InfoTart

One of the coolest things is that with a Nokia 770, you’re never far from the Internet. Obviously, it has WiFi access, so if there’s a free & open WiFi hotspot around, then you’re online in a jiffy. What’s also really cool is that if your phone supports Bluetooth and you have a good data plan, then going online that way is also wicked easy. Thank goodness for the unlimited data plan on my work phone!

Well, once quite recently, I put an experimental version of the operating system on the device. And when I went to set up the device to connect to the Internet via my phone — the list of known operators in the US was missing Cingular. Oops! It was a bug in the software build and it was quickly fixed.

This issue stymied me for a few days or so until I ran into a co-worker who happened to know the magic settings for Cinguar. I didn’t realize how much I’d come to rely on randomly going onlinne — whether to check email or kill some time reading Google News — until I couldn’t do it any more via the phone connection. So just in case someone else ever faces the same issue, here are the magic settings. (And it’s not easy to figure out where to put them in, either!)

1. Click on the Programs icon > Tools category > Control Panel.
2. Click on the Connectivity icon in the Control Panel.
3. In the Connectivity dialog, click on the Connections button.
4. If “Cingular Internet” is listed there, then you can click the Edit button. If it’s not listed, click New instead.
5. The Connection Setup Wizard introduction screen will display. Click Next.
6. Step 1, Name and Type. Enter these values, then click Next.
• Connection name:  Cingular Internet
• Connection type:  Packet data
7. Step 2, Packet Data. Click next after entering these values:
• Access point name: wap.cingular
• Dial-up number: *99#
• User name: wap.cingulargprs.com
• Password: cingular1
• Prompt password at every login:  (Leave unchecked)
8. Advanced Settings: Don’t modify any of the advanced settings.

That ought to do it! Now you’ll see Cingular Internet in the list of connection options. The device will attempt to connect to the Internet via the current phone using the Cingular Internet settings above.

I’m still not entirely sure how it works — I’m just thankful that it does! And I didn’t even have to sacrifice a goat to get the magical settings values…

This imported English TV show has some sort of strange hold on my roommate. He loves this show and watches it almost every day. It’s on the Biography channel all the time. Thanks to the magic of the Comcast DVR, there’s always a new (to him) episode on.

Woe is me! When will I get the TV back??? When am I going to be able to watch Lisa Williams??? Though I guess the funny thing is that they’re murdered on my roommate’s TV show, and then we communicate with them from beyond the grave on Lisa’s…

Midsomer Murders on IMDB:  www.imdb.com/title/tt0118401/

One of the most compelling features of the Nokia 770 I find is the ability to get Gmail on the go. It’s way more addicting than I’d have expected!

Sure, if you have a mobile phone that can run Java applications, you could put Gmail on it. (Along with Google Maps — both compelling downloads for your mobile phone, but that’s another post. And without a good data plan, or a qwerty keypad, it would be both expensive and unpleasant.) With the Nokia 770, you can use the built in email application to run Gmail — or any other POP/IMAP email service. In fact, I put both Gmail and my old Univ. of Michigan email accounts on it. Cool!

Unfortunately, the Google web site doesn’t give explicit instructions for adding Gmail to your shiny new Nokia 770. They tell you how to do it for a bunch of other clients, but not the 770. Because it won’t work unless it’s set up exactly right, I’m here to save the day with step by step instructions!

1. Fire up your Nokia 770’s email application. Click on the People icon > View Inbox. Alternately, click on the Programs icon > Contact group > E-mail.

2. Click on the Main Menu part of the titlebar, then Tools > New account… The Account Setup wizard dialog appears.

3. Intro: Read the Intro screen (blah blah blah), then click Next.

4. Step 1: On the Account Setup (1/4) screen, give the account a name, such as “Gmail”. For the Account type, select “Pop3″. Click Next.

5. Step 2: On the next screen (2/4), put in the following values. Imagine your name is Clark Gable. Enter the following information, then click Next.

• Name: Clark Gable
• User Name: clark.gable@gmail.com (Yes, put your full email address here.)
• Password: *****
• E-mail Address: clark.gable@gmail.com

6. Step 3: Enter information about the incoming and outgoing servers (step 3/4), then click Next.

• Incoming Server (POP3): pop.gmail.com
• Outgoing Server (SMTP): smtp.gmail.com
• Use connection-specific SMTP servers: (leave this unchecked)

7. The next screen says that account setup is complete — but they lie. Gmail requires a few advanced settings to be checked. So click on the Advanced button.

8. On the Retrieval tab, set the following values:

• Retrieve: Headers only (Change this if you want, but it’s a good idea to keep this if you sometimes connect over a mobile data connection)
• Leave e-mail on server: Checked (Do you like to use the Gmail web site? If yes, definitely leave this checked.)
• Email size limit (kb): 1000 (Or whatever you prefer.)
• Password authentication: Normal
• Security: SSL (POP3)
• Incoming email port: 995

9. On the Sending tab, set these values:

• SMTP Authentication: Login
• User Name: clark.gable@gmail.com
• Password: *****
• Security: SLL
• Outgoing Email Port: 465

10. Leave the Security tab with its default values, but change any of the Composing tab’s values per your preferences.

11. That’s it! Click OK. Then back on the original Step 4 dialog window, click on Finish and the dialog window will close.

12. It may start to pull down your email immediately. If not, speed things along by clicking on the Inbox’s Send/Receive icon. (It’s in the toolbar at the bottom of the screen on the far right; the one with the up and down arrows on it.)

Adding a Second Account :: University of Michigan Email

The above will get your Gmail account all set up. If you’d like to add a second account, be sure to check their settings closely. For example, to set up my University of Michigan account, all of the settings were the same as Gmail’s except the following:

• Step 2: On this screen, I put only my unique name in the User Name field — not the full email address. So if my full email address were cgable@umich.edu, then in the User Name field, I’d put only: cgable.
• Step 3: Be sure to check how your service names their incoming and outgoing servers. U-M’s incoming server is: mail.umich.edu. It’s outgoing server is: smtp.mail.umich.edu.
• Advanced :: Sending Tab: Again, the only difference here is to use your uniquename in the User Name field: cgable.

Set the Default Email Account

If you add a second email account, be sure you note which one is the default one. The default one is the one which all outgoing emails you write on the 770 will be sent from. To see which account is your default account, click on the Main Menu part of the titlebar, then Tools > Account settings…

In the Account Settings dialog, it’ll say, “” next to the account name. (Naturally!) If you want a different one, just highlight it with the stylus and press the “Set as default” button. It’s that easy!

Feature Request

Please, please, PLEASE Nokia 770 software developers, add a smart feature to the account setup wizard so that it recognizes a Gmail account and it just does the magic for you! I would like to simply add my Gmail email address and password, and VOILA! The rest is done. After all, these are pretty well known and stable settings and the service is immensely popular.

Actually, if it could recognize the world’s most popular 20 or 30 email services and save users the pain of mis-configuring accounts and trouble shooting alone in the dark, that’d be even better! The Intellisync email service does this for many popular services already, so talk to those folks in Enterprise Solutions (MSU) if you need any help on that. I beg you!

A friend of mine lives in Provincetown and has been dating this guy named Peter Donnelly. I’ve met Peter a few times and he’s a wicked cool guy. (Plus handsome! What a good catch…)

Peter had invited me to a concert in Boston earlier this summer, but unfortunately, that was the week I was going to Provincetown. In fact, most unfortunately I’ve missed all of his Boston-area concerts for one reason or another.

I found out today that Peter has a web site to promote his two CDs of original music so I checked it out. He offers a few downloads of his songs and a concert schedule. Plus, he writes on his web site that another new CD is dropping in February 2007. Cool…

Peter has a great voice! He’s actually a good songwriter, too. I’m not sure how to categorize his music. Maybe folk? Anyways, I didn’t realize that he was so good. Now I know what to ask my P-town friend for Christmas…

Peter Donnelly’s web site: www.peterdonnelly.com

As a UI guy, the one of the first things I wanted to install on my 770 the day I bought it was a screenshot utility. Not only do I like to collect screenshots (seriously!), but such a utility is extremely useful for bug reporting and general UI design. In my day job designing cross-platform enterprise communications software at Nokia, I frequently use a cool free screenshot utility for S60 devices by a guy named Anthony Pranata. (Thanks, Anthony!)

(By the way, I have a gazillion screenshots primarily of web pages from the late 90’s. One of these days, I swear I’ll put them online, perhaps some of them with comments…)

So imagine my delight when I saw a screenshot utility listed in the Nokia 770 software catalog today. Could my prayers finally be answered?

The product is gloriously called “CPU/Mem/Screenshot Apple” — a name that reeks of the Soviet-era consumer product naming style. What it lacks in naming panache it makes up for in sheer utility, though. It does 3 things and 3 things only. Fortunately, they seem to be done pretty well.

Screenshots

Either immediately or with a short delay. The default delay is 7 seconds, but you can change that in settings. New screenshot images are automatically saved in the device’s Images folder. You can change the default name, “screenshot”. A number 1 - 99 is appended to the file name to avoid overwriting existing screenshots. Not bad — but could be better (see below).

List Active Processes

It displays a list of active processes and how much memory they’re taking up. The “List processes” feature is similar to the feature on the Microsoft Windows Task Manager’s Processes tab. You can “watch” or “kill” a process, but you can’t sort the list by name or memory usage.

Live CPU & Memory Usage Graphs

The product sits in the top status bar as a plugin, active all the time. The icon has two sides: The left side shows a vertical bar graph with 4 sections for real-time CPU usage. The right side shows another 4-segment graph for memory usage. Launch an application and watch the CPU bar light up all 4 segments. Launch a handful of applications and browser windows and watch the memory graph fill up. Cool! Now I can keep half an eye out for avoiding overtaxing available memory by multi-tasking with too many open apps.

What’s it missing?

Given my interest in the screenshot feature in particular, I’d love if I could select the image format. I prefer PNG because of its versatility. (Stick a PNG in a Word doc or Visio diagram and it looks great on the screen and also prints very well.) Fortunately, PNG is the default format. But some folks like to collect screenshots in other formats, such as JPG or GIF, so it would be nice to be able to choose.

I’d love it if the product could remember the last number across device bootups. For example, if I take a screenshot right now, the first file’s name will be “screenshot00.png”. If I forget to move that file to my computer, then I restart the Nokia 770 and take a new screenshot, the product resets its numbering scheme at 0. So the new screenshot overwrites the old one and is saved as “screenshot00.png”, as well.

Feature Request: Let’s adopt the file naming system that S60 uses for cameraphone pictures. Basically, it’s like: screenshot. And because the app remembers where it left off even if the phone is restarted, it doesn’t overwrite any existing pictures.

Given that this product’s source code is available on Maemo Garage (the open source project site, similar to SourceForge), folks have taken this product and forked it. One variant has Swapon/Off, while the second variant adds another new feature related to having it execute and store arbitrary commands. To be honest, I’m not really clear on what either of these variants add to the party. Undoubtedly, software developers would find these useful, though.
The the product really needs is a spiffy name! I went to WordLab’s Naming Tools page and played with some of their fun naming tools. After clicking on the name generator buttons a few gazillion times, here are my favorites:

• JangoNut (Name builder tool)
• BrainSister (Name builder tool)
• Burn5 (Name builder tool)
• ZengaShot (Name builder tool)
• Blazin’ Axe (Name your band tool)
• Finodexy (Drug-o-matic tool)
• Lenfloxa (Drug-o-matic tool)
• Fega (Morpheme Machine tool)
• Datrino (Morpheme Machine tool)
• Antipix (Morpheme Machine tool)

What do you think? Do any of those names work for a product like this?

Use it or snooze it?

Use it. Even regular folks will appreciate all of its major features. Geeks and hackers might try one of the two variants with the extra stuff. But regular folks should stick to the basic product.

Summary

Product Name: CPU/Mem/Screenshot Applet

Publisher: Individual contributor (a Nokia staffperson, I think…)

Price: Free

Download it at: Maemo Software Catalog (Maemo 2.0)

Project Homepage: https://garage.maemo.org/projects/load-applet/

When I bought my Nokia 770 back in March 2006, I used to visit the software catalog on Maemo.org all the time, hoping to discover something cool. Well, back in those days, there wasn’t a lot available yet and by July or so, I stopped traveling as much (the primary time I’d been using the 770), got distracted by my day job, and kinda forgot about exploring new software.
Boy, have times changed…

I went back to the online software catalog today and discovered that folks have been busy during these past few months. Thank you, Maemo contributors!

I swear that the catalog has doubled or tripled in length since last time I looked! There are a ton more games, PIM apps (like calendar and contacts management), cool new multimedia apps, more networking apps, and a PC-based theme builder. Plus lots and lots more… Cool!

So what should one do with this software explosion? Why, try it all out, of course.

I’ve resolved to find the most interesting and compelling software out there for the Nokia 770. Of course, what’s interesting and compelling to you might be different from what’s interesting and compelling to me. So let’s explore what’s out there together. I’ll let you know what I like and you can let me know what you think about these products, too. Sound like a plan?

Nokia 770 Software catalog: www.maemo.org/maemowiki/ApplicationCatalog2006

Tonight, I watched two episodes of Lisa Williams back to back thanks to my Comcast DVR. Oh my god, I love this new show!

Have you ever seen this show before? These were the first two episodes I’d ever seen. And I’m totally hooked now — even though the show is on Lifetime.

Lisa is a medium/clairvoyant. She moved to Los Angeles with her husband and son earlier this year and they began taping this reality show.

She walks around, randomly approaching people on sidewalks, in cafes, cheese shops, bookstores, and so on and gives them a random reading. It surprises the hell out of these folks, but it seems so completely genuine and real. It’s truly amazing.

Plus, people will come to her office for personal readings. Those are also really amazing. And then the producers will arrange for her to visit haunted houses for random real-time readings. Those are also really interesting.

Lisa is so pretty, so down to earth, and so incredibly warm and friendly. I love that she doesn’t act aloof from people. She comes across as accessible and genuine. It’s great to see how she relates to people during the readings. She’s non-threatening and tries to help people feel comfortable as they deal with the emotional trauma of reconnecting with loved ones who’ve passed.

I also love this show because it totally jibes with my feelings about spirituality…

Anyways, I think this show just started this past October, so I can’t wait to watch the rest of the shows this season. Love it!

Lisa Williams site on Lifetime: www.lifetimetv.com/shows/lisawilliams/