Since I bought my Yeasu VX-7R, I’ve had some fun listening in to the world around me – especially FRS channels in the hood.  And while I had thought about putting together a van Eck setup (I still use CRTs for the gamut), I expected to wait until I had at least a mobile, if not base, radio to play with.

For some reason, this page was open in one of my insanely large Firefox tab sessions.  More than the software – which is a neat way to demonstrate a type of vulnerability end users never consider – the links from that page to various papers and sites make this worth at least a few minutes of your time.

…because the page is fairly ugly, poorly categorized (tabs… controls… stupidity? These are not like things) and dated navigation tools.  Still, not nearly as bad as the examples contained in the Interface Hall of Shame – Controls.   Perhaps the irony is intentional?

So, a couple of weeks ago, I reflashed my Nokia n800 because something had gone terribly wrong: it seemed that the power saving features no longer worked. I would have the machine plugged in to the outlet, screen locked and the machine set to offline mode – neither of which, to Nokia’s credit, should grant significant power savings – and then, after unplugging it and leaving it in such a state would hear the dreaded low power notice play but a few hours later. Since I have made significant changes to my n800, I assumed that this was the result of some obscure switch I flipped in a conf file in an all-too-small vim session. Accepting the fact that tracking down the cause of the problem would take longer than the total system wipe – and that I had been intending to rebuild my system at some point anyway – I took the coward’s approach and reflashed. And all was good.Until a few days ago.

The power drain returned.

This time, I had a newly rebuilt system with nigh complete Hebrew support and all the applications i wanted. Reflashing, though an option, was no longer acceptable. This time the behavior was limited to an effect of the software installed over a few prior days and thus, more easily debugged. To make a long enough story somewhat shorter, the cause of my problems turned out to be the Autoscan package.

Let me be clear – these are my problems – the package is clearly marked as arm, not armel, marked as for the 770, not the n800. The developers did no wrong.

Still, the package manager installed just fine, and it provided functionality I wanted. However, it was also creating a server which constantly ran network traffic, irrespective of the status of the client software or network connection. From this, I have learned two lessons which I hope will be of use to someone else facing four hour battery lifespans on the n800:

1. The differences in 770 and n800 software can be significant. Just because a package installs and runs does not mean happiness will ensue. The power management differences are more important than I considered.
2. The value of a good, ps-like, Hildonized task list/manager cannot be underestimated. Load Applet is my choice these days. My choice prior to reflashing displayed Hildon apps only; had I known about the Autoscan daemon I could have saved myself hours of reinstalls and reconfiguring.

From the POSIX Programmer’s Guide.

How did I miss this on the internet until now?

Well, there is no winning move. Play or don’t play, optimal checkers is a draw.

Yup, checkers is solved, and no one wins.

I’ve been religiously googleling “N800 skype” for two weeks now. I shouldn’t have bothered – I fired up tableteer on my N800 looking for the free Earthlink setup (not available in NYC, sadly) and it suggested an update to 2007.26-8 – with Skype, Flash 9 support, and (mainstream) SDHC support. Go and get it!