All work no blog makes Late a…. rich boy I guess.

Been playing with my N95 lately. Why do people always compare the N95 and the iPhone? They are two totally different devices – one of them is a useless toy and the other one is what computers have become – a superb PDA, phone, camera and GPS in one shell. Revolutionary touchscreen interface? Nice, but I find real features much more useful. With the N95 I can geotag my pictures automagically and send them to flickr instantly. How cool is that?

So far I haven’t had much time to experiment with third party apps, apart from twibble, which makes twittering kind of faster and allows you to geotag tweets automagically. ShoZu does the same thing for images. For screenshots, Antony Pranata’s screenshot seems to do it’s job. GoogleMaps and Gmail are simply a must.

The only thing that sucks about the N95 is the battery – with GPS and 3G it’ll run out in couple of hours But that’s still better than no 3G and no GPS.

Blogging is hard. Anyway, Sini – I hope you’re happy now

Buying a new APG graphics card would have been kind of stupid,I’d just have wasted a lot of money on a card that I could not use with any decent motherboard later. So what the hell, lets buy a new motherboard. Oh wait, my old AMD processor will need a socket 754 motherboard. No way, I’m not going to buy a new ancient system. Wait another sec, my memory won’t be compatible either… It’s not easy to upgrade a system that is friggin three years old! The situation would be slightly better had I three years ago invested in a socket 939, but only slightly I guess.

Anyway, I decided to go for a budget motherboard with an integrated GPU. I chose the Asus M2N-MX, only 58€ @ verkosta.fi, which fared well in hintaseuranta, and they had it in stock. Newegg reviews for this board are spot on – it’s good value for your money, it comes with everything you need, but it’s got some minor problems, such as:

• Very confusing labeling for DIMM slots, but OK if you read the manual carefully.
• No locking clip for the heat sink’s retention bracket lock to clip into – but IMHO who needs that anyway? The heat sink will stay on just fine without it.
• “No mounting points near where the power cable and PATA cable plugs into the motherboard. Plugging and un-plugging those into the board causes it to flex more than I am comfortable with.” – nc3d – I could not agree more, plugging in the power and PATA cables is pretty scary with this one.

I found a couple of additional problems:

There’s no PC-speaker on the mobo! How will I be able to play Space Invaders?!?

There was a really ugly white scratch on my southbridge heat sink. Overall the product does not look very polished…

Some more pics:

If you need more connectors than this, buy another motherboard. With the M2N-MX you get no DVI, IEEE 1394, S/PDIF… just the basics. <sarcasm>Serial port is there, which is all I need</sarcasm>.

The accessories are pretty basic too, nothing fancy, just the absolute necessities. There was a case sticker, which was nice

Here’s my AMD 64 X2 3800+ processor, not the fastest thing on the planet, but a great budget product. Got it for 66€ from Mikromaja, apparently the cheapest in Finland. Also bought some cheap memory from verkkokauppa.com. Here’s my updated machine:

Pretty leds all-over the case… Notice how the micro-ATX board is just ridiculously small for my huge case.

Everything works just fine for me with the Asus M2N-MX. Installing Ubuntu 7.04 was a breeze, although there were some problems with X settings after installing the proprietary Nvidia drivers, but not a big deal. More on that later, if I bother…

If you’re in Helsinki, you want to check out CityWall at the corner of Lasipalatsi (map). I took some pics in Helsinki, then went home to upload them to Flickr. When I came back a couple hours later I walked past the CityWall and saw my pictures there. That was pretty awesome! The CityWall automatically fetches pictures from Flickr that are tagged “Helsinki”. Kind of neat, you can watch in close to real time what’s happening in the city. For mobile users it works even better. The user interface is like something from Minority Report, it’s something you’ve never seen before but you know straight away how to use it. You can rotate and stretch pictures, you can zoom into the timeline and throw the pictures around… I saw a couple of little kids try it out – even the kids knew immediately how to use it! This is really the user interface of the future, the most intuitive thing I have ever seen. Cooler than the iPhone. Really awesome. Jeff Han has demonstrated this kind of technology earlier, but this wall is the first public multi-touch interface of this scale in the world. Just come to Helsinki if you want to play with it If you don’t believe me, check out this video. Oh and they interviewed me about my experience. I hope I managed to say something sensible.

The deal is that you have to share your WiFi connection with other registered users. That’s pretty cool, because if there are a lot of Foneros out there, then you have a good chance of using a Fon connection for free when you travel. You can use maps.fon.com to check out Foneros closest to your location. Tech.am has some “real statistics” of Foneros worldwide, claiming that Fon isn’t actually as widespread as they let you believe. Well I don’t care if there aren’t any Fon hotspots in Bangkok or Cathmandu, there are some in Helsinki and that’ll be enough for me.

The La Fonera is “free” as in “free beer for a limited time only”, but how “free” is it as in “freedom of speech”? (See “Gratis versus Libre” if you are still confused.) The La Fonera wireless router uses the open source OpenWrt firmware for embedded devices. It’s nice to know that my Fonera router is running open source software. If I want to, I can download the source code for OpenWrt, hack it, share my hacks with others, and install it in some other device. The Fonera router is therefore “sort of free” – but it’s not free for you to hack and do whatever you want with it. It’s like a piece of free software locked up in a cage. Anton Demartini writes:

“What I mean is that perhaps, leaving la fonera open, and freeing the possibility for anybody with skills to reflash it, to enhance it and, why not, to correct bugs along you, could be a great benefit also for FON business.”

I completely agree. It would be much smarter If I could just use my hardware of choice, install more features on the router and provide a better service for the Foneros that connect to my WiFi. It would be possible to create a free wireless network similar to Fon, which is open for all registered users, but gives the users more flexibility with their hardware and software.

The bottom line is, I got a free router from these guys and I get to use WiFi for free when I travel, so I should not complain. However, I do suffer from the “free all software” syndrome. I just hate to have a piece of free software on my device, which I cannot use as I like. Thankfully, there are some solutions. Jauzsi explains how to open up the device and attach a connecter to allow ssh on the device. As far as I know Stefan Datenbruch was the first to use shell code injection to free the device. The exploited weakness has been fixed by Fon, so that hack doesn’t work anymore, but it worked as inspiration for this hack, which works like a charm. Follow the hack and then just SSH to your La Fonera, enter password “admin” and behold:

Next it’s up to you what you do with your unlocked Fonera. If I come up with any hacks of my own, I’ll be sure to post them here.

Update: There’s now a third hack for firmware version 0.7.1 r1. If you’re feeling especially white and nerdy today, check out gelPlog’s instructions on how to recover a bricked Fonera.