Holidays, N800 and so
=====================
Well, I we (me and my wife) was on holidays in Austria. Weather was
good as here was only one rainy day (there were some rains and storms
during nights). Two klettersteigen, two found geocaches (I still have
to find a geocache of one of these klettersteigs), a lot f walking and
tons of great food. Very nice holidays, I must say. Salzkamergut area
in Austria (Bad Ischl - Hallstatt - Obertraun area). We of course
weren't able to visit everything so there are many reasons to return
here in the future. And of course, it's somewhat mystic to go on paths
once used bu the Emperor Franz Josef I or to eat its favorite dishes in
the area of its summer residence.
I will try to upload some pictures here or to my SDF gallery later.
This time I decided to take just a GPD Pocket and a Nokia N800 (and
phones for case of emergency). Of course we had a GPS but it was useful
just for geocaching as we visited only areas which we know rather well.
And of course a digital camera (the Kodak FZ101). The GPD was used to
some planning, to find train and bus schedules and to store and preview
photos. And for writing of this text in the train. The Nokia was useful
mainly as a e-book reader in train (my wife used it to read some books
from Karl May).
Actually I have taken the Nokia N800 with us because I was curious if
this "internet tablet" from 2008 is can be still useful to surf the
Internet. Well, there are WiFi networks on railway stations and in some
of trains. The poor old N800 can connect to some of then but it cannot
open the login portals. So no luck. In the apartment in Austria there
was a normal WPA2-protected WiFi network so it worked well. Of course
many pages are not accessible (an usual "no common encryption" error on
some HTTPS pages) or they are just too big for the Nokia (it was just
128MB of RAM) or too "new" (the browser uses a Gecko or Opera core of
2008 vintage). Anyway, Mastodon works via the Brutaldon [1]. The
browser cannot do the Gopher, though. But one can find a older version
of Lynx online so there is an easy fix. The problem is that available
font sizes for the Terminal are 12px (way too small) and 16px (too big
so the 80-character line does not fit in the Terminal) and nothing
between is available. It can be probably fixed by installation of an
additional fonts package but I have not did it on a device with so
limited disk space. Surprisingly, the weather applet for desktop still
works (the OMWeather - it uses data from the Weather.com). It
has somewhat limited database of cities but it is good enough.
Unfortunately there is no "finger" command so one cannot obtain the
forecast with the usual "finger
[email protected]" command.
Among the WWW browsing it is still possible to listen music and read
e-books. The music player can use MP3s and (with some add-ons
installed) teh OGGs. But it does not like the UTF-8 (not-speaking about
non-latin characters) in song names and descriptions. If you have such
ones, you will see a mess instead of song/album/singer names.
E-book reading is OK with the FBReader (it is still available in
repositories) except one thing: it cannot correctly save data on exit
if it is closed in any manner but by using "Exit" from its pull-down
menu. One should not close it by pressing on the "Close" button or by
turning the device off. If it happens then it simply fails to start and
"rm -rf ~/.FBReader" is necessary (and it deletes ALL setup data, all
bookmarks and all links to books, of course). Except of this it works
well. It can open PalmDOC and Plucker files, and ePub files, too (the
ePub support is somewhat limited because the formal as developed in
last 10 years and but this FBReader port wasn't updated).
Reference:
[1]
https://brutaldon.online
