Guaka! - maemo

Hitchwiki everywhere

Guaka — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:46:32 +0000

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"Aard Dictionary is a multiplatform dictionary and offline Wikipedia reader. It runs on desktop computers, notebooks and netbooks with Windows, Linux and Mac OS X as well as Nokia Internet Tablets (N800 and N810) and anywhere Python, PyGTK and ICU are available. Aard Dictionary is light, fast, easy to use and free." And now it's also possible to read Hitchwiki articles everywhere: I converted Hitchwiki dumps into .aar files. I'll probably set up a weekly cron on my server once I have aarddict running on the N900 that I received from Nokia during the Maemo conference in Amsterdam 3 weeks ago :)

Amsterdam - Hamburg - Stockholm

Guaka — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 21:39:24 +0000

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We left Amsterdam last Friday, after 15:00 or so. It took 50 minutes or so to leave Amsterdam at the liftershalte (which is also the longest wait of this trip!). We arrived at Julien's front door in Hamburg right in time for dinner. The third ride was great, a Danish managing director of 7 companies was happy to take us from the parking spot close to Osnabrueck. His Chrysler quickly accelerated to 220 km/h, and he was driving like a madman. Unfortunately it was not convenient enough to blog with maemowordpy on my N810. So I'm writing this in Stockholm. Or well, in a really nice Summer house that is currently inhabited all the time in the Southern suburbs of Stockholm. It's close to a beautiful lake. It's actually not really suburbs here. There's not even regular water. The pump broke and now we have to help ourselves with bottles and buckets. It's a great lesson on how not to waste water.

Hamburg was great. Despite the heavy rain. We met up with Matthias and Lena (who was at the CouchSerfing Collective New Zealand) and met some new friends. We stayed with Julien, who is simply hilarious. A lot of parties and vegan pancakes. Again we left Hamburg a bit later. We quickly had a ride - before the rain came down, into sunnier weather. The couple (in their fifties) who picked us up told us they hitchhiked themselves in Norway, with their children. At the gas station we immediately had eye contact with a woman and then it appears that she (Swedish), her husband (from Belgium) and children (bilingual) were heading to Denmark and they were happy to take us there. In the car we talked a lot. Then I found out that her husband was making a living through Drupal and that he had too many requests and he's willing to pass on some work to a starting Drupalist!

At the lines before the ferry I walked around to find a ride towards Copenhagen. I found a group of German kids (16, 17, 18 and 19 y/o) with big kanos on a huge Mercedes van. They were happy to take us and then we found out that they were actually going to the North of Sweden. So we skipped Copenhagen. I wanted to see Sigurdas and Stockholm though. We spent the night in our tent in the South of Sweden, which was quite comfy, woke up and continued with the German kids. They dropped us at a gas station where there was only one potential friendly car driver, who also took us to Stockholm. Now it's 14:00, E is preparing pasta and we're planning on eating that and head North to Umea. bonus vid preview

Last.fm social music revolution

Guaka — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 12:59:39 +0000

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I signed up at Last.fm in 2005. I never really used it a lot. Until recently, when I got slightly bored by soma.fm (still great though!). I found out Last.fm is streaming tons of music. A bit like pandora.com, but way better. And it seems they have everything, ranging from Aphex Twin, to the Beatles, your local punk band, Ravi Shankar, Stockhausen, anything. It can give you recommendations, or you listen to a tag radio (try gypsy, 303, amsterdam, whatever). You can click "love" if you like something and "ban" is even more useful. It's especially nice to tune into your friends' radios. Feel free to tune into mine. There's even a client for my Nokia N810. Now we just need free wireless everywhere...

Nokia N810

Guaka — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 18:15:08 +0000

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I wish Nokia sold laptops. I really liked my Nokia 770, that I bought in December 2005. It's running mostly free software, and is very Debianic. I wasn't traveling with a laptop then, and it was a nice (and often cheap) way to get online. I also read a lot of books with the excellent FBReader. And I created MaemoDict, which never really worked very well I must admit. But, silly enough I was more focused on working on the CouchSurfing code base once I finally bought a laptop (that is seriously broken now). I saw the announcements of the N810 a couple of weeks ago, and I was just in time to apply for Nokia's developer program, which gives developers the possibility to buy the device for 99 euros instead of the usual price. So I'm very happy to receive that they accepted my application ("I want to have many dictionaries and encyclopedias in my pocket"). Now I'm actually reading Nokia's entire announcement, and it's friggin great! The N800 already had a faster CPU, a webcam, much more memory and a normal SD card, but the N810 is totally awesome, it comes with GPS and a real mini-keyboard! And, it's great to see that Nokia has moved away from the proprietary Opera to a Mozilla based browser. Because of the GPS it could be interesting for Citizen Logistics, and I'm really looking forward to see if it's possible to get maps.hitchwiki.org on it!