Battery Life

The battery life of my N900 is actually pretty good:



The above graph show a day where my N900 has been online on Wifi all the time (I have configured automatically connect to any connection and switch to Wifi if available) and online on SIP, MSN, Yahoo, 3 Jabber Accounts during the hours I was awake.  As can be seen it should run just about 24 hours online.

Hiding your porn

I remember a while back there was some questions on the Maemo mailing list on how to "hide" certain images or videos from showing up in the media player or image library. Good news is that it would appear there is a bug feature in the media scanner making this possible.

I used rsync to copy my own image library to my N900. I created a directory on the memory card called images/ and the whole directory structure was copied into this directory. This resulted in a reasonably deep directory tree with directories like:

./images/Malaysia/Xmas2006

Images in the above Malaysia directory show up, while images in Xmas2006 does not. Same goes for videos. It's still possible to browse the images using a customised folder.

A bug? Yeah I reckon, but one which could have some fortunate side effects.

I now think I got the original post completely wrong.  It's not the directory depth that matters but naming.  It would appear that the tracker avoid directories named "Private".  It is however not immediately obvious why this is the case since there is no mention of this in the configuration file.  So

./images/Malaysia/Xmas2006

does indeed show up, whereas:

./images/Private/Xmas2006

does not.

There you go - still possible to "hide" private pictures from accidental view.

No Sense of Direction

Well - for a short while there I was under the impression that Nokia was getting serious about Maemo and then they just announced some kind of merge with another Intel project:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8516368.stm

When is Nokia going to realise that it is not about their bloody platform it is about applications and who the fuck is going to develop anything for Maemo now.  The way I see this Nokia effectively "flip the bird" to all early adopters and developers for the Maemo platform.

I browsed around at some blogs and saw lots of attempts to soften the blow: "Maemo6 is just the first instance of the new MeeGo platform".  BS!  It's an entirely different beast based on an entirely different platform.  It might use the same api's but the underlying OS is quite different (rpm/deb for one).

This is a bad idea and I for one will take another look at Android - at least Google seems to have a firm sense of which direction they are heading.

New version of ipcheck

I just uploaded a new version of ipcheck. This one no longer use external check to get ip address but check the actual interface address. Whether that's better or not I'm not too sure but for me personally it works better.

Free up space on rootfs

After enabling testing and dev I was running a bit low on free space on the root file system.  I started digging around and most is in /usr/bin and /usr/lib - but there was in fact about 30-40 MB of apt/dpkg related stuff in /var.  This part was quite easy to free with a few commands:

# mkdir -p /home/var/lib

# mv /var/lib/apt /home/var/lib && ln -s /home/var/lib/apt /var/lib

# mv /var/lib/dpkg /home/var/lib && ln -s /home/var/lib/dpkg /var/lib

# mkdir /home/var/cache

# mv /var/cache/apt /home/var/cache && ln -s /home/var/cache/apt /var/cache

That's about it - 30-40 MB freed on the root.