I Love My Linux

Fuzzy fonts in firefox 3.5?

Michael Fletcher — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 16:50:12 +0000

thanks to the crew at webupd8 :-)

http://webupd8.blogspot.com/2009/07/fix-fonts-in-firefox-35-and-ubuntu.html

Classic bash...

Quinn Reynolds — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:07:28 +0000

<snort> ^_^

http://www.bash.org/?889637

Off Topic - but so cool

Michael Fletcher — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:55:13 +0000

oh my... I may have to get me some of these... my wireless mouse will never need batteries again!

http://www.usbcell.com/

HTC-Magic demo video

Michael Fletcher — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:20:34 +0000

As promised, the quality is not brilliant (due to smaller file size), but hopefully shows the main points :-)

HTC-Magic / Android Demo from i love my linux on Vimeo.

Thoughts on the HTC-Magic and Google Android

Michael Fletcher — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:05:27 +0000

Absolutely amazing!!! I am so in love with this phone, it truly is a geeks paradise! Don't get me wrong, there are a few things are stupid and things that need work, but on the whole i think this phone rocks the party that rocks the party!

First things first, how does it compare with the so called "Jesus Phone"... well according to our friends at el'Reg, the HTC-Magic review scored 85% and the new iPhone 3G S only scored 80% - I leave you to make your mind up on that. Comparing my Magic with a friends iPhone 3G, I can say there are points where the Magic wins hands down, and others where the iPhone is a step ahead. Overall, I prefer the Magic, but I would, considering I'm a Linux zealot.

Lets look at some individual areas:
Bluetooth leaves A LOT to be desired. At the moment it can only do mono-audio. it works with my nokia bluetooth headset without too much function loss, but that's all. No data transfer, no tethering and no contact sharing or picture sending. So if you want to send your mate a picture you have, you will have to do it via email (which it is set up to do very easily). I believe the iPhone suffered with this as well, but may now have been fixed?

The keyboard - it's ok... lets be honest here, I have fat fingers and it's very small, but it's actually becoming more functional the more I use it. It's saving grace is the auto correction. many miss hit letters get fixed pretty well. I just have to be careful that I don't send texts or emails with the wrong words in when it auto-corrects incorrectly (similar to predictive text errors)! This is happening less and less though as i add more custom words to the dictionary and get more proficient with the keyboard. you can always turn the phone horizontally and use the width to great effect.

Why, oh why, would you not put a 3.5mm jack for earphones on a multimedia device. I mean really, the mini-usb connection! I've had to get an adaptor so that I can use my own earphones.

Battery life is limited and very dependent on how hard you are hitting it. Using it during the day, lots of emails, web browsing and texting, it has died before on me in less than 12hrs. This is mitigated slightly by the fact that it does only take a couple of hours to recharge, and because it charges through the mini-ubs socket, any computer is a potential power source. On average now i get about 36-48hrs life out of it. Dependent of course on what i'm doing with it.

Connectivity to Ubuntu is super easy, plug in and mount the SD Card out of the box with no issues (the phone comes with a 2GB Micro SD card). The SD card can be hot swapped which is good. Music transfered easily and you can just build your own files system because the music player uses tags to organise your music and searches the card automagically. Still fighting with album art (should ideally download this itself) but slowly getting there with picard and reassigning the mp3 tags. Oh, how good is this, ogg files played for me without any additional fiddling!

Applications:
The preloaded applications are good, gmail, email and google chat are very good. The Android Market is filled with tons of applications, but here is a list of what I currently have installed:

Application Name	*Function*	Cost
PicSay Pro	Photo editor - very cool, adds décor and speech bubbles on the fun side, otherwise does the basic editing if required	EUR2.37
twidroid	twitter and identi.ca client	free
Labyrinth	tilt board game - brilliant game (paid for the full version)	£2.99
beebPlayer	plays bbc iplayer content and some live TV streaming	free
ThrottleCopter	that stupidly addictive game where the little helicopter goes up and down	free
Battery Widget	adds a widget on your home screen to see the exact battery percentage - very useful	free
AndFTP	Brilliant FTP client	free
Repligo Reader	PDF reader	$4.95
Bubble	Spirit Level	free
andriod-vnc-viewer	VNC viewer, means i can remote control my ubuntu machine!	free
GPS Status	all GPS data and a compass	free
My Tracks	records your gps data and draws path on google maps, can also exprt to gpx file	free
Hi-Hiker Pro	another GPD tracker	free
AK Notepad	notepad that can easily email notes	free
Countdown Alarm	does what it says on the tin	free
Google Sky Map	like streetview with GPS location and astro maps - still haven't tested fully	free
The Scwartz Unsheathed	A MUST HAVE, turn your phone into a light saber!!	free
Advanced task manager	easy enough	free
Free Dictionary Org		free
Toggle Wifi	turns wifi on and off with one touch on the home screen	free
Shazam	same as the iphone app, listens to music and can give you the song title and artist	free
Skype Lite Beta	skype	free
ShopSavvy	turns your camera into a bar code reader and finds the product to purchase on the web! AMAZING	free

I've left of the rest of the random games I have, but there are tons to get if you want :-)

Overall I'm very very happy, and hopefully will get a short video posted before the end of the week with a quick demo of the interface.

You Know You Want One.

Quinn Reynolds — Mon, 25 May 2009 10:13:19 +0000

More here: www.fpdimages.com/html/StoreOpenSystemsBanner.htm

watch this space...

Michael Fletcher — Wed, 13 May 2009 21:35:31 +0000

Very soon... hopefully before the end of this week, I will be the owner of a new mobile phone. Not just any phone my friends, but a phone that uses the linux kernel.

http://www.htc.com/www/product/magic/overview.html

Interesting read...

Michael Fletcher — Fri, 08 May 2009 10:23:40 +0000

I found this blog post by Mark Shuttleworth to be very interesting. Mainly because I know very little about the development process of open source software. It outlines some interesting points and if you have any points, please comment on the original post :-)

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/288

Does Dubya Know About This?

Quinn Reynolds — Wed, 06 May 2009 16:40:50 +0000

A bit of penguin humour for you this evening...

Ubuntu 9.04 Screen Switching Bullshit.

Quinn Reynolds — Sat, 02 May 2009 13:49:59 +0000

Right. Jaunty is out there, and I've installed it on the tiny little speck of a laptop that my company bought me last month. It's a thing of beauty this little HP 2230s, like a netbook that's been hitting the gym and the Mega Muscle shakes hard for a few months. And Ubuntu runs quite nicely on it, the various odd buttons and quirky hardware bits that laptops are notorious for all work (well, mostly), and it's nice and responsive.

The rest of this post is mostly a rant about a particular thing that annoys me colossally. The key points you should take away from the previous sentence are "a particular thing", and "me". Ubuntu 9.04 is a good step forward for the distro, and despite how my comments might come across I heartily recommend it.

Now I'm sorry, but seriously people, how hard is it, I mean, really, to get screen-switching on laptops working properly? We're three years and six releases downwind of when I first noticed this issue, which is just one of those absolutely totally critical things that anyone doing presentations (read: a huge fraction of your potential market) needs every day. I'm not a business person, but I am a researcher, and the thing about research is that you have to present it. You have to get up in front of a large group of people and show them your work on a regular basis. When you do this, and have to sit around for five minutes on the lectern in front of an increasingly tough crowd dicking with the broken screen-switching config in a desperate attempt to get a mirror of your screen to show on the projector, two very important things happen.

It throws you off your stride. And it wrecks your credibility in the eyes of the audience.

When you are standing up in front of people, the last thing you want is the equipment you're using to let you down by behaving unpredictably. Plugging an external projector into a laptop should work like this, every single time: display nothing on the external output until you tell the computer to do so, and then display a mirror of the laptop screen immediately and correctly as soon as you tell it to.

The Ubuntu screen manager fails miserably at this supposedly simple task which Those Other OSes seem to be able to get right pretty consistently. Plugging a projector into my laptop while it's running either mirrors the screen immediately, or displays nothing, or tries to fuse the two screens together into some horrifying abomination of an extended desktop. It's a total crapshoot as to which happens. If it does nothing (best case scenario), starting up the screen manager shows two screens, the laptop's LCD (active), and the projector (inactive). All good so far, but unfortunately activating the projector in the screen manager causes another roll of the dice. Either the resolutions of both screens are reset to match and the screen is mirrored to the projector (hooray!), or it isn't, or you get the weird mangled extended desktop again. If it's done something you didn't like, clicking the "mirror screens" checkbox either fixes it, or causes the system to throw an error and crash the screen manager. In addition to this mess, during your wrangling of the screen manager it will simply shut down at random points, displaying a message asking you to log out and back in again to confirm the screen settings. I've learned from bitter experience never to do this, unless you want to start all over again from scratch. By now, sweat is streaming down your face and you can feel the audience warming up their throwing arms and reaching into their conference packs for the complimentary bag of rotten tomatoes.

An additional annoyance is waiting to plague you after you've finished your presentation and mercifully retreated to the isolation of your hotel room or office. Ubuntu is now thoroughly confused as to whether or not you have an external monitor connected. Every few startups subsequently, it will suddenly pick up some combination of the settings you button-mashed while trying to get your presentation running and attempt to apply them. This has resulted in at least the following happening (by no means an exhaustive list):

The laptop starting up in mirrored mode with only the external screen activated (i.e. a blank LCD).
The laptop starting up locked in mirrored mode, meaning I'm unable to set the LCD resolution above 1024x768.
The laptop starting up thinking it has an extended desktop, causing me to lose windows off the side of the screen until I realise what's happening.

Further soul-destroying fighting with the screen manager is required to revert the laptop to realising that no, actually, there is no external projector or screen plugged in, and yes, the LCD is all it has to worry about.

It amazes me that something this fundamental (and this long-standing) is still so broken in Ubuntu. It's a real deal breaker for me, since it means that I have to maintain a dual boot setup for doing presentations, at least on my laptop.