De-Lite is a really nice SDL clone of Lights Out. Those unfamiliar with the game will pick it up soon, as it is really simple. The main premise is to shut down all the lights on the board by tapping a lightpiece and do it in as less moves as possible. Tapping one piece affects the pieces adjacent to it.

De-Lite has many challenging levels available and will provide you with much minutes of puzzle fun. Thinking out the most efficient way to clear a level is a good brain teaser. The graphics are great and the the touch controls are quite smooth. Go on and add it to your collection. De-Lite is available from Extras, the package name is de-lite.

Have a problem? A suggestion? Leave us a message on our Facebook page, leave a comment or write an email, we’ll surely try to answer you.

Personal Photo Frame is a widget that does what the name suggest, it holds a frame with your photos and displays them on your desktop. You can choose the size of the frame, choose between a single picture mode or a slideshow mode. The second one allows you to have a whole folder of your images in a frame, which you can scroll through (the buttons for scrolling can be removed if you so desire) and have them automatically scroll after a certain amount of time.

One thing I’ll mark as a flaw is the inability to go through an image folder recursively or display two or more folders. That is, if you have all your photos carefully sorted into directories, you’ll have only one directory to choose.

That aside, the widget is pretty neat and nice to have on your desktop. Go and fetch it from Extras, the package name is personal-photo-frame.

Have a problem? A suggestion? Leave us a message on our Facebook page, leave a comment or write an email, we’ll surely try to answer you.

The premise of KeepassX is the same as with Password Safe: it stores all your usernames and passwords into a single encrypted database, so you’ll only need to remember a single key to access your whole list. It is just as cross-platform and runs almost everywhere. However, KeepassX is Password Safe on steroids.

The amount of features is huge. Keepass supports groups, exporting, different encryption levels, URLs for your desired websites, custom icons, attachments, expiration dates, list sorting, export-import with several formats available and much, much more under the settings. Those coming from Password Safe can import it’s database into Keepass as well, the formats are compatible.

The price for much of the power is the interface: the porters didn’t seem to adapt the huge GUI for the N900‘s screen. The interface is pressed down, taking it’s space. This doesn’t stop the program from being useable, but it sure makes it hard to see what’s written on the buttons and makes it hard to hit them as well. After a while, the main menu becomes a huge mess.

That aside, KeepassX is a great and very powerful password-storing app. It is only available through Extras-Devel, so if you want to try it out yourself make sure to enable the repository only once, disable it after you fetch the app.

Have a problem? A suggestion? Leave us a message on our Facebook page, leave a comment or write an email, we’ll surely try to answer you.

Password Safe is a port of the full-fledged libre desktop program for keeping track of all your passwords. It saves all your passwords into an encrypted database and you can easily read them off it with your master password. The master password is not saved in the database, but it’s the only thing you’ll have to remember.

Password Safe keeps great simplicity and keeps the features and security. It has group support, keeps notes and, well, usernames and passwords. You can also keep several different databases. Thanks to import/export feature, you can keep the database on the PC or your N900 and freely update and exchange information between the devices. Password Safe supports many platforms, so you don’t need to worry whether you’re on GNU/Linux or Windows.

While not as feature-rich as KeePassX (the N900 port of which I’ll review soon), Password Safe is just as cross-platform and very-very simple. Go give it a go: fetch it off Extras (package name: pwsafe).

Have a problem? A suggestion? Leave us a message on our Facebook page, leave a comment or write an email, we’ll surely try to answer you.

As mentioned, Don Ceferino is a Super Pang clone. That means the whole premise of the game is to try and shoot down as many flying bubbles as you can without them touching your character, who is Don Ceferino, trying to rescue his cow from being abducted.

If you played the original , then there’s not much to be said. It is a really well done clone, featuring several levels of challenging bubble popping! Don Ceferino can grab bonuses off defeated alien bubbles, which range from additional time to more weapons. The touch control is really good, but the game itself needs to be played on keyboard. Surprisingly, the controls are very tolerable! Several keybindings are available, so you can control the game as you see fit. The graphics look smooth and the music is nice too.

As so, the game is good enough to land in your game collection. Fetch it off Extras (package name is ceferino) and go save the cow from aliens!

Note: The guide assumes you know what you’re doing, as some of the tweaks might cause damage to your system, so use those at your own risk. Also, some of the packages to be installed require Extras-devel to be enabled, read on how to enable it here if you can’t find the package. Disable it right after you’ve done everything!

The tweaks work independently, so they’re all optional, but it’ll be wise to get through them all!

1. Battery and Speed Patch

Both speed the N900 up and conserve battery life, so install them, follow our guide here.

2. Turn on Hardware Acceleration

HW Accel makes your Hildon desktop much smoother. To activate it, go root:

sudo gainroot

and run this sed command:

sed -i ‘s/WSEGL_UseHWSync=0/WSEGL_UseHWSync=1/’ /etc/powervr.d/hildon-desktop.ini

HW Accel can cause some random crashes or reboots for some people. If you’re one of them, do the same steps, but switch 0 and 1 in the sed command.

3. Swappolube and Tracker-Cfg

Swappolube uses many tweaks to improve performance and low-memory mode for the tracker also conserves battery.
To install Swappolube:
sudo gainroot

apt-get install swappolube

Launch it, hit “Proposed”, “Apply”, “Store” in order to use the optimal settings.

To install tracker-cfg:

sudo gainroot

apt-get install tracker-cfg

Launch it and set it to low memory mode.

4. Kernel Power and Busybox-power

Kernel-power is a highly recommended package to have, as it adds many useful features to the kernel. To install it:

sudo gainroot

apt-get install kernel-power-flasher

and then reboot.

Busybox-power adds in a huge load of utilities to your Busybox shell. To install it:

sudo gainroot

apt-get install busybox-power

5. Community SSU

The Community SSU adds in a lot of UI improvements, full portrait support and much, much more! If you still don’t have it, go over here for instructions.

6. Task-swapper

A nifty package called task-swapper will save you time between window transitions. With it installed, switching between apps is as easy as pressing Ctrl-Right or Ctrl-Left.

Install it with:

sudo gainroot

apt-get install task-swapper

7. Catorise Plus

Catorise Plus puts all your apps into nice configurable directories, so you don’t have to go searching them all over the menu. To install Catorise Plus:

sudo gainroot

apt-get install catoriseplus

After installing all these, you should have a much better performance than what you had before!

If you know any more Tweaks, feel free to mention them and I’ll add them to this article.

Have a problem? A suggestion? Leave us a message on our Facebook page, leave a comment or write an email, we’ll surely try to answer you.

Green screen, Maemo screenshooter can't capture video streams. But the video plays. Really.

Note: the port requires you to fetch all the dependencies, and it will chomp up around 45 mB of your memory. Since some of them aren’t well optified, you’d want at least 20 mB in your rootfs.

The VLC port doesn’t have a package in the official Maemo repos yet, but VideoLAN’s repo has all the packages you need. Go and add it, either via the Application Manager (Name: VLC; Address: http://downloads.videolan.org/videolan/maemo/; Distro: freemantle; Components: free), or via Xterm:

sudo gainroot

echo “deb http://downloads.videolan.org/videolan/maemo/ freemantle free” >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hildon-application-manager.list

After you got the repo installed, simply install VLC from the App Manager or run:

sudo gainroot

apt-get update

apt-get install vlc

After that, reboot and VLC is installed.

The port itself is fairly functional, although a bit unstable. I had a couple of crashes trying to open a video.

All the desktop functions are there, they work, and are put it a more tight menu, for better mobile integration. You know what to expect. The videos play smoothly as well.

And while I myself always preferred mplayer, VLC is a solid, well known player, and certainly is a nice addition to your app library.

Have a problem? A suggestion? Leave us a message on our Facebook page, leave a comment or write an email, we’ll surely try to answer you.

Plans Plant is a really powerful task manager. It holds a wonderful task tree system, with your parent tasks, subtasks, dependencies… The tasks can hold a lot of descriptive information (if you’d like to fill it out), can hold start-finish times and the time required to accomplish the task. If you need to print out the whole sheet you can export the whole task tree into an HTML file! Numerous projects/task trees can be held as well.

The unstable release (available in Extras-Devel) features even more neat features, such as the time counter, with which you can mark the tasks as started and it will calculate the completion percentage for you. It also features task priorities, task search and sorting.

Future releases promise to have a calendar view, more informative buttons, desktop synchronization and much more!

Perhaps the only little downside to the great app I found is a rather huge and non-intuitive interface, it would take you some time to figure out which button does what, how to remove/modify tasks, but once you get the grasp of it, the app is wonderful.

Fetch the stable version off Extras, or the more feature-rich version form Extras-Devel, you won’t regret it.

Have a problem? A suggestion? Leave us a message on our Facebook page, leave a comment or write an email, we’ll surely answer you.

The Pomodoro app on the N900 has everything for the easy use of the technique. It has a nice task list, which includes task editing, allows you to start-stop tasks and shows you complete info on the process. Pomodoro also has visual and/or audio alarms (with the feature to add in your own alarm tune) and a short usage guide for those new to the technique. Complete guide and a free book can be fetched off the website.

Nicely done, and certainly applicable to jobs or studies. If you’re interested, do fetch the app off Extras right now and make sure to check out the main website as well, as it features a lot of interesting information.

Have a problem? A suggestion? Leave us a message on our Facebook page, leave a comment or write me an email.

One of the main things to love about MeBook is the interface. It’s beautiful, intuitive, very finger friendly and oh, so smooth.

The support for every basic thing is there: annotations, bookmarks, various screen modes, which surely includes portrait support and the ability to toggle between scrolling/page flipping among other things. The interface helps here too.

Reading books is fast, scrolling through several pages does not have any lag whatsoever, while being as smooth as ever. Of course, there’s support for a search engine and it’s very nicely done.

A few downsides would be: only one search engine (MeBook uses feedbooks.com, albeit the engine is great and you’ll find many books you’d need) and the lack of many cool features fbreader has.

So, should you keep it in your app library? Definitely. While it might be short on features the interface alone makes reading experience a very good one and all the life-needed features are there! Go on and fetch the app from the Extras, you won’t regret it.

Have a problem? A suggestion? Leave us a message on our Facebook page, leave a comment or write me an email.