The Ruhestein hill, used for skiing during the winter months
In the late morning hours the temperature in Karlsruhe was about 18°C. Usually the Ruhestein is about 6°C less, but surprisingly its webcam displayed 18° as well, so I immediately grabbed the bike and went to the station, heading towards Baiersbronn, Black Forest (about 500m).
Due to the rainy August, it’s fungi time. Here is yesterday’s catch. All pictures have been taken using the Nokia N900 mobile computer. The quality is not comparable to pictures taken with a dedicated camera, but frankly I’m quite impressed of what one can achieve with the N900. I hope you enjoy.
Caterpillars
Heavy Weather brewing near Wissembourg
Since it was obvious that I need a more reliable bike, I’m looking for the right device. A friend once sent me a PDF of a very attractive gadget. I also considered other options, but the more I was looking for alternatives, the more I wanted exactly this one.
Bergamont Satelite
Back in 2006, I bought a Bergamont Satelite 8 bike (about 600€), mainly to get to work. Shortly after that, I detected that biking is fun and bought a Garmin eTrex Venture Cx (about 300€), together with routable City Navigator Europe map data (about 200€). It just took a couple of days until I understood that the map material was made for car routing, not for outdoor activities. A lot of minor roads for biking were missing, and setting the device to do bike routing just did car routing, except that it omitted highway types like motorways. But heck, I wanted to know the shortest possible biking trail from my home to France.
Unintentionally trashing the Vista installation on a Dell computer
One decade back, I was installing operating systems quite often. Win 98 was broken every now and then, and Linux was developing very quickly.
Meanwhile I’m very reluctant in updating operating systems. It just takes too much time to set up the system, to reinstall all required applications and to do all the configuration work. Or the other way around: It’s just a waste of time.
However, there are circumstances where your machines need some healing hands.
#1: N900 Upgrade
This week, a much anticipated update for the Nokia N900 was finally released. I was eagerly waiting for it, as I hoped that it would erase »The Big Bug«. The update was advertised as an »over-the-air«-update, installable via a wireless network connection. Unfortunately, the device didn’t offer the update on my machine. After waiting for a couple of days, I got suspicious and searched the web for the reasons.
Obviously the device performs some checks first, and in case certain circumstances occur, it denies to offer the update. The reason might be that I enabled an additional repository and installed (only) a couple of extra software packages. Further, the N900’s operating system is not installed to the 32GB flash memory. Instead, it lives in some wee small extra partition of about 200MB. I’ve never understood why it is designed this way and why the space is that limited. Unfortunately, the Debian-like operating system stores each package in a folder in this small partition, further reducing its size.
So I ssh’ed into the phone and tried to install the update using apt-get. It told me that it wants to download about 100MB of packages and that there was not enough space left. I created a folder on the 32GB flash drive and symlinked to it. Now the update packages were downloaded and the update went fine – halfways. I saw some warnings during the update, and finally it stopped.
So I did it the hard – by reflashing the device. I downloaded the current firmware image and a GUI tool for the Mac. Unfortunately this tool failed to complete the flashing process so the device was bricked. I tried again using my Linux box and everything went fine now. As all personal data lives on the 32GB storage which was not touched by the flashing process, I just needed to reinstall some additional software packages (mainly those for mapping) and was back in business.
#2: Reinstalling Vista from a recovery CD
The backlight of the display on my Dell notebook was broken (it appeared as a defective contact, as the backlight switched off every now and then). I’ve a service contract and hoped they would replace it as soon as possbile (»next business day«). Surprisingly, there was some (bi-daily) mail exchange where they told me what to do – one bit of information per message.
First they asked me to install some BIOS and driver updates, though I wrote in my initial message that I’m running Linux on the machine and that everything looks like a hardware defect. I wanted to do them the favour and booted Vista from the (seldom used) NTFS partition. After downloading and installing the driver updates, Vista prefered to show a blue screen at each attempt to boot it. Doh.
Dell further asked me to run a diagnostics tool before booting the operating system. This led me nowhere, as the backlight of the display always switched off while the tool was running.
Next they offered to catch the device and to repair it off-site. The device would be unavailable for up to two weeks. Hey guys, there was a reason why I spent the extra bucks for the on-site service.
Finally, after almost two weeks, a technician dropped by and exchanged the display. Heck, I didn’t remember how bright the display once was :) .
I do not really rely on the Vista installation, but I boot it every now and then to compile and test some code of my own. Due to some file system errors, problems with KDE after upgrading Ubuntu, the broken Vista installation and the fact, that the 15 GB partition was too small for Vista (yes, Vista needs at least 10GB for its installation, 2GB for a swap and 2GB for a hibernation file), I decided to set up the complete machine anew.
I backed up my home directory and used the Kubuntu installation disk to repartition the hard drive.
The Vista installation went halfway straightforward thanks to the Dell recovery CD. But later on I got stuck as there was no driver installed for the wireless network adapter. I tried to install it from an additional CD that came with the device, but to no avail. I finally downloaded some drivers from the Dell page and got it working, but this still was a challenge as it was not obvious which file to download and install. This was surprising as I passed the service tag of the device to the online support system.
Finally Vista insisted to download and install plenty of huge updates. I read »Usability Engineering kompakt« meanwhile :) .
#3: Installing Kubuntu 10.04 LTS
This one was simple. Insert the CD, enter some data, select the right partitions for installation and let the installer alone for a couple of minutes. After booting the system, plug in the USB hard drive containing the backup of your home directory and copy the files back to the hard drive. Log in and feel comfortable.
Conclusion
It was good luck that it was a rainy sunday. I really hate those bread- and senseless installation orgies. I hope the machine will now run until it gets replaced.
La Maison du Sel en Wissembourg
Finally the rainy days are over. The warm and sunny weather conditions allowed for the first mapping trip to Wissembourg by bike – the biking season finally has started.
I mapped a lot of details along the way. Some short breaks every now and then and finally a nice supper at the destination took time. Luckily »Deutsche Bahn« (a german railway company) provided public transport back home.
The location services of the N900 are pretty good, but there are also some weak points:
Here’s how the tracklog recorded in the train looks like. Note that it should follow the rails precisely:
The device is an almost perfect gadget anyway. All I want to say is: If you reliably want to collect the tracklogs of your trips, just get an additional logger. The N900 is an exccellent general purpose device. It is not a specialized GPS receiver and logger.
Jester (openclipart.org, by Johnny Automatic, public domain)
It’s not the first time it happened, but I was surprised anyway. I was hiking along the french-german border. I only ran Mæp and Waypointcatcher. I didn’t use osm2go to save some battery power. Even without Waypointcatcher not running, Mæp caused the device to crash four times. This usually happens when the device’s interface is locked, so you just notice that the device does not respond as soon as you try to unlock it. The only thing that helps is to remove the battery and boot anew. As data roaming is about 7¢ per 10KB of data (sic), I could not use AGPS. Thus the device needs up to twenty minutes to get a GPS fix after a reboot.
Unfortunately Mæp drops the recorded track after such a forced reboot. But hey, no prob, I have the WBT-201 running as a backup.
Fern near Blumenstein Castle
The N810 is a great device and the perfect mapper’s companion, but the N900 is even better and a joy to use. Here are some applications I use on a regular basis:
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Anguis fragilis
This weekend was an excellent one, providing very good weather conditions to do some mapping by bike. The Bienwald, a huge area of wood where I still seem to be the (almost) only mapper who collects data, still serves me well to combine three hobbies of mine – nature, riding my bike and mapping for openstreetmap.org.
I really love the smell of the pines during warm days in spring. You can see all kinds of animals – including crane flies, though. The Bienwaldmühle, including a traditional german restaurant, serves great food. The rest in their biergarten took too long, so the way back home included twilight – which was a good thing, because you can see even more animals (like foxes, roe deers etc.) which usually are not seen during daylight.
I collected a lot of missing ways, names of ways and names of the wooden parcels. Though it is the third year I’m mapping there, still a lot of details are missing.
I used the WBT-201 as an autonomous logger to track the whole trip. The N900 did a good job, but I left it alone until I crossed the rhine to save some battery power. This is necessary as one of my two batteries only lasts for about three hours – though I switched the device to offline mode. The two batteries have been sufficient for the whole trip, but I now know I will need a third one for whole-day-trips.
Lizard on the Loewenstein
When I took the above picture, I missed the zoom lens of a dedicated camera. It was not possible to get closer to the lizard, as it otherwise would have escaped. Of course noone would ever request a cell phone to provide an objective slot :) .
Photo with Geotags
I’m still impressed by the features, the versatility and the usability of the N900. I’m also still impressed by the quality of the built-in camera. It does not beat my Canon A650, but it gets close enough to leave the Canon at home when riding the bike. Plus the 5MP images are more handy than the quite huge 12MP images of the Canon.
During my last trip, I avoided to use an audio player and osm2go on the N900. The only application running was Mapper (formerly known as Maemo Mapper). Again the big bug occured, requiring two reboots.
Nevertheless the battery only lasted for two and a half hours. This really is very poor. Maybe Mapper needs more CPU than on the N810. I’m curious whether I’ll get better results during the next trips or if the uptime will remain the same. In either case, I’m desperately wating for the second battery I purchased to arrive.
I logged the track both using the N900 and the WBT-201 (aka G-Rays 2 ). Surprisingly, the track of the N900’s built-in GPS receiver was more accurate as the one of the WBT.
The Heilbach meanders the Bienwald
I grabbed the occasion of today’s excellent weather conditions for my first mapping tour with the N900. I used it for my continued effort to map the Heilbach for openstreetmap:
I left all the other gadgets I used until now (mp3 player, Canon camera, external bluetooth GPSr, N810) at home and only grabbed the N900 to check if it really can replace the previously used armada. To anticipate the result: yes it can. I’m quite impressed and really content with the device. It’s a great digital companion. You should read on, though, to learn more about some pitfalls and shortcomings to avoid frustration.
n900 microB Browser
I’m not using the N900 as a telephone or (business) PDA. I bought it as a personal gadget. It was rather expensive, but frankly, it’s well worth the bucks.
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Nokia N900, Smartphone with Maemo 5 operating system
I did it. SCNR.
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Gebabbel Logo
The current issue 12/2009 of the german »Linux Magazin« features several GPS related articles. On page 40 there’s one about Openstreetmap on mobile devices, especially the N810.
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Expense Recorder
Admittedly, it’s just a modification of the Waypoint Catcher. For me it’s useful anyway :) .
I just stumbled across this video about the perfect Qt4 support on the N900 via mapomatic. It’s a short video, but pay attention to the magnifier on top of Openstreetmaps at the end of the video. Cool stuff. Want to hack my own map app right now!
