natowelch

Someone from Koolu called me at buttfuck early this morning, as promised (I always sleep in, and he was in Ontario, so I don't hold it against him). He asked me to try testing it on their port of Android specifically for the Freerunner, which they would be releasing images for in a couple of days. I was not able to get Android running despite some very clear instructions posted recently with Sean McNeil's images. But further investigation today revealed that the initial boot of Android takes an unusually long time to boot (something like ten minutes?!), while it finishes setting up and installing. I may simply have not been patient enough. I'll find some time to try again.

In the meantime, I tried SHR, the "Stable Hybrid Release". This distro used to be an ugly-looking Frankenstein mash-up of the 2007 (gtk) and 2008 (Qtopia) software stacks, but I come to find out that it has now totally changed into what amounts to a community showcase distro for the FSO next-gen Python/Dbus middleware layer currently under development at freesmartphone.org. FSO is the distro that had the great debugging tools that told me what the hell was wrong with the thing in the first place. Well, SHR now simply wraps that in a more complete suite of applications, and a cleaner, faster, prettier interface. I was impressed. The fact that I didn't have to give up Mickeyterm and mdbus was even better.

( Why I love Dbus )

And because of these developing tools, I was able to test more thoroughly and discover some good news: the GSM/phone functionality actually seems to mostly work, and the parts that don't work may not be due to faulty hardware after all.

It turns out that whenever I boot up with the SIM in, the phone registers just fine with Fido. I can reliably recieve calls, and I can reliably send and receive SMS text messages. But as soon as I attempt to call out, It not only immediately kicks off that call, but I am unable to re-register with any carrier or send SMS messages. One thing I noticed was that, before placing an outbond, I was always registering with Fido, using Fido's carrier id number. But as soon as I tried to call out, the carrier ID on further registration attempts was the same, but the phone would somehow identify the carrier as "Rogers Wireless", not Fido. Rogers owns Fido, so it doesn't surprise me that they seem to have pretty merged their networks together. Fine with me, but apprently, it confuses the hell out of my new phone.

The Wifi is still patchy, but it works sometimes. My roommate's PC Wifi connects flawlessly through it, so I may have to live with that. But If I can get service through another GSM carrier that works that last mile with outgoing calls, I think I can appreciate and use the Freerunner just fine.

We'll see.

( Speaking of cheap Wifi... )

I'm not going to get much in terms of extra money this season. I can smell it.

So much for buying a place.

I've been playing with the GPS in the Freerunner. TangoGPS and Viking appear to be well-done, simple applications for mapping, tracking, and examining GPS data. Though it seems to take a few minutes before TangoGPS can get a fix and start tracking, it seems pretty reliable once it kicks in. Viking takes the recorded log data (once converted from a log-file into a gpx xml format with a provided script) and allows you to overlay it over Google, Terraserver, or OpenStreetMap maps.

I'm getting a feel for how accurate (or not) GPS is supposed to be. A few times, I've left the tracker on for hours at home. The resulting tracks of relative stillness exhibit some rather whimsical loops outside the building and back, but never by more than a few dozen meters or so. I've recorded tracks home from a friend's place, and to the store and back, and, in places, it makes it look like I went over a fence and tramping through someone's yard. It seems to tend to drift most when I'm in one place for several seconds, like waiting for a crosswalk light. It clocked my average speed at 4.0km/hour, but my max was a blistering 16km/hour (wow! really?). It's not spot-on, but it's more than usable.

These new capabilities are doing interesting things to my brain. General, open digital tech like this gives me a feeling of potential, that I could do things I simply haven't thought of yet. Being able to look at manifestations of my past fuels my enjoyment of creating records of my life for later review. People have often been anxious about the implications of others gathering all this data. I feel better knowing that I can compile and record all this data about myself, by myself, for myself, and that I don't have to share it with anyone I don't wish to. I want to know as much about myself as I can, and being able to track my own movements and history gives me one more avenue to increase my own self-awareness.

There was a moment, walking home today, where I stopped to admire the sunset. I thought to myself, about how I would observe the pause in my own GPS tracks later, and think about what I was doing at that moment. And I remembered the beauty of the moment I was living in, and I lived in it again. These digital tracks are yet more ways to leave breadcrumbs back to places I love to be.

And then, there are the moments of sadness, like Last Sunday's. But I don't regret grief. It seems that when I cry, it's always because I really want to. And I revere those moments, because I still can't tell how the feeling of tears of grief really differ from the feeling of tears of joy. Weeping satisfies.