“The time has come…to talk of many [technologies].” –Lewis Carroll(‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’)
N800
Streaming Music To Nokia N800 using Windows Medial Player 11
5There is no arguing that as soon as you replace the headphones that come with Nokia N800 Internet Tablet with any other decent quality headphones, you have got yourself an excellent music player. The playback quality is good and the user interface of the default media player is far better than that of a typical MP3 player(large size, touch screen etc.). The only downside is that the N800 comes with a meagre storage memory of 256MB! OK, you can stop laughing now, it does come with two memory slots enabling you to expand the storage capacity to 8/16 GB. 2 GB SD cards especially are very cheap on Amazon or eBay. Not interested in spending more money? You have a way out: Nokia N800 is a UPnP AV device which means that all you need to stream your entire music collection from a computer to N800 tablet is a UPnP AV MediaServer.
But what is a UPnP AV MediaServer? Let’s ask Wikipedia for help:
UPnP AV MediaServers store and share digital media, such as photographs, movies, or music [with UPnP AV Clients like N800]. There are UPnP MediaServers available for most operating-systems and many hardware-platforms. Software-based UPnP AV MediaServers can be run on PCs (Personal-Computers), mainly on Microsoft Windows, Linux, BSD, Unix or Mac OS X.
What does this translate to in the context of N800? It means that we can turn any computer that has access to our music collection into a media server that can stream the music to N800 directly over the wifi/network connection. This has become an absolute ‘new’ favourite feature of mine and I no more try to store as much music as I can cramp on the 8GB cards of my N800; instead, I just run a Media Server software on the computer, point it to my entire music collection(~80GB) and access it all from the media player of Nokia N800. Let us see how simple one way to setup N800 with a Media Server software.
If you are a Windows Vista user, almost everything needed to setup N800 for media streaming is already available for you :) It is because Windows Media Player 11 has built-in support for UPnP media streaming. (Not to say that it is any difficult to setup media streaming in GNU/Linux, as we will see in future posts.)
To configure which music/picture folders should be shared with the UPnP devices(N800), fire up Windows Media Player 11 from the Start menu(you use Launchy? Good for you) and go to the Tools -> Options window(pressing the “ALT” key will show the main menu). On the “Library” tab, click the “Monitor Folders” button and add as many folders as you want to share using the “Add” button. When finished, dismiss all the dialog boxes and close or minimise Windows Media Player.
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Boot N800 if it is not already powered on, start the default Media Player(or MediaStreamer if it is installed), and in its Library you will find a new entry listed under the name of your computer, which is the WMP 11 MediaServer. Click this entry to browse all the music and pictures that you have set for sharing.
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Note: If you feel like changing the settings used to share the files in Windows Media Player, then go to the same Library page under Tools -> Options window and click the “Configure Sharing” button. In the pop-up window, click the “Settings…” button and customise the way you want to share the music, pictures and the videos…wait, strike that video part out, it is a hopeless case to try to play video on N800 streamed from Windows Media Player!
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Using Windows Media Player 11 in Vista to stream music to N800 is the easiest setup, but definitely not the only one. You can setup older versions of Windows Media Player if you are a Windows XP user but you need a non-free plugin for that I believe. But the real fun starts when you install and configure a real UPnP MediaServer to work with N800, such as TVersity. Many of them support video transcoding and streaming too! Music can be streamed to N800 using other methods too, over HTTP using SlimServer, DAAP using Rhythmbox etc. And of course you can use other UPnP client software(say MediaStreamer) in N800 and not just the default media player. The possibilities are endless for a capable device with an open development platform! More to come in future posts.
Winding up what I had said in the beginning of the post, media streaming is not a complete replacement for the lack of decent storage available on N800. To carry music wherever you want to take N800, buying additional SD cards is a must. The only other option will be to setup the media stream server to stream music over the Internet and access the shared music from Nokia N800 through a wifi hotspot or a service-enabled phone, in which case, good luck with the streaming speed!
Different Ways of Taking Screenshots in Nokia N800
2I use the following different ways to take screenshots of the screen of my Nokia N800 Internet Tablet depending on which one is most convenient in a given situation.
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MH Shot Tool
MH Shot tool is an easy to use screen capturing tool that does one job very well: when run, it captures the N800 screen in its current state and provides an option to upload it directly to a Flickr account. I find it to be the fastest way of transferring a picture of my N800 screen to my blog. It also provides the option of saving the image to N800 memory card, but if you want to save the images at a non-default location, then you will have to browse to that location every time you take a screenshot – MH Shot tool doesn’t remember the last-saved location. MH Shot tool also doesn’t support delayed screenshots which means you can’t first start it and then go and prepare the screen for capturing. Because of this you can’t take screenshots of applications running in fullscreen or with menus popping-out.
If maemo hacker repositories are setup in your tablet then you should be able to install it right from the Application Manager. Otherwise go to inz’s mh-shot-tool page (perhaps from your Nokia N800) and click on the .install file. To take screenshots, setup N800′s screen the way you like it and then run the tool from Extras -> MH Shot tool. You will be prompted with a choice to either upload the screenshot to Flickr website or save it in a local folder in N800′s memory card. If you choose to upload it to Flickr, you will have to enter your account username and password but you need to do this only the first time.
This application could be so much more useful if it can allow delayed screenshots too. I also am not sure if there is a way to use a second Flickr account with it.
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Maemo Screengrabber
Did you ask for delayed screenshots? OK, that was I :) But don’t worry, we’ve got it. The application I use for taking delayed screenshots on my N800 is a very user-friendly osso-screenshot-tool wrapper tool called Maemo Screengrabber. Go to Tuomas Kulve’s page and follow the instructions to install maemo-screen-grabber tool on your Nokia N800. Now when you want to take a screenshot, first (roughly) prepare the screen as you want it and then run the tool from Extras -> Maemo Screengabber. You now get another 5 seconds to make any changes to the screen(e.g. make any menus visible or switch to fullscreen mode) before the screenshot is taken and automatically saved in the “Images” directory.
I wish the capture delay time and the default save location were configurable(see (4) below on how to do this). But many thanks to inz/Santtu and Toumas for making available two useful tools that I probably can’t do without :)
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VNC using x11vnc
If you want more control over the process of capturing the N800′s screen, and also editing and uploading it to one of the several image hosting websites, your best bet will be to do it from a computer using VNC software. To do that, install a VNC server on N800, install a VNC client on the computer, connect them together, and then take screenshots from the computer in whatever way pleases you. I have written a post about one such way to connect a computer to Nokia N800 using VNC, so probably that will be a good place to get started. Once connected through VNC, the N800 screen from the computer looks like this:
So you can now just use the typical screen capturing tools that you have always used on your computer, and after capturing, you can edit the screenshots to your heart’s content and finally upload it to your favourite image hosting websites.
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Screenshots from the terminal(osso-screenshot-tool)
If you are feeling adventurous and want to take screenshots from the terminal, one way to do it is to use osso-screenshot-tool directly(you can install it from the Application Manager; obviously xterm also needs to be installed). Its wrapper mentioned in (2) above is preferable unless you want to take screenshots from within a script(custom delays, multiple automated multiple screenshots, custom save locations, oh my!) or something like that. Recommended only if you are comfortable using the terminal but if you are already sold on this, René Seindal has a thisgood post to get started.
NOTE: I also keep hearing people talk about a certain CPU load applet (osso-statusbar-cpu, needs osso-screenshot-tool to be already installed) that it also takes delayed screenshots, and that it is actually meant for ITOS2006(N770) but installs just fine on N800 too. But I could never get it to work on my Nokia N800.
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Maemo Scratchbox
If you have Maemo Scratchbox installed on your computer and you want to take screenshots of an application that can be installed in it, then taking screenshots from here will be simpler as you don’t have to worry about connecting N800 to the computer(or have anything to do with N800 at all). If you don’t know what Maemo Scratchbox is, you can forget that I ever mentioned it! (Or get started with Maemo LiveCD.)
My toolset includes MH Shot tool, Maemo Screengrabber, VNC(x11vnc + VNC client), osso-screenshot-tool and the Scratchbox, but mostly I try to use VNC. Which ones are your favourites?
Connecting To Nokia N800 From a Computer Using VNC
12Setting Up Nokia N800 for VNC Access Using `x11vnc`
- Install x11vnc application on the Nokia N800. Either download the x11vnc deb package on the PC, transfer it to N800 and install it; or download and install it directly from N800.
- You need to run x11vnc server in your Nokia N800 now. From the applications menu, go to Extras and select the x11vnc application. You can also run it from the terminal if you want to see its output messages.
- Next note down the IP address of your Nokia N800 device. Go to [Applications Menu] -> Tools -> Connection Manager.
From the Connection Manager top menu, select Internet Connection -> IP Address. I assume it to be 192.168.2.10 for the purposes of this tutorial.
Accessing Nokia N800′s screen from Windows:
Download TightVNC Viewer application for Windows and extract it at a convenient location.
Run the TightVNC Viewer executable, enter the IP address( as noted in the previous section) in the pop-up dialog box, and click the Connect button.
Enjoy accessing N800′s screen comfortably using PC’s keyboard/mouse :)
(Experiment with the different settings in TightVNC viewer at your leisure.)
Accessing Nokia N800′s screen from GNU/Linux:
Chances are high that a VNC client is already installed on your GNU/Linux distribution. To test for one client, try the ‘vncviewer ––help’ command:
If you see the version information as displayed above, it means vncviewer is installed on your computer. You can run the following command to connect to the N800(substitute the IP address of *your* N800 below that you had noted above):
sh# vncviewer 192.168.2.10:0
And you should be up and running just as in Windows.
If you get an error though that the vncviewer command is not found on your system, then either some other VNC client application may be installed on your distribution(check in the menus) or perhaps you need to install a VNC client manually. vncviewer was already there on my Ubuntu, Fedora, openSuse, Linux Mint etc. ; if that is not the case with you, search for a VNC client in your distribution repositories or on the web.
Just by installing a ~500KB VNC server application x11vnc on the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet you can access its screen from any computer by using any of the available VNC client software for your favourite operating system. You can connect N800 to a computer through ssh in the same way, if there is no GUI present for example, but let that be a topic for another post.
Microsoft’s Mobile PC Newsletter Features Linux-enabled Nokia N800
0Microsoft’s Mobile PC Newsletter of the month of September(2007) features a section on Linux-powered Nokia N800 Internet Tablet about an article written by Matt Faulkner on gottabemobile.com. The website basically features Windows powered Tablet PCs and UMPC devices. As Matt himself says:
We don’t deal with too many devices that aren’t Tablet PC or UMPC related, but there are a few that enhance our ‘Mobile’ life, and the N800 could be one of those devices.
Fair enough.
But what took Microsoft’s “Mobile PC” Newsletter so long to mention a mobile product that is almost nine months old today? It’s not even a detailed review of the product, just a short post by Matt! I felt strange that such a passing mention of a nine month old Linux-powered product found space in Microsoft’s newsletter :)
Nokia N800 As an EBook Reader Using FBReader
2Though N800 is an Internet Tablet, it can serve as a very good ebook reader too, for those casual/semi-serious readers who don’t want to invest in a stand-alone ebook reader. At its screen size and resolution, reading ebooks is extremely pleasing on the eye. It supports HTML, PDF, etc formats out of the box; but what truly makes it such a good candidate to be used as an ebook reader is the excellent(read Free) ebook reader software available for it called FBReader.
Install FBReader for N800 with a few simple clicks and you are ready to read ebooks in the following formats in N800: TXT, RTF, CHM, fb 2.1, palmdoc, zTxt, OEB, OpenReader, mobipocket(non-encrypted), etc. For a complete list of supported formats, see FBReader’s about page. Support for tables and stylesheets in the above mentioned formats is lacking; it will be added in the future versions, along with support for more ebook formats.
FBReader can read the files of above mentioned formats directly from a compressed archive too, the supported compression formats being zip, gzip(.gz) and bzip2(.bz2). It remembers the last read position of all the files opened earlier for reading. But support for adding manual bookmarks or annotations is missing(planned for the next version). More features: Any images embedded in the documents are displayed; text search is supported; allows switching between portrait and landscape modes while reading(in fact supports all rotations in 90 degree increments); there is no inbuilt dictionary in the software and can’t easily fix the mis-spelled words either.
Visual Tour of FBReader for N800
The following screenshots should give a glimpse into some of the important features of FBReader i.e. N800′s ebook reading capabilities.
- The default reading mode in FBReader is the landscape mode. Fewer lines are visible and needs frequent eye movement too but I can access the (scrolling) buttons on N800 more comfortably.
- Portrait mode is more comfortable for reading but scrolling down is very uncomfortable to me in this position. The lines look really short when the font size is increased(or zoomed-in using N800′s button) but FBReader still wraps the words correctly.
- Searching for books to add them to the FBReaders library is a confusing process: It doesn’t show the file structure similar to N800′s File Manager. It took me some time to find the books in /media/mmc1/ebooks folder. Once added, the book remains easily accessible from FBReader’s library.
- Text search feature is one of my favourites and I end up using it quite often. Also, in the wake of absence of bookmarks, I use text search to jump from one place in the document to the other, provided I remember a few words from those contexts.
- FBReader has a lot of options that can be customised. General options can be seen in the screenshot below. The paths specified in Book Path field never worked for me but you can always give it a try!
- Change the size/colour/style of the text font from the “Styles” tab.
More information
A detailed review of N800′s ebook reading capabilities and related issues is available onTeleread. The same blog has a post on ten easy tips for Nokia N800 ebook users using FBReader, also available as a pdf for taking a printout.
N800 + FBReader/Web Browser + Plucker makes a great combination, I will that for a later post.
Discussion threads on N800 as an ebook reader:
FBReader Google Group
MobileRead Forums
Internet Tablet Talk
Some websites from where you can download ebooks for free(I will try to add more in future):
Gutenberg
Manybooks
Mobileread EBooks
20+ Places for Public Domain E-Books (Somebody else seems to have done the work for me)
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