I have a weakness for various gadgets. I'm usually the person that has the imported phone before they're available locally.
I was watching Tekzilla today on Miro (Oooh Veronica Belmont, if she won the elections she'd be Baberiham Lincoln - shwing) and they mentioned the Invisible Shield from Zagg for the ipod. As a brutally active user of the Nokia n800 I need a new screen protector because it's getting hard to see through my old one because of all the scratches. I went to the Zagg site and they do indeed have a screen protector for the n800 and it's priced at $12.95 so I have one on the way. You can check out the Invisible Shield Video to see how tough it is. According to the video you can attach your ipod (with Invisible Shield) to the leading edge of a helicopter blade and it won't get damaged. Perhaps that's not what they said but it's supposed to be tough. As soon as I get mine I'm going to beat up on it and we'll see how tough it is. Also I use a silicon case for the n800 which adds bulk but makes it easier to hold on to. If I could find a way to make it less slippery I'd get rid of that too.
Zagg has way more invisible shields that I would have ever thought. Here's the URL for the Nokia n800 version.
Add a commentIt will take you about 5 minutes to run out of space on the internal 256 MB of flash provided on the Nokia n800 so moving your Operating System to a flash card is a good idea. It's our goal is to install the latest Diablo firmware, install the bootmenu and then move the OS to flash.
Install Diablo firmware
Execute as root and replace
For the N800 and N810:
./flasher-3.0 -F RX-34_DIABLO_5.2008.43-7_PR_COMBINED_MR0_ARM.bin -f -R
You should now see Suitable USB device not found, waiting
, switch on your tablet while holding the Home-button (N800) or swap button (N810), and watch the messages on your console as the FIASCO image is flashed, after which it will reboot automatically—you're done!
Now we need to install a couple of files to get us our boot menu and then to move the OS to flash.
Move Diablo to flash and install boot menu
Before we get too carried away adding buggy software to Diablo (you know you will) we'll move it to flash and we can add the buggy software. This way when it stops working and we need to fix it but don't have time we can just reboot in the stock Diablo firmware.
This tutorial will delete all information on your SD memory card! Install only one SD card into the system, if there are two it won't work.
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If you want to reflash your brand new Nokia n800/n810, follow the steps below:
./flasher-3.0 -F RX-34_DIABLO_4.2008.23-14_PR_COMBINED_MR0_ARM.bin -f -R
You might find that if you've stored the firmware and the flasher on a remote network filesystem you might get a permission denied message. If this happens just move both to a local filesystem until you're done flashing. Once you've written the firmware you'll want to configure networking and check for updates.
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Here's an interesting idea. I don't know how much power is sent through headjack plugs but this device from Inflight Power Recharger Cables will allow you to recharge USB devices by plugging into the audio jack. It has one cable that plugs into the audio jack and on the other side it's a standard USB outlet so with the appropriate adapter you can charge about anything. I imagine it doesn't charge very fast but if you're on an airplane asleep you might as well be charging your phone, ipod, Nokia web tablet or whatever. Price is $35 for the basic one with no adapters and then add about another $10 for each adapter. Or you could just go online and buy the adapters for abotu $5 ea. It also has 2 AAA batteries in it so I'm guessing it can double as additional battery power for your gadget if it's not plugged in.
I contacted them about the methods of charging the batteries and here's what they said.
"You can only power via audio input or battery input, the unit can use
any form of AAA battery. The max output is 250mA at 5v."
The only real problem I see is you can't charge your device while watching a movie on the plane, and any other time you'd have to look around for a radio or laptop in order to charge it up. It seems like the standard Wall outlet to USB backup may be more versatile everywhere except the plane. I guess if you normally charge things with you laptops USB port you could charge this and a USB device at the same time. Makes me wonder if someone makes a USB to audio jack adpater so I could charge this from a USB wall converter. Maybe I'm getting a bit carried away but I bet one could hack a USB to audio jack adapter pretty easy.
I might buy one anyway and review it just beause I'm curious.
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Apps I can't live without
Apps that I have installed and that I use on occasion
Internet Tablet School has put up a new tutorial on how to connect USB devices to the Nokia web tablets. The tablets put out very little power so it seems flash drives will work as long as they don't have a larget LED on them. Makes me wonder if I took mine apart and unsoldered the LED it would work. USB hard drives will work but they need to be powered by an external source. USB keyboards will work but USB mice won't because the tablet doesn't have a mouse driver. Seems that a module could be compiled and installed like how we handle ext3 filesystems.
I think the application for having external storage is great because when I'm on vacation I could backup my photos to an external drive and the uses for a USB keyboard are great. I currently have an iGO bluetooth keyboard (if you look around you can get it for about $40) but I've noticed that if I'm running off battery power the bluetooth drains the n800 very fast. A USB keyboard I presume would lengthen battery life. Although it wouldn't be as compact with the cords etc.. The thing that really comes to my mind is if I have an external storage system, a keyboard and a mouse what I really need now is the ability to edit photos. I'm not talking running the gimp here I just want to do some simple contrast adjustments, sharpening, rotate image, scale, crop etc.. Basically imagemagick stuff but grapically. If I could do this and I could get a local blogging client for Joomla I'd not even bring a laptop on vacation with me. Of course if I have the n800, external drive, keyboard, mouse, external battery and bluetooth headset for Skype I've probably packed about as much as just carrying a 2lb laptop!
Anyway the tutorial at Internet Tablet School has a video and text howto both so check it out.
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