Wordpress app
Posted on February 2nd, 2010 by Daniel
W00t! The wordpress app for android works with the new mu! It knows about multiple blogs on the install and everything. Pretty sweet!
W00t! The wordpress app for android works with the new mu! It knows about multiple blogs on the install and everything. Pretty sweet!
A shiny new version of wordpress-mu now adorns this site. Yay! Maybe, now that it can upgrade itself, I’ll be more proactive about upgrading, rather than falling 4 (yes 4) major versions behind…
Hopefully all my old posts don’t show up as new on the planet. If they do, I apologize.
Well, I got a new laptop about a week and a half ago, and I already love it. It’s small, light, cool, and has a huge battery life, even in Linux, even with my normal usage. It works extremely well out of the box, as well. Here’s the specs:
First impressions: The screen is bright. Wow, the screen is bright. I generally have to run it a <50% brightness. Makes me wonder if it’s visible in sunlight; since it’s winter, I don’t know yet. It’s quite slow, compared to my previous laptop. Or rather, it takes a long time to compile things, because it doesn’t feel any slower to use. If anything, it feels somewhat faster; presumably, this is due to twice as much RAM that is much faster, and a much better GPU. The keyboard is nice, the touchpad is great (although it’s very slightly in the wrong place, meaning you hit it with your palm while typing; more later), the speakers are way too quiet.
On to the real meat of the question: Linux support. In general, everything works great. Here’s the details.
Video
This works fine with xorg 1.7.3 and xf86-video-intel 2.9.1. Screen brightness works, both via Fn keys and software. KMS also works fine. The backlight doesn’t come back on after resume (and I haven’t set up acpid yet to fix that) but a quick chvt works fine to get it back. HDMI out works (although I wasn’t able to get full 1080p on my quick test with my TV; I’ll try on a monitor later). Dual head via HDMI also works fine via xrandr. I can render 720p video fine, without kicking out of low CPU frequency. I haven’t tried 1080p, since the screen doesn’t go that high.
Network
Both the GigE and WiFi work fine; the GigE uses the atl1c driver, and the WiFi uses the ath9k driver. A word of warning, tho: use 2.6.32 or higher, or the WiFi get poor reception and constantly roams to a non-existent base station, causing your network connection to cycle up and down constantly. With 2.6.32, it works fine.
Touchpad
The touchpad is detected as a mouse, and handled by evdev, even with the Elantech driver built into the kernel. Since two-finger scroll and multi-finger tap work out of the box (even without the Elantech driver), I haven’t investigated why yet. I would guess that hal is mis-diagnosing it, and loading evdev rather than synaptics. I’m planning on looking into this soon.
Audio
Audio works fine with the intelhda driver. Full volume control, headphone, etc. The speakers on this thing are way to quiet. You can’t use them to play video for 2 people to watch. Since I didn’t play much with Windows, I’m not sure if it’s a hardware thing, or if I’m missing some “make it loud” setting. The headphones are plenty loud, so that’s okay. I mostly use headphones anyway.
Webcam
This may or may not work. I added the driver that’s supposed to work (uvc) but when I tried to run cheese, it crashed. I haven’t tried any further at this point, so it may work. The USB ID isn’t the same as the ones listed, so it may not work.
Battery Life
This is the big one. Size/weight and battery life are why I got this laptop in the first place, so it better be good, right? Well, it is. I haven’t done a full battery drain test (well, I’m doing it right now), but I’ve gotten 5 hours with space left, and I watched 2 hours of 720p HD video with ~50% left. When you first unplug, g-p-m claims 10.1 hours left, but that’s a damn lie, of course. I’ll have to do a good powerdrain run.
Okay, I’m no longer cautiously optimistic about the N900. I’ve officially crossed it off my list, and any claims that Nokians make about the N900 being an actual open source platform are patently false.
This reminded me of bug #176 opened in 2005 (yes, 4 years and 4.5 hardware iterations ago): The N900 still does not have native ogg support. This means to me that Nokia deliberately removed that support. They must have; all the underlying software (gstreamer, etc) has it by default.
If the N900 was, in fact, an open source project, ogg support would have been added by the community. Heck, I looked at adding it myself back in the day. But it’s not there, therefore the N900 is not open source. Oh well. There’s always the N910, that’s sure to come out in 6 months. Maybe Nokia will have gotten their act together by then.
There’s been a lot of chatter on the planets about the N900. I have to admit, I’ve been very blah about Maemo for the past 6 months or so, despite having a 770 and a n810. And it’s related to why I’m not exceptionally exited about the n900. I’ll get to that.
You see, I was hugely excited about the 770. It was a great little device, and I bought it as soon as it was available. I skipped the n800, because it wasn’t any improvement for my uses, and because I was pissed that Nokia had EOL’d my 770 after about a year. But, I was seduced by the hardware keyboard, daylight-visible screen, and extreme prettiness of the n810 to ignore my misgiving about Nokia, and get one. Again, early adopter. And the n810 is a fabulous device: well made, very useful, etc.
However, I noticed trend. Bugs for Maemo on the n810 got ignore, or closed “fixed in freemantle”. Features and development for the n810 (and n800) stopped. Everything added was not backwards compatible. Barely a year into my n810 ownership, and Nokia was already quietly EOLing it. Now, it sits in my car and acts as a GPS.
So, on to the n900. The hardware looks awesome. The software, ditto. I’m extremely excited about it as a device. But I can’t bring myself to actually care about it, because twice now, Nokia has screwed me. Come on guys: for a $400 – $500 device, you have to support it longer than a year! 3-4 minimum!
So, I’m not excited about the n900. I can’t afford to be burned again. I’ll stick with my Android phones for now.
Nemesis, my main fileserver/webserver/dhcp/etc. just bit the big one. Bad, too: no response to the power button. The power supply is probably okay, because several LEDs on the motherboard light up, but no fan spin, no HD spin up.
Yay.
So, I get to try to replace it. Temporarily, I’m going to try to put the drives in my desktop (thanatos), and re-purpose it. But that’s not a long term solution, since I need thanatos to be my desktop.
One possibility is to buy a new desktop. I’m planning on getting a new gaming machine when Diablo 3 comes out anyway, so maybe I should buy it early. However, with no ETA for Diablo 3, I can get much more machine by waiting. Then, too, I’m not done with Fallout 3, and the DLC isn’t even out yet for the PS3, and I have to go back and finish InFamous at some point, so I probably won’t have time for Diablo 3 any time soon anyway. So buying a new desktop is probably out.
Another possibility is to just replace nemesis with the cheapest setup I can find. That’s certainly quick, and easy. Another possibility, which I’ve been considering for a while, is to get a NAS. Some of them are quite nice, and I’m too old to enjoy administering a box anymore. I’ve also read some good things about some of them. I guess some serious pricing of options is in order…
Of course, my decision may be made for me if something happened to the drives in the crash of nemesis. There may be no point in trying to build a quick-and-easy replacement. Time to find out I guess.
My friend the reporter (who still has a job this week…) was visiting today, and we were talking about the newspaper industry, and how reporters everywhere are getting laid off. In fact, my “home town” newspaper (the Ann Arbor News) recently folded, fired their reporters, and became some kind of online monstrosity (named after my city with “dot com” on the end; I won’t give them Google Juice by listing the name) that does nothing interesting with news, and dumps printed ads (not news or content, mind you, just ads) on my lawn all the time. They’re basically paper spammers… Anyway, we were talking, and it occurred to me that there is probably a fairly large set of out-of-work writers at the moment. People with lots of skill, and love of writing. What we need is a business model to take advantage of that to make everyone involved a bit of money. What model should this be, I wonder?Here’s my idea: iTunes for ebooks, but done right.
See, ebook readers are becoming good right about now, and Kindle has shown that they can even become popular. And people are buying iPhone and Android apps for a buck or two right and left. What if we could come up with a way to get these writers to be able to write good content, and get that content to consumers, all at low enough overhead that you could charge a buck? What I want is two things: A community and a ratings system. It works like this.
There’s a community for writers, where they can collaborate on, edit, comment on, rate, and so on each other’s work. The community provides appropriate licenses (in collaboration with Creative Commons, probably), and hosting, and forums, and mailing lists, and all the snazzy web 2.0 things that fan-fic sites have. The community also provides, and here’s the important part, a store.
The store would support Kindle, Sony’s reader, Plastic Logic’s reader, at least one decent iPhone app, at least one decent Android app, at least one decent Pre app, and at least one decent blackberry app. Probably a Windows Mobile app too, but that’s a pain. Buyers would be able to rate things, tag things, and link things. Each book would link to the authors community page, so that people could follow and interact with their favorite authors. Authors, subjects, tags, and so on, should have feeds that you can follow: blog-like, twitter like, and so on. Integration with other services (such as twitter, facebook, myspace, and so on) would be a plus.Prices should be low; $.50 – $1.
The idea is to encourage people to buy. Overhead should be low: 5-10%, maybe. Some works could (and probably would) be given away, as teasers or other incentives. There should be no DRM; it wouldn’t help, and isn’t really necessary.The point of the store/community should be convenience: get things for your device easily and cheaply, support people providing your content, and get good content our the deal.
The point of this whole thing is to make an opportunity out of the failure of the newspaper industry: we have a surplus of talented, professional, skilled writers, who need money. We also have the beginnings of devices that make reading ebooks a good experience. Let’s put them together, and allow the fans to help pay for the works of the writers.
Post from PostBot on my G1.
Nice app. I wonder if it will make me post more?
Well, hal-0.5.13 is in the tree and fully working. This brings us up to current for the hal world, and should unblock further udev/devicekit work.
Sorry for the problems getting it it; it was a major change. Hotplug is working again.
If anything is still broken for you, you know where to go.