Trypticon: Tag gadgets

K700 (Accidentally!) Debranded

Trejkaz — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 16:34:00 +1000

Today I was trying to remove the Vodafone branding from my phone using [these guys][1]’ software to do it with my DSS-25 cable/phone stand.

I eventually exhausted my credits without getting anywhere. It would do some stuff, charge me, and then fail to complete

K700 Saga

Trejkaz — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 17:04:00 +1000

As part of the yearly gadget purge, I upgraded my phone from the Sony Ericsson [T610][1] to the [K700i][2]. This particular model is getting a little aged now, but it’s a nice looking phone, has a lot more memory than the older T610, and most importantly, is cheap enough to buy up-front without hurting my cash flow. :-)

At the current point in time, buying this phone from Vodafone will only cost $30 more than a Nokia 3220, which lacks half the features the K700 has

Maybe I Should Sell My Zaurus

Trejkaz — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 12:52:00 +1000

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my beloved PDA, and whether I really need it.

I mean, the thing has given me a lot of fun. Unlike all other PDAs, Java development on the Zaurus is actually quite nice. The JRE looks native, runs relatively fast, and integrates pretty well (it’s a shame they decided to remove it from the default bundle in the newer versions of the PDA.)

The OS is pretty solid (until you go reflashing it with something more experimental), compatibility with Linux is perfect, and the thing can even be overclocked to a limited degree. :-)

But this fun has a price. I’ve started discovering that every time I get out the PDA, it’s for one of two reasons. Most of the time, I use it to waste time by tinkering with various things

Phone Fun

Trejkaz — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 16:15:00 +1000

Well, ignoring that our phone line is experiencing a temporary fault at the moment, we should have a bit of fun with the phone I picked up to be the new house phone. They call it the >>Freedom 3000 (the price listed on Telstra’s site is a little steep, we picked up the exact same model for $120 at Tandy.)

The cordless house phone really is starting to resemble a mobile. Already, the things were getting quite small. These days they have a whole bunch of features which really do belong on a mobile phone:

Polyphonic ringtones;
Colour screens;
Cheezy wallpapers which can’t be customised;
Cheezy games which can’t be customised;
Support for jamming your SIM card into the thing for copying the phone book to use with Caller ID.

That last one is bolded because it broke my brain to learn that it had become a feature of a house phone.

But I think there is still a long way to go. Why do I have to put in a SIM card in there in the first place? Don’t all mobile phones these days support Bluetooth for transferring contacts?

So I figure that a more enlightened manufacturer might use Bluetooth to put a few more useful features on the humble house phone

Zaurus Wikipedia

Trejkaz — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 17:55:00 +1100

It’s like it sounds.

I wanted a copy of [Wikipedia][1] to use on the run, when I had no easy access to a net connection (this is especially the case while I have no Wi-fi adapter and need to make do with Bluetooth, or USB for better bandwidth.)

Requirements:

An SD card (or CF, I suppose) with well over 500MB of free space. I would suggest 1GB for the sake of future safety.
A kernel on the Zaurus which supports squashfs. The latest Cacko certainly supports this, but you can probably find a module which works on whatever kernel you happen to have available.
A little bit of patience… as these scripts can take ages to complete.

The first thing we do is grab wiki2static from this site (or grab the script directly.)

Find a directory somewhere on your desktop computer where you still have a lot of space, and extract it:

cd /mnt/data/wikipedia
tar zxf wiki2static.tar.gz

The next think you need is an actual database dump. You can get one from the Wikipedia download site. These files are pretty big

Zaurus SD Autostart

Trejkaz — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 17:32:00 +1100

I wanted to set up stuff to run automatically when the SD card is inserted. One of the reasons for this was a Zaurus Wikipedia install, as I wanted it to mount the wikipedia when the card was inserted and unmount it as it was ejected.

The modifications in question need to be done to /etc/sdcontrol. So fire up vi, and make the following changes:

The following goes right after the swapfile handling in the ‘insert’ section:

if [ -d ${MOUNT_POINT}/.autostart/ ]; then
    for f in ${MOUNT_POINT}/.autostart/* ; do
        if [ -x $f ]; then
            $f start
        fi
    done
fi

And the following does right before the swapfile handling in the ‘eject’ section:

if [ -d ${MOUNT_POINT}/.autostart/ ]; then
    for f in ${MOUNT_POINT}/.autostart/* ; do
        if [ -x $f ]; then
            $f stop
        fi
    done
fi

As you can probably gather from the code, this looks for a directory called “.autostart” in the root of the SD card. When the “.autostart” directory has been found, it looks for executable files in that directory. I would have used run-parts here, only it doesn’t seem to be provided with the default Busybox.

On a FAT filesystem on the Zaurus, everything is executable, which can be trouble