Thursday, December 29, 2005

Memory cards for the Nokia 770

In anticipation of the arrival of the Nokia 770 and also because I needed a larger card for my digital camera (which uses full-sized mmc/sd cards), I ordered an rs-mmc card way back in August. Turns out of course since this is the univserve with eternally changing memory card formats, That the 770 sensibly uses 1.8v rs-mmc or dual-voltage mmc cards which draw less power. So my existing card won't work and it's time to shop for a new one.

In the interim, rs-mmc dual-voltage cards, appear to have evolved into MMCmobile, which has a higher though still compatible pin count, and vastly greater potential throughput. What the deal with the 770 is eactly I don't know, The included 64MB card has 13 pins but simply states (1.8/3.0v) multimedia card.

http://www.flashrus.com/atp/web/mmcdifference.htm

Even if the doesn't support the enhanced features of MMCmobile the newer cards should work without trouple. At some point benchmarking is probably in order to determine if one mmc card is vastly faster than another.

So anyway cards (amazon affiliate links are italic):

kingston 512MB MMCmobile

1GB rs-mmc DV cards seem to be about $80-$90 via froogle

Basically 1GB is probably the acceptable minimum for an aftermarket card, if you're planning on storing mp3s on it. The other application I've seen recently is to use a small chunk of it as swap, though to my mind that might run into issues around flash memory longevity and perhaps battery life implications, though for all I know these new mmc cards might do write balancing and sector remapping like modern cf cards.

Monday, December 26, 2005

Nokia 770 mp3 audio streaming.


cimg0591
Originally uploaded by joelja.

Plays back internet radio stations with little or no effort. Given the limited amount of cpu it has, it surprising but it can run in the background while you do other things under most circumstances.

Nokia 770 with xchat...


cimg0585
Originally uploaded by joelja.

First thing I did after noodling around with the thing for a while was install some software, this is the xchat irc client.

Friday, December 23, 2005

Nokia 770

Now thar I've had it for a bit more than a week. it seems like quite a reasonable device. I haven't spent any significant time hacking on it, but not withstanding that. the things it was designed to do it does quite well.

Browser. mp3 player, rss agregator. email and anything that requirs serious typing is a little labor intensive. I would note however that I'm about to be pushed over the edge by all the devices that I routinely carry that require fairly regular charging and all have different power supplies.

Friday, December 16, 2005

New toy!

So it's been a long time in coming but my new toy has arrived. I didn't really know what to expect from the Nokia 770. but it appears to exceed even my most wild imaginings.

Pictures to follow shortly.

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

$100 pc goes to manufacturing...

Can't say much for the color scheme, though that's something you can probably fix with a rattle-can and some stickers.

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000920072549/

They do have one photo displaying actual text which I would think would be
the principle application...

http://laptop.media.mit.edu/images/laptop-ebook.jpg

It's slightly interesting to me from a design perspective that in one configuration or another some of the usb ports are allways covered. which means basically no permenantly attached devices. It also means to me the most if not all the electronics apart from the keyboard/touch-pad are located in the screen housing.

Monday, December 12, 2005

WTF!

Materialism as the road to abstinence

http://psych.colorado.edu/~gwebster/bling.jpg

Put out if he drops the rock!

Let's get this straight... If you can be bought for a tiny little rock, you're just a whore.

Friday, December 09, 2005

Dell powerconnect 5212 firmware problem

Got a dell switch that you can't upload a new firmware on?

That second config file is taking up to much space... Nuts! you think there would be enough room for an extra 1600 bytes.
http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=pc_managed&message.id=1045&query.id=400264#M1045

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Turn based space adventure games...

When I quit my job, or start commuting by train so that I have and extra 45 minutes to kill each day, I have to take up turn based space adventure games again.... New and promising are:

Weird Worlds
http://www.shrapnelgames.com/digital_eel/weird_worlds/6.htm

Sword of the Stars
http://www.kerberos-productions.com/sots.shtml

Galactic Civilization
http://www.galciv2.com/ScreenShots.aspx

Interesting hardware on the pvr front.

Not relevant to the hobbyist obviously:

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS9968931411.html

I could easily see the bill of materials for a pvr built around this thing being well under $100.

So the tivo business model eventually makes money even if they have to give the pvr's away to get you to subscribe to their $12 month tv-guide xml meta-data service.

Either that or a pvr eventually ends up costing less than a vcr (currently $40) since it has fewer moving parts.

--

My knoppmyth pvr is getting a bit long in the tooth. So it's time for an upgrade, probably new disk is the first step, but freshening up the distro is something I've been avoiding for months now. Looks like knoppmyth has gone through two rapid releases since the last time I looked, so time to burn some iso's.

Thursday, December 01, 2005