SyncML the tools available for Linux (which are mostly based on OpenSync) sadly are unable to sync the E71 over bluetooth or HTTP³⁾ ATM, however, USB synchronization is supposed to work. See the OpenSync Device Compatibility Listing for more up to date information.

To sync my E71 with Sunbird I therefore had to build this chain:
E71 ↔ GooSync ↔ Google Calendar ↔ Provider for Google Calendar⁴⁾ ↔ Sunbird.

If you just want to backup your calendar, don't need to access it from a normal calendar program and can do without a good webcalendar you might be satisfied with Ovi or MyFunambol. Both don't exactly excel at being webcalendars but are very easy to setup.

Conclusion

Despite its small flaws I'm quite happy with my E71. For a price of approximately 360€ it delivers a very solid package that doesn't have to hide itself from any over-hyped touchscreen smartphone.

Miscellaneous

Other Software I installed

Other Reviews

I’ve been using it for a month now, and I’m completely sold. This is the best phone I’ve ever had. I love it.
Joel Spolsky

Since I focused on the functionalities that are the most important to me in this review and completely ignored other features (e.g. mail client, exchange integration, VPN client, camera, media player, …) maybe reading other reviews might be a good idea before buying your own E71

Joel on Software
Engadget Mobile
All About Symbian.com
Symbian in motion (offers some valid negative points)

Amendments

The phone (and symbian in general) can multitask which is kinda cool
There appear to be no good accessories to provide external control over the music player which is sad since this phone could have been a great mp3 player replacement
The phones key lock tends to unlock occasionally by itself when I put it in its standard sleeve and in my pocket

Hardware, Nokia, E71, Review, Cellphone, Symbian, Calendar

¹⁾ The e71blog hosts some good looking themes

²⁾ Not that I'm that much of a cellphone gamer but being able to play Puzzle Quest would have been great

³⁾ I had bi-directional synchronization over HTTP working for a while (although the program exited with an error message despite synchronizing successfully), however, after changing something I wasn't able to make it work again.

⁴⁾ a Sunbird plugin

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Google's Testing Blog

demod — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 09:06:08 +0200

I just finished reading through the 20ish posts of Google's Testing Blog that accumulated in my RSS reader during the end of the last semester and just wanted to say that that blog is actually pretty awesome (assuming you care for software engineering ).

Now go read it.

software, engineering,, google,, blog

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Simple Improvements for Simple Scripts

demod — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 21:03:02 +0200

Did you ever suddenly notice that something simple you've been doing for years could be vastly improved with just a little bit of tweaking? I did yesterday concerning the transfer of files with netcat (e.g. when nobody got sendfile installed and standard paranoia forbids simply using scp instead) and figured I should share my sudden “enlightenment”

ncsend

#!/bin/sh
 
host=$1
shift
 
tar cv "$@" | pv -brt | nc -q0 $host 23000

ncrecv

#!/bin/sh
 
netcat -l -p 23000 | pv -brt | tar xv

Note: piping to pv is optional

Edit: fixed a word splitting bug and specified a default port

sh, quick and dirty, tools

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Ever wanted to shutdown your workstation and...

demod — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 18:54:16 +0200

Ever wanted to shutdown your workstation and confused some random $xterm with an ssh-session and one with a local shell? Still want to use your pretty shell color scheme on all your accounts anyway? Look no further. After managing to shutdown the wrong machine once or twice a year I finally took the time to build some visual safeguards into my ZSH.

However, since both ssh sessions and X terminal emulators allocate the same kind of pseudo terminal the best thing I came up with so far was iterating over the chain of parent processes until finding init or sshd. If anyone got a cleaner solution for this problem please tell me

.zshrc

function ppid_of() {
	grep ^PPid /proc/$1/status | awk '{print $2}'
}
 
function is_ssh_login() {
	pid=$$
 
	while [ $pid != 1 ]; do
		if `grep -q sshd /proc/$pid/cmdline` ; then
			return 0
		fi
		pid=`ppid_of $pid`
	done
 
	return -1
}

.zshrc

## see console_codes(4) for number<->color relations
# red foreground
root_color=31
# green foreground
user_color=32
# blue foreground
cwd_color=34
 
 
if [ `id -u` == 0 ]; then
	hostname_color=$root_color
else
	hostname_color=$user_color
fi
 
if is_ssh_login ; then
	# background color = foreground color
	hostname_color=`expr $hostname_color + 10`
fi
 
PROMPT=`echo "%{\033[01;${hostname_color}m%}%n@%m%{\033[00m%}:%b%{\033[01;${cwd_color}m%}%~%{\033[00m%} %# "`

sh, zsh, quick and dirty

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Staying Sane with RSI

demod — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:55:14 +0200

I am not a doctor. Anything I post here is just based on my experiences and may help as well as harm you. Consult a doctor before following any of my advice.

Some time ago I suffered from a bad case of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) which german doctors usually diagnose as Sehnenscheidenentzündung or Tendovaginitis/Tenosynovitis. Not being able to normally use a computer or my hands for a prolonged period of time gave me plenty of opportunity to think about how to improve my situation (and how to stay sane). After going through this I figured I might as well share which tools I bought as a result of that thought process.

Staying Productive

Staying productive was very important to me because I still had (unrealistic) hopes of finishing my CS BSc within the standard period of time – which included “writing” my bachelor thesis…

A Trackball for your Feet

While the idea surely sounds wrong using a trackball with your feet is probably one of the best options you've got with RSI. I used a X-Arcade™ Trackball which, being a humongous arcade style trackball, had just the right size and button positioning to be used somewhat comfortably with my feet. It's also nice to have when reading your RSS feeds while eating…

Just remember: your wrists are not the only joints that are endangered by RSI so use your trackball in moderation.

The X-Arcade™ Trackball

Speech Recognition

Vista's Speech Recognition

The speech recognition worked surprisingly well for web browsing and most applications in general, however, it still had some pretty rough edges (semi-frequent crashing, not really learning how you speak words, etc.) and became tedious to use rather fast. Also, dictating longer texts didn't work that well either.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking

For the dictation of parts of my bachelor thesis I used Dragon NaturallySpeaking Standard 9. Thanks to VirtualBox I was able to use DNS9 and MS Word¹⁾ without any major issues on my linux workstation. While still somewhat tedious, annoying and nowhere near the speed of touch-typing DNS9 is IMHO more or less as good as speech recognition gets (at least for dictating).

Staying Sane

A Joystick for your Feet

Ever tried playing a game with your feet? No? It's just a matter of desperation and boredom, trust me. After trying out some cheap no-name arcade stick I got myself a X-Arcade™ Solo which was sufficiently large and robust enough to be used this way. Thanks to the large selection of adapters you can use the Solo with your PC (USB or PS2) and most game consoles (Playstation 1/2²⁾/3, Xbox 1, Gamecube (⇒Wii), Dreamcast).

While it takes some time getting used to it is sure better than no gaming at all. Personally I'd recommend turn-based strategy and role-playing games, like Fire Emblem, Disgaea, Chrono Trigger, etc. However, as with the trackball you've got to remember not to overstrain your ankles.

The X-Arcade™ Solo

A Bookholder

Easy Read is a simple yet flexible bookholder that makes (mostly) hands free reading quiet feasible. It is pretty nice to have in general even without RSI.

The Easy Read

Other Advise

Three out of four doctors were sure that I had Tendovaginitis, the fourth at least admitted that it was just his best shot. However, when I started seeing a physiotherapist to learn some exercises he dismissed the doctors theory within minutes and after some testing got a pretty good idea of the true cause. Therefore, if you can get some physiotherapy, give it a shot. Also, should you happen to be from around Darmstadt (Germany) I can only recommend ProPhysio.

Health, RSI

¹⁾ DNS9 directly supports MS Word and therefore it is a lot more productive with it than with OpenOffice.org.

²⁾ while the Playstation 1/2 adapter is supposed to emulate PS1&2 pads it's actually just emulating a PS1 pad and therefore might not work with all PS2 games

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Tools: unpaper

demod — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:38:59 +0200

Recently I wanted to print a few scanned pages. However, due to the low quality of the source material (see below) reducing the pages to black&white didn't exactly improve them.

Enter unpaper. While unpaper is a rather unknown tool it's also extremely useful because it allows diverse image modifications to improve scanned pages, e.g.:

black-/gray-/noise-/blurfiltering
deskewing
border-aligning
mask-centering
etc.

If you aren't sold yet the documentation offers other great examples of applied image processing techniques.

Below I've included the minimal¹⁾ script I used to process the scanned pages. While the settings produced sufficient results for my needs they are probably still far from perfect – so don't forget to toy with your settings to get optimal results ,)

autounpaper

#!/bin/sh
# Usage: autounpaper *.jpg
 
inputfiles=$*
tmpin=`mktemp -t autounpaper-in-XXXXXXXXXX`.pgm
tmpout=`mktemp -t autounpaper-out-XXXXXXXXXX`.pgm
 
opts="-q --overwrite"
opts+=" --no-deskew --no-mask-scan"
opts+=" --grayfilter-size 1,1 --grayfilter-step 1,1 --grayfilter-threshold 0.4"
 
echo -n "Processing:"
 
for input in $inputfiles; do
	echo -n " $input"
	ending=${input#*.}
	output=${input%.*}-unpaper.$ending
 
	convert $input $tmpin && echo -n . && \
	unpaper $opts $tmpin $tmpout && echo -n . && \
	convert $tmpout $output
done
 
rm $tmpin $tmpout
 
echo

sh, quick and dirty, tools

¹⁾ meaning: quick&dirty

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I got tagged

demod — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 19:59:38 +0200

Splitbrain just tagged me and so I guess I've got to list my “favorite desktop Linux software”. Here are the rules:

blog a list with your favorite destktop Linux software (as many or few you want)

add links to the software project's websites

post these rules

tag three other Linux using bloggers

however, I will just ignore the “desktop” part because the list would be short and boring otherwise.

audacious
A simple musicplayer that can trace back its ancestry to x11amp
unison
Synchronizes filesystems over ssh
gVim
Great editor once you've spend a few years rewiring your brain to it
SMPlayer
Great mplayer frontend
Meld
Gets stuff merged without wasting your time
bzr (aka Bazaar aka Bazaar-NG)
Gets stuff versioned without wasting your time. Especially nice when combined with meld (via the extmerge plugin)
ZSH
A powerful and customizable shell; once you get used to scp-remote-host-path-completion you won't be able to do without
Xfce
A fast yet sufficiently customizable windowmanager
KPDF
Well thought-out PDF-reader
VirtualBox
Free and fast virtualisation
JabRef
BibTex bibliography manager with docbook export and other nice features
The Gimp
Great pixel-based Image Manipulation Program
Inkscape
Like gimp just without those pixelthingies
Python
Gets things done fast yet beautiful; can pose as a desktop app with the right input

So now that this is settled I tag:

UPDATE:
s/KPDF/Okular/

chain letters, linux, tools

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demod.org blog

Mini-Review: Nokia E71

Hardware

Software

Calendar

Synchronization

Conclusion

Miscellaneous

Other Software I installed

Other Reviews

Amendments

Google's Testing Blog

Simple Improvements for Simple Scripts

Ever wanted to shutdown your workstation and...

Staying Sane with RSI

Staying Productive

A Trackball for your Feet

Speech Recognition

Vista's Speech Recognition

Dragon NaturallySpeaking

Staying Sane

A Joystick for your Feet

A Bookholder

Other Advise

Tools: unpaper

I got tagged

"favorite" as in "they suck less than everything else"

"favorite" as in "OK"

"favorite" as in "I really like them"