The Syncing Apple

Reinstalling packages after a firmware update via the GUI is a drag. Luckily, you can do it quickly and easily with with a simple cli tool on your 770. Thanks to Andrew Flegg who tipped me off to this tool.

Assuming you have SSH setup and your 770 is in R&D mode, ssh into your 700, gainroot and locate your packages. I keep mine on a folder on my MMC card, named ‘Installers.’

Here I’m installing FBreader and the LoadPlugin:

/media/mmc1/Installers # app-installer-tool install fbreader-maemo_0.7.1b-1_arm.deb
Selecting previously deselected package fbreader-maemo.
(Reading database ... 95 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking fbreader-maemo (from fbreader-maemo_0.7.1b-1_arm.deb) ...
Setting up fbreader-maemo (0.7.1b) ...

/media/mmc1/Installers # app-installer-tool install load-plugin_0.2.4-1_arm.deb
Selecting previously deselected package load-plugin.
(Reading database ... 158 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking load-plugin (from load-plugin_0.2.4-1_arm.deb) ...
Setting up load-plugin (0.2.4-1) ...

Nice and simple.

The Nokia team has released the .51 (apparently that refers to the week the update was released) update on their European site. You can download it after you type in the MAC address of your 770 which is located on a sticker underneath the battery. Hint: write it down somewhere so you don’t have to keep pulling the battery out for every update.

The update is actually the 2nd bigger file, the zipped one (the one that says ‘Software’ The Guide is just a two page guide to installing and running the Windows Update Wizard and not a guide for actually flashing the device. However - the new wizard itself is fairly descriptive.

The new Update Wizard for Windows was a disappointment. While it has some cool screens and clear instructions, it wouldn’t actually flash the device for me. A slight problem! And yes, you have to connect the 770 directly into your computer’s USB- hooking it up to any type of hub results in the wizard not even detecting it.

Screen shots of the new Flashing Wizard.

This is where the Wizard got stuck with me- I had to kill the wizard in Windows as it would soon stop ‘responding’ to Windows. I tried it 5 times and finally gave up and went for the CLI flashing utiliy on my Macintosh. That worked.

Flashing CLI

Below is the output for my flash… you use the -F for filename, -f for flash and -R to reboot the device after its done. The first go-round it actually stopped flashing the rootfs at 99%, so I killed the job on the mac, reset the 700, re-flashed and it worked completely the 2nd time.

• How to Flash with OSX
  

• How to Flash with Linux

blinky:~ dillera$ ./flasher.macosx -F Nokia_770_SE2005_3_2005_51-13.bin -f -R
Found image 2nd (length 8576)
Found image secondary (length 79360)
Found image xloader (length 13824)
Found image initfs (length 1581824)
Found image kernel (length 1481856)
Found image rootfs (length 58851328)
USB device found found at bus 003, device address 003-0421-0105-02-00
Found board Nokia 770 (F5)
NOLO version 0.9.0
Sending X-Loader image (13 kB)...
100% (13 of 13 kB, avg. 586 kB/s)
Sending secondary image (77 kB)...
100% (77 of 77 kB, avg. 717 kB/s)
Flashing X-Loader... done.
Sending kernel image (1447 kB)...
100% (1447 of 1447 kB, avg. 733 kB/s)
Flashing kernel... done.
Sending initfs image (1544 kB)...
100% (1544 of 1544 kB, avg. 733 kB/s)
Flashing initfs... done.
Sending and flashing rootfs image (57472 kB)...
100% (57472 of 57472 kB, avg. 622 kB/s)
Finishing flashing... done

I used the built in backup utility to save all my data (sans email) it has a nice check list of what you want to save. It restored the data and rebooted my device. Now I have all my RSS feeds and Bookmarks back. One other nice thing with the backup- you can choose not to save your email data (i.e. messages) but it still backs up your account settings.

Warning: you will lose all your 3rd party apps that you’ve installed, so be ready to re-install them or find a way to back them up. And speaking of that, on IRC this morning I see that Jaffa at Bleb has released a new utility (in the form of a makefile) that he says can help backup and restore these 3rd party apps across firmware updates. It’s too late for me (although I’ve kept all my app installers ready to push back over) but I’d like to see if there isn’t a way to install them via the CLI rather than the GUI.

So what’s it like?

So far, it’s not terribly much more than .45 I’m afraid.

• The email app shows nothing different (it still has its bad UI and is slow as balls)
• The over all system is not noticeably faster (I’m redoing my swap to speed it up)
• The Newsreader now fails to even load with my feeds

So I’m guessing this was a minor, under the hood tweaks kind of update. Nothing major seems to have been addressed. Nothing dramatic regarding speed, which I was hoping for. At least I’ve gone thru a firmware update now. Once I sort out the backup and restore of 3rd party apps I’ll be ready for the next one.

In my quest to speed up the 770 (I think that by loading my bookmarks and RSS feeds I’ve crushed it- it’s just so slow now that it’s mostly unusable) I ran across a link in the comments here to a post on the users list about enabling swap on the MMC, and how that could help processes in the poor 770.

So here is my output, enabling 32Megs of swap on my 1G MMC, starting from a terminal on my Mac.
Note: you have to do this every time you reboot of course.

blinky:~ dillera$ ssh user@192.168.251.53

BusyBox v1.00 (Debian 2:20041102-11) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

processing andy mods
done
~ $ sudo gainroot
Root shell enabled

BusyBox v1.00 (Debian 2:20041102-11) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

/home/user # dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/mmc1/extraswap bs=1024 count=32768
32768+0 records in
32768+0 records out
/home/user # mkswap /media/mmc1/extraswap 32768
Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 33550336 bytes
/home/user # swapon /media/mmc1/extraswap

The 5 min result: swap seems to be helping, as I am now able to run a browser, the bookmarks app and the RSS reader and they are not making me wish I had a pocketpc…..

Ready to export your existing bookmarks onto the 770? Just as I wasn’t willing to enter in my RSS feeds by hand, the same goes for my bookmarks. I wanted to export my perfectly good bookmark lists in Firefox and put them on the 770, since it is supposed to stand in for my laptop surfing around the house. The virtual keyboard is not an option.

Luckily a few good things have happened: back in 1998 some Python hackers wanted to show off the XML support in Python, so they created the XBEL format for the exchange of bookmark data. And the smart folks at Nokia are using a bookmarks manager application that uses XBEL raw (just as the RSS reader used OPML raw for its feed list). I am impressed that Nokia is cutting edge as far as open file formats are concerned. And finally, Firefox can spit out its bookmarks as XBEL, with the proper extension.

The final piece was tracking down the elusive bookmarks file on the 770. There is a file located in your home directory (/home/user/.opera/customurls) that looks promising, but it turns out that it’s not the bookmarks file. That file resides over in the /usr/share/osso-bookmarks directory. From what I can determine, while the browser is a port of Opera Mobile, the bookmarks manager is its own application that is not related to Opera.

Warning: this procedure is a hack, and a laborious one at that. What we need is a Python script to take the XBEL export from Firefox and convert it to the XBEL format that the 770 likes (see my issues section below). Till then you can use an XML editor to cut, paste, and edit the attributes of your bookmark objects in XBEL and massage them into the format that the 770 accepts.

The method I outline below works, but it’s a PITA. To me, it’s easier than typing all my bookmarks via the virtual keyboard. But I used this on a subset of my full bookmark list. I’m working on the Python script (when I have the time).

Overview

There are four major steps to this:

• Get the bookmarks file from the 770
• Export bookmarks from Firefox
• Use XML editor to copy and clean data
• Copy the bookmarks file back to the 770

Transferring Bookmarks to Desktop

• Using MMC and USB

  • Windows/Macintosh/Linux
    • On the 770 open an xterm and copy the bookmarks file over.
    • $ cp /usr/share/osso-bookmarks/bookmarks/MyBookmarks.xml /media/mmc1
  • Then plug
    in the USB connector into your desktop and copy the MyBookmarks.xml file
    to your desktop computer.

• Using SSH
  
  • Setup your ssh environment
    • You should already have your ssh environment setup, using the
      DropBear ssh server and clients. You need to follow the
      Dropbear installation directions and have your authorized_keys
      file setup on your 770 with the identities of your Desktop Host.
      In this case, I have the ssh server running as root, so I’m
      not specifying the port in the scp command.
    • To ssh over your bookmarks file to your Desktop:
      • dillera$ scp user@192.168.251.53:
        /usr/share/osso-bookmarks/
        bookmarks/MyBookmarks.xml .
      • Don’t forget that period ‘.’ at the end of that last command- it means copy that file into the directory that you are currently in (on your desktop computer).

Exporting Firefox Bookmarks

Get Bookmarks Synchronizer Extension

• For
  up to version 1.5 of Firefox you need this
  version, For
  version 1.5 this
  one.
• Export your bookmarks
  • Bookmarks/Synchronize bookmarks
  • Advanced Tab
  • Uncheck everything but “Check the XBEL public…”
  • Click on the Export XBEL button
• Name your xml file appropriately.

Opening and Editing the Bookmarks File

• Finding an XML Editor
  • Macintosh - ELFData XML editor available
    as a 7 day demo
• Downloading the DTD
  • Download the XBEL
    DTD at http://www.python.org/topics/xml/dtds/xbel-1.0.dtd
    and install it into your XML editors plugin directory (or where ever your
    editor wants DTD to go).
• Use the XML editor to copy and paste your
  bookmarks into your existing MyBookmarks (from 770), keeping in mind the issues
  listed below and removing and adding the data that the 770 requires.

Issues:

• Differences in XML
  formats on the 770 and Firefox XBEL
  • Firefox: Inside each folder and bookmark
    element, Firefox stores a rdf attribute, unfortunately
    you need to remove it.
  • 770: The bookmark object requires
    the info element as a child, which contains the metadata element as its child.
    The metadata element contains two attributes: the time that you added the bookmark and the time you
    last visited the site. You must add these into the copied bookmark elements
    from Firefox, or the 770 bookmarks application won’t read the file.
  • 700: Folder element: requires
    a ‘folded’ attribute, as well
    as the same info/metadata child elements and their attributes that exist in the bookmarks elements.

[Thanks for Roger Sperberg's comment and correction on my XML nomenclature!]

Once you are done editing the MyBookmarks.xml file, save it and copy it (ssh or MMC card/USB) back over to the 770. Make sure that the bookmarks application is not running on the 770. Then start the bookmarks application and check out your bookmarks.

Following are two screen shots from the ELFData editor on the Mac, showing the XBEL output from Firefox and the MyBookmarks.xml file from the 770. You can use just a text editor for this of course, but I found that the ELFData editor let you copy and paste objects so moving them around with their attributes was easy.

I’m also fooling around with BookMark Bridge, available over at sourceforge. I’m trying to built in on my Ubuntu powered Powerbook G4, and once it’s built I’m hoping that it will let me mange these XBEL files better.

Screen shots are on the Extended Page….

Continue Reading »

I really got into reading ebooks with my Toshiba e805, one of the first PocketPCs that sported a near-VGA screen. Reading on it was pleasant and very easy on the eyes. So I’ve been anxious for the 770 to take over as my primary ebook device– the beautiful screen is certainly up to it. So far I haven’t been disappointed in the least.

We are lucky enough to have two options on the 770 - Plucker and FBReader. I’ve looked at both and FBReader is the clear winner for the 770. FB is super quick, supports plucker formatted books and has a deeper set of options on the 770 than does the current Plucker viewer. The killer feature is landscape rotation- just click the center button on the 770. It’s amazing how fast the 770 and FB render pages– this is the speed that I would like to see on the 770 for all applications.

There are a few good places I’ve found for content.

• Plucker Books - get your books already plucked
• Mobile Read’s E-Book Resources Forum - this is a great place to watch for newly released works
• Manybooks
• 
  Project Gutenberg
  can now dynamically create plucker formats!

There was an interesting, passionate letter written by Roger Sperberg to Nokia- wherein he addressed many salient points regarding the 770 and ebookery, namely, that Nokia should be working on pre-loading a ebook reader app (FBreader) and free ebooks with the 770.

Fbreader and Plucker screen shots.

Gmail mobile is live for mobile devices. It’s a super stripped down interface to your gmail intended for tiny screens on mobile phones. Needless to say, it’s extremely fast on the 770. Using the 770 with this new mobile interface is as fast as email should be. Until the Nokia Osso Email application reaches this speed I’m passing on it. It’s dog slow and so ponderous and so unintuitive… ugh.

Gmail Mobile- http://m.gmail.com

Below are two screen shots showing gmail mobile.

I figured out how to manipulate the bookmarks for the Opera on the Nokia 770. They are stored in XBEL format. More later as I perfect this. You can export XBEL formatted bookmarks right out of Firefox with the Bookmarks Synchronizer– that is the key.

Go here to get a version of the Bookmarks Sync that works with Firefox 1.5.

TomTom5 now has live traffic updates in the US, for selected cities. You can get the service free till the end of 2005. There is no traffic info for Philadelphia however. Logging into your tomtom account, you can check the availability of service for many major cities. I selected NYC, since there is service there.

Thanks to the work of Matthew Mastracci, this amazing news is all over the net, but I want to mention it here.

Matthew Mastracci has booted a Linux kernel on his Treo. His site has the current status, and he has setup a Treo650 page on the Handhelds.org Wiki site.

My Treo 650 (from Sprint) has been working fine for me. The only real issue I have is the Sprint Service in West Philadelphia. I want to use it as my primary phone (and do, and just put up with the missed calls), but there are still issues of service coverage while inside my house. These super thick brick walls are just not nice to the Sprint signals. Other than that ChatterEmail has been superb, and I use it most of the day to keep me on top of my email, when I’m not in front of a computer. In that respect the Treo has been near flawless. I have no plans to flash Linux onto it, but I can see how it could become very interesting on the 650: with the keyboard, built in connectivity and a decently rezed screen.

If you want nice screen shots from your 770 you are in luck. Jakub Pavelek has written a cool applet that shows both CPU load and memory (ram) usage. As a bonus, it offers to take both a screenshot and a delayed screenshot. It will also kill running applications to help with the dreaded memory crunch on the 770. The screenshot delay is essential, since if there is no delay you will always have the applet’s pop-up ui as a blank mask over the screen (see my previous screenshots on this blog).

With this in place, you can snap screenshots. They are stored as PNGs in:

/home/user/MyDocs/.images/screenshot[000].png

So, assuming that you have already setup the Dropbear SSH server and have your host keys all setup, from a Mac or Windows terminal you can just do this:

dillera$ scp user@192.168.251.53:MyDocs/.images/*.png .
screenshot00.png            100%  177KB 177.3KB/s   00:01
screenshot01.png            100%   88KB  88.0KB/s   00:00

In this example, I just pulled down two screenshots from the 770 into my local directory on my Mac. Now I can edit those as necessary. One result is below.

In playing with the Nokia 700, it seems silly that Nokia has limited the device to two connectivity realms - wifi and bluetooth phones. There is another type of bluetooth access- via a PAN, or Personal Area Network. I’m only just starting to see what the 770 can do with BT, but already I’ve found that it’s too dumb to connect to a PAN with the Hildon-based Connection Manager. I’ve tried connecting to my Belkin F8T030 BT Access Point, to no avail. The 770 reports that there are no useful profiles on the device (which it sees). I don’t think the Connection Manager is looking for a PAN BT profile.

Why BT (which is pretty slow) when you have wifi? Well, because you may not have wifi. There are restricted areas where wifi is not allowed, but a grey area exists with a BT PAN. With the limited range of BT PANs, you have security via proximity. Just kidding. But there are places where I’d like to use it since there is no wifi.

My Belkin has been without a PAN till just now however- I’ve had it a few years and while it’s nice html administration menu has always had an Upgrade Firmware button, every depression of the button has resulted in it reporting that it can’t find the website- which is hardwired in as www.belkin.com. I read about two things that changed all this: Belkin had released a firmware update in Nov 2005 which included PAN profiles, and that to get the F8T030 to successfully update you need to use the IP address for Belkin, and not the host name.

I quickly dug up the right ip address, clicked on the upgrade button, stopped the pathetic attempt to reach Belkin home and pasted in the ip. Here is what I saw in the URL field:

http://192.168.251.11/run_prog.cgi?command=download
&insert=yes&UPGRADE=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.belkin.com
%2Ffirmware%2Fbluetooth%2Ff8t030%2Fflash.bin&
nextpage=upgradeok.shtml

After jamming in 205.166.232.45 it worked.

Now I’ve got to get the 770 to connect to the PAN by hand. I think its possible, since the 770 seems to have most of the Linux Bluez stack in place. More to come as I work at this.

Technorati Tags: Bluetooth PAN, Nokia 770

[UPDATE] I just came across an great 770 Bluetooth hacking site - Collin R. Mulliner - he has a great blog, some 770/BT projects and a few pieces of software for the 770. Nice resource.

This is my first test from the Macintosh version of the OPML editor. Dave released a new version of wp.root yesterday and it seems to support catagories on your blog. So I’m trying it out. I read about it over at Nomadic Coder.

Wow, I didn’t realize that the editor understood a link- it just swallowed up that last href I typed out.

I feel like it’s time to enable root on my 770. I want to setup some things and its hard looking around and searching for things without having access to everything. Fortunately, getting root is super simple on the 770. The MaemoWiki has an excellent page on it, but if your in a hurry, all you do is this:

• Get the flasher - (Mac, Linux)
• Remove the 770 from mains and shut it down completely (using powerbutton)
• Plug the USB cable directly into the Mac (hubs won’t let it work) and into the 770
• Execute the flasher application as root
• Turn on the 770
• After the flasher is done (it only takes a moment), unplug the USB from the 770
• The 770 will boot
• Now, on the 770 use the command: “sudo gainroot” whenever you feel the need.

Output from the terminal on my Mac:

blinky:~ dillera$ chmod a+x flasher.macosx
blinky:~ dillera$ sudo ./flasher.macosx --enable-rd-mode
Suitable USB device not found, waiting
USB device found found at bus 003, device address 002-0421-0105-02-00
Found board Nokia 770 (F5)
NOLO version 0.9.0
The device is now in R&D mode
blinky:~ dillera$

Back on the 770:

~ $ sudo gainroot
Root shell enabled

BusyBox v1.00 (Debian 2:20041102-11) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

/home/user # id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root)

One OPML reader that did agree with the OPML output by the Liferea RSS reader in the Nokia 770 was the OPML Editor written by Dave Winer.

Go figure.

So I just got my 770 yesterday, and it seems to be as good as I had imagined. I’ve installed some cool stuff, and am using it as I planned- as a replacement for my laptop around the house when I just want to surf and read the web and rss news…

However, I didn’t want to manually enter my feeds on the 770, using the virtual keyboard and pen method. [I'm waiting for someone to get the Apple BT keyboard working with(the BT keyboard plugin for the 770 )] Until this happens I wanted a quick method to move my feeds onto the 770.

Continue Reading »

You can access the RSMMC card inserted into the Nokia 770 on the Mac just as you can on Windows- just plug the USB cable into the Macintosh and after a few seconds a disk will pop up on your desktop.

This comes in handy if you want to move a lot of files over and don’t have ready WiFi access.

I was looking around the other day for some good gui blog posting apps for windows. But I was also looking for some good RSS readers for Windows… I ended up looking at RSS Bandit and the OPML editor from Dave Winer. The OPML editor is a bit of a trial, as I don’t see how you actually use it to add and read RSS, but the Bandit works well enough. I found a great page that lists at least a hundred RSS readers for Windows, so I’m posting that URL here.
http://allrss.com/rssreaderswindows.html
After playing with a few of these to try and manage a RSS feed list for my new Nokia 700 (which comes with a RSS newsreader) I’ve found that these vary wildly in features and capabilities… but here are three that I ended up using. All these support importing and export OPML, which is a must if you are jumping between them.

• Sharpreader - #1 Google hit for “windows rss” - this is a speedy and nice basic aggregator. The best feature is has is the auto parse field- the URL field at the top can be use to just paste in the URL for any website, and it will rip the page up and auto-discover the feeds… then you simply click the Subscribe button. A huge time saver. What drove me nuts is that you can’t move the subscriptions once you have them, for instance if you want to put them in a sub-folder.
• RSS Bandit - a really nice free aggy. This seems to output the cleanest OPML, that is why I used it.
• NewzCrawler - a fully featured reader/crawler ($20) that I used only because it has a superb organizing UI, and the interface is rock solid. It does a lot that I don’t need. However, it was useful for organizing all the feeds that I grabbed.

I ended up using Sharpreader to build my raw list of feeds, just by copying and pasting my bookmarks from Firefox into its ripper. Then I exported the list and edited it with NewzCrawler. Then I exported it yet again and imported it into RSSBandit just to normalize the RSS (or so I thought). The final output was destined for my Nokia 770, but there were still issues with the OPML… see my next post for what I ended up doing.

Nokia just informed me last night via email that my 770 (ordered back on the 15th of November, and promised to ship on the 17th) has finally shipped to me. There has been a fairly large amount of consternation regarding the release of the 770. Nokia apparently misjudged the popularity of the device at the launch, and had many more pre-orders (which they started accepting Nov 14) than they expected (for the US). As the promised shipping date slipped, more and more people were upset… and expressed that in the Forums over at Internet Tablet Talk.

As people waited anxiously for their promised Internet Tablets to ship, others in Europe were receiving them. But all of a sudden there were reports that CompUSA of all places was going to sell them- and and some in stock in most stores! While it was only a few units per store, most CompUSAs had 4 and were selling them- mostly to people fed up with waiting the four weeks already for Nokia to ship units to the USA. Strangely, CUSA was selling the 770 for $399 - and you paid tax of course. There was speculation that Nokia had make an 11th hour deal with CompUSA and gave them that first batch of 770’s so they could be the exclusive reseller of the device - for a premium. As people on the boards started to purchase 770s from CompUSA, the holdouts only became more vocal and upset. Throw in the fact that Nokia’s ordering department seemed to know nothing and the allegations grew each day that moved further from the 17th of November. Dates like Dec 30th and then Jan 6th started appearing from somewhere. Then after a few more days, most (if not all) of the CompUSAs were out (they had only about 4 to start off with) and had no date for another shipment.

It does seem like Nokia is taking a play from the Xbox 360 launch– but I’m still looking forward to using mine, as most of the feedback from the lucky users of the device has been, so far, positive. And I’v already ordered and received a RSMMS 1 Gig memory card.

Date:    12/08/2005
To:      dillera@xxx.com
Order#:  5723XXX

Subject: Your NokiaUSA.com Order...
Dear andrew diller
Thanks again for your order.  

You can expect to receive your package at the address
below in 3 business days via FedEx Freight Saver.
You can track the progress of your order using the
tracking number and link below:

Tracking Number: XXXX
Link: @ http://www.fedex.com/us/tracking/

Shipped To:
andrew diller
PA-19143
Description: NOKIA 770 INTERNET TABLET
Shipped:     1 @ 359.99

Just like it says, this is a test from my 2nd attempt with the OPML editor and wordpress.

Well, the title in that test post didn’t seem to go right. I’ve edited this with Ecto to make it more presentable.