There has bee a lots of interest around this new device and the Maemo 5 operating system. Lots of positive comments and then I have read some comments where people doubt that the transitions would be just some flash animations and not a real thing (which of course is not true). Well, this is a OpenGL hardware accelerated Maemo device, and all you see is real. Quim Gil just posted on Twitter a link to a new video showing how the Maemo UI works, if you had doubts, you can put the doubt aside and see by yourself. The user experience is slick and beautiful.

Our secret N900 "The Device" is no longer so secret as it just got announced. I can't though show yet my own videos about it (I will post them some time later, so stay tuned), but there is already plenty of announced material that might interest you. Others have already announced links to them I am sure. I really love our device and I am sure you want it too!

New site, lots of cool pictures and information:
http://maemo.nokia.com

There is a video in Youtube (not my video, but cool nonetheless):
N900 interaction documentary

I recommend watching the above video if you are eager to see (I am sure you are) how our completely renewed fancy UI works. It is very cool and it works!

I recently created a new song ( these can be found from my music blog from http://karoliinamusic.blogspot.com ) and here is a shortened version of it which I tried to make useful as use as a ring tone for mobile devices. It is a bit more equalized and bit more compressed also than the hifi-version of the song. By all means, you can use also the actual song as a ring tone, but this has been cut to start from the middle to be more useful - ring tones usually play only a short time and long intro part is not very useful on them then.

I have this on my N810 and also in my N95 and I think it works pretty well. You can in principle use it with any mobile device which understands mp3 format and allows you to assign these files as ring tones.

I am planning to do a measurement of the frequency response of the tiny speakers to equalize this better for them (now this has too much mid frequencies maybe for the tiny speakers, because this mix is still "almost hifi"). I haven't done that yet, I should dig my measurement microphone from storage to be able to do that (the Internet tablet / phone mix would be counter-equalized with that). However, this version already works on your device, so feel free to use it.

Download it from here:
Sky Party - ring tone version 1

The file bitrate is 128 kbit/s and the file size is 2188433 bytes which is around 2MB. You can install it by for example reading this with the N810, saving the file and then assigning it as a ring tone for the internet call. Alternatively you can download it with your computer, use the USB cable to connect the computer to the device and then copy the file to the device's file system.

If you are using Mac to download the file (instead of the mentioned Internet tablet for example), you may need to right click the file with CTRL + mouse button or otherwise the Quicktime starts to play it instead of downloading the file.

All feedback is welcome.

I am back, with a blog on another service. I attended the Akademy 2008 and Maemo Summit 2008 conferences. I have created a video of both of them. These are no presentation videos but rather attempt to record the spirit of the time and place to a collection of video clips which are presented in a sequence on these short movies. Both conferences were quite interesting and a success. It was great to meet new people, especially on the Akademy conference, I have been participating many years in the Guadec conferences, but this was my first Akademy.

Here is the Akademy video. Nokia gave devices for KDE developers and I have quite many faces who received one on the video. Have a look if you are interested:


Akademy 2008 KDE conference - Nokia gave out N810 devices for free from Karoliina Salminen on Vimeo.

Kate Alhola had linked to my Maemo summit video on her earlier post. Because of technical issue on her blog software, she embedded the Youtube link. The Youtube offers poor quality, especially the audio quality is severely degraded since Youtube only supports mono sound. Here is the same video in 720p HD quality and stereo in the Vimeo-service (by the way it is the best video service I have found to the date):


Maemo Summit 2008 from Karoliina Salminen on Vimeo.

If you go to the vimeo page, you can watch these videos in 720p HD when you click the full screen button.

In Ubuntu hardy:

Host kernel mmap_min addr value is incompatible with the QEMU version used in scratchbox.

Quick help:

$ sudo su
$ nano /etc/sysctl.conf
edit line which begins 'vm.mmap_min_addr' (search it with CTRL-W) to
'vm.mmap_min_addr = 4096'
CTRL-X for save & quit
$ sysctl -p

Quick help:

$ sudo su
$ nano /etc/sysctl.conf

Add line 'vm.vdso_enabled = 0' to the end of file.
Press ctrl-x to exit and save.

Then run 'sysctl -p' (while remaining as root)