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Flashing Maemo

Yesterday, I finally found the time to flash my N900 with the latest Maemo version PR1.1. I ran the flasher software on a Fedora host and the process performed quickly without problems. After recovering my backup everything was back  to normal. Unfortunately I had no wifi available at the time, so when the backup recovery re-established the software setup, it downloaded ~50MB via UMTS which was somewhat unexpected.

Most notably, the browser feels even snappier than before and I am very pleased that connecting to my OpenVPN now also works over the UMTS/GPRS connection – with the previous version I could join the VPN via WLAN only (and even Patrick couldn’t fix it). I also noted quite a few new packages in the repositories, so there are more hours of fun ahead…

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Fixing The Planet

Adrian just upgraded lisas.de to Fedora 12 and that brought us an upgraded python. Unfortunately the current planet version uses the md5 module which has now been deprecated, so cron now sends me one deprecation warning per hour, which is rather frustrating. I wrote a little patch to fix the planet and this entry will be the one to test the patched planet with. If it works I’ll add the patch to bug #552462.

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Saving the planet

I’ve moved my printer to another room. Now it’s connected to my continuously running computer. But it’s constantly connected to power and is not really switching off. So I was searching for a solution to switch it of automatically. Using a µC would be nice, but the idea a the moment is to use a USB->serial converter and us the status pin RTS to switch a solid state relay. Today I’ve successfully tested the setup. First I tried with python, which in general is able to set the status of that pin, but unfortunately python is too “high”. During initialization and termination RTS is touched. And I don’t want to “shock” my printer with short switching pulses. But I’ve found this C-code. This allows to keep the state of the pin after termination of the program. This little piece of code exactly does what I need. I’ve added a diode before connecting RTS to the solid state relay to make sure that the relay does not see a negative voltage. I can not yet post a picture of that because my prototype is highly dangerous and I don’t want to provide any examples of dangerous 230V wiring on the net.

The next step will be to set up a cups backend that switches on and off the relay.

2009-12-22 00:00

After mirroring ftp.mozilla.org since 2000 we are now finally included in the automatic redirector pool. Chances are, if you are downloading something from mozilla.org, that you will be redirected to our mirror.

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It does rock indeed

So this is the obligatory blogged-on-the-N900 blog entry, straight from the maemo browser running all that WordPress JavaScript. So far, I am pretty amazed, although it’s only one day and I didn’t have much time to play with it. Software and UI are much more polished than I would have expected, and browsing the web works so much better than with any other mobile browser I’ve used so far.

First Text Then HTML

I finally have mutt configured in such a way that it first tries to display the plain text part of a mail and only the HTML part if there is no plain text available. For years I had mutt configured to display HTML mails using lynx but it was displaying the HTML part even if there was plain text available.

To display HTML mails I was using auto_view text/html in my .muttrc like it is described everywhere with the following corresponding entry in my .mailcap:

text/html; lynx -dump %s; copiousoutput; nametemplate=%s.html

The problem with this setup is that it displays the HTML part of a mail even if there is a plain text part available. So I had auto_view text/html disabled for most of the time and edited the configuration file manually to enable it again for the rare cases in which I received a HTML only mail.

But as this is mutt and almost everything can be configured I finally searched and found a solution:

auto_view text/html alternative_order text/plain text/html

If the message has a plain text part and a HTML part mutt shows me the plain text part, but if there is only a HTML part available I get the HTML converted to plain text. Exactly what I always wanted.