Mmm, portrait mode on N900

Couch, coffee and feeds in portrait. I've missed that.

Since the first big update on the N900 the browser supports portrait mode.

I've missed reading my feeds in portrait, as I allways did on my N810 with it's custom kernel. And I must admit that it's so much nicer as the N900 is quite a bit smaller.

Very nice to see this in the browser, but why make it a hidden feature? As of now you have to press ctrl+shift+O to activate it.

RTFM - Capital letters by onscreen keyboard

You don't have to press the blue button to do capital letters. It can be done with a simple swipe, apparently.

So, I guess I've shoulda just read the manual for this one.

Anyways, you can swipe upwards while typing a letter on the onscreen keyboard on the N900. This will do a capital letter without requirering you to toggle between the two modes by pressing the designated onscreen button.

I got this from a guy complaining on talk.maemo.org about how this feature will apparently go away with the upcoming firmware.

I hope it isn't true though. I think it's pretty cool and I'm not afraid to admit that it was news to me.

Bluetooth keyboard and the N900

Nice, just like on the good ol' N810. Almost

(DISCLAIMER: After doing this my filemanager shows two of the standard folders such as images, videos and so forth. I have no idea why. It doesn't seem to have really duplicated the folders though.)

The other day I ranted in danish about the how the N900 didn't support bluetooth keyboards.

It still don't, but the always awesome community found a way to make it sorta work.

You can ONLY type letters, not symbols, numbers and so forth. Still, it's better than nothing.

Here's how it goes down. Check out:

http://wiki.maemo.org/Fremantle_Unsupported_Bluetooth_profiles#HID_host_.28i.e._support_for_Bluetooth_keyboards.29

Here's my newb way of doing this.

I installed Midnight Commander(MC) and rootsh.

I navigated to the main.conf in MC, altered the file but couldn't save it. Instead I opened X Terminal, enabled root by typing

sudo gainroot

I navigated to the directory of the main.conf and copied the file to a location, where I knew I could save it without any problems. I typed

cp main.conf /home/user/MyDocs/

I then edited it with MC, saved it and copied it back in X Terminal by navigating to /home/user/MyDocs and typing

cp main.conf /etc/bluetooth/

I then rebooted and connected with my bluetooth keyboard.

And now I'm typing this using the bluetooth keyboard. Well partially, I can't do the ' or / or any of that. I have to do that on the N900's hardware keyboard.

Thank you once again Maemo community.

Widgets and battery consumption on the N900

For today I'll try to disable the Facebook- and Mauku(Twitter)homescreen widgets and see if it has any impact on the battery consumption.

Yesterday the handset needed to be charged around noon as it was running pretty low.

During the day I had been connected with the afore mentioned widgets, done a small amount of surfing and uploaded a post via maStory - all using the 3g connection.

Lets see for today. I'm still connected to MSN, Gtalk and Skype through the Conversation app as I were yesterday, and I'm also doing a blogpost the same way.

THE NEXT DAY

My test of battery consumption on a normal day didn't really work out, as the day didn't turn out as expected.

I'll keep trying to find out if the widgets on the homescreen makes a difference in the future.

Camkeyd - an usefull tool on the N900

A press on the camerakey brings up the dashboard with Camkeyd installed.(screenshot)

I just wanted to give this little app a kind word on the way.

All it does is to bring the dashboard to the front by pressing the camerakey halfway down when the lenscover is closed. It doesn't sound like much, but it's very usefull and it really adds to the "ease of use".

Actually it's quite like the taskswitcherkey by the left thumb on the N810, a key which I've missed on this new one.

I believe Camkeyd is located in the extras-devel repository - so go fetch.

De første par dage med N900 - Tastaturet

Jeg har haft min N900 over weekenden og tænkte lige, at jeg ville dele et par indtryk. I første omgang om tastaturet.

Jeg havde virkelig glædet mig til at kunne sidde og skrive temmelig hurtigt på det, så jeg ikke skulle til at hive bluetooth-tastatur frem, som jeg ellers har haft brugt til min N810.

Tastaturet er rigtig fint, når man lige vænner sig til det. Jeg er glad for det nu og skriver indlægget her på det uden besvær. I starten overraskede det mig dog noget, hvor små tasterne egentlig er. De føltes også langt mere plastik-agtige, end jeg troede, de ville gøre.

Alt det er dog for længst overstået, og jeg er blevet gode venner med det - og det er vel ikke helt dårligt efter kun et par dage.

Nu ligger tasturet som det skal, tasterne føles ikke længere plastik-agtige, og jeg er sikker på, at jeg efter længere tid vil føle mig fuldstændig hjemme med det.

Til gengæld er der én rigtig skidt ting ved N900, i hvert fald indtil det bliver rettet.

Jeg kunne ikke forbinde mit Stowaway bluetooth-tastatur, og jeg fandt ud af, at det er et problem, der er generelt! N900 lader slet ikke til at understøtte bluetooth-tastaturer. Det overraskede mig i dén grad, og hvis der ikke bliver taget hånd om det i den næste firmware, er det for latterligt.

Det var det om tastaturet. Det er rigtig fint, men der går lige et par dage, inden man vænner sig til det.

N900 and the joy of merging contacts

I just got my N900 a few days ago and was very pleased with the contacts management.

First of I powered up Hermes, and it did a great job of pulling info from Facebook and Twitter. There want too many matches, but it was quick and easy to pair up the fragments with the nicknames, that my contacts are often stored as.

Now here comes the great part. The third-party app worked great, but the N900 also had a trick up it's sleeve.

I connected to MSN via the butterfly-plugin and suddenly there was a lot of contacts, who were mere mail addresses.

These were a lot of old addresses for people whom I've had contact with on MSN, but the addresses weren't tied to their phonenumbers.

So I've selected the mail-address entry, pressed "merge contact", which is called "Flet kontakt" in danish, and pop, the field was entered at the contact and the mail-only entry was deleted. Nice.

As I spent a few minutes doing this, I could see the number of contacts decrease while each of them became more and more beefed up with info.

Very nice indeed, and within a few minutes I went from around 245 to 220 entrys. It's not the biggest decrease but still very, very sweet - and easy to do.

Shooting extreme close-up with a mobile camera

Hi.

Here is a little usefull technique, that I found out about the other day.
I like to take really close-up pictures of different things, but when you have a small object in front of a distant background, the camera on my Nokia N79 is having a hard time focusing on the object itself. It simple doesn't fill up seeker, and the camera is focusing on the background.

This of course happens even though the camera is put on "near-photography".

And you can't get any closer, cause the object is then simply to close, for the camera to focus.

The photos comes out something like this.

(Photo: Martin Ove Christensen)

Here is the trick. Simply use the digital zoom. I'm of course aware, that zooming is usually an "emergency only", since the quality takes a huge impact.

But when you're really close-up and nasty, it doesn't matter. You can actually make a really, really small object fill the entire seeker-field, making the camera put the focus right smack on. In this case, the body of the spider is about the size of my thumbnail.

Put short, you are able to stand so far from a very small object, that the camera can focus, but still make the object fill the seeker up, so that it becomes the cameras focus priority.

It comes out something like this. (Behold the nastyness)

(Photo: Martin Ove Christensen)

This image is NOT cropped. This was what it actually looked like in the seeker.

The technique doesn't suddenly make Nokia-phones awesome close-up cameras of course, but it certainly helps alot.

The main problem is holding the phone as still as possible, as the photo gets shaking up pretty easy as the camera is fully zoomed in.

Check out even more close-up photos at picasaweb.google.com/mocove/makro

Thank you for reading.

- MOC