René Rebe

So for decades we had 3.5mm (⅛″) and 6,3mm (1/4″) headphone jacks on nearly any audio equipment. From the Revox A77 all the way down to the Sony Walkman and Apple iPhone. Nowadays they often carry a fourth ring, usually for the microphone for handsfree use on cell phones.

In the second week with the Nokia Booklet I thought to finally checkout the audio quality. Well, what should I say, I nearly fall off my office chair when I plugged in my V-Mode Vibe Duo headphone ( I got for use with the iPhone). It sounded like good old PC speakers (well beeper) plugged into a coke can. Awful, at best. Still shocked, I plugged in the standard headphone that came with the Palm Pré, which was not a bit better, rather worse.

Puzzled if it should be possible to mangle a DA convert’s output lines that badly, I grabbed the box, in which Nokia shipped the Booklet, from the shelf to give the Nokia headphones, which came with the Booklet, a try. All to my surprise they sounded somewhat better. Still sub-standard, but at least not like a PC beeper thrown into a tin.

I quickly checked the headphones in front of me:

• the iPhone’s work in the iPhone (obviously), the Pré, a MacBook, but not in the Booklet
• the Pré’s work in the iPhone, Pré, MacBook and neither in the Nokia Booklet
• the Booklet’s only have reasonable sound quality in the Booklet itself, in the iPhone, Pré or a standard outputs, such as the MacBook, they sounds awful
• at least a regular Sennheiser (without microphone ring) worked in all devices, puh

I get the feeling Nokia uses a different signal combination. One could have thought the vendors would be smart enough to all use the same, … Well, I guess they where smart enough to all use their own variant, sell matching accessories.

At least Apple and Palm where smart enough to make their variants work with good old standard devices, while Nokia somehow managed to make them incompatible with probably all the last decades audio equipment, …

This morning’s newspaper, Norah Jones commented here previous style, new album: my style was really boring (German: Mein Stil hat mich total gelangweilt.).

Yeah Norah, I couldn’t agree more. Hope your new CD digital-bitstream is better. Much luck and all the best.

Update: Ok, a little progress, a little better: listen yourself.

So recently I mangled my PowerPC G5’s Apple partition map while installing Mac OS X on my Nokia Booklet 3G. Yeah, all this zero-based, one-based, everyone names them different device enumeration, …

So after the Chameleon Master Boot Record hit the Apple Partition Map of the G5, OpenFirmware was not able to read the remaining partition table anymore (I actually should lookup the layout, maybe just some magic was hit, or a backup copy resists somewhere, whatever).

So after about a week without the G5 I thought it would be a good day to install all the OS X flavors, which I need for testing, alongside my Linux, again.

Loading the T2 installable disk, Linux did neither recognize a valid partition table, anymore - however mac-disk still displayed all the 8 partitions just fine. It just wouldn’t save it without changes (at least I found no “forced write, really I mean it, yes I know I have not modified it” switch). So the last partition removed, re-added, re-written (yuck), and all was there again. Yay!

This year we have quite some celebrations in Germany: 20 years since the fall of the Berlin wall, and 60 years Federal Republic of Germany. Next year follows 20 years of German reunification.

As follow up to one of the celebration events today, an art project made a Berlin Wall from giant dominos. The domino wall will be toppled this evening.

… more in the whole gallery

According to an O2 employee I just spoke to (regarding my memory glitching device) the Nokia Booklet 3G is already on the list of soon to be End-Of-Life’d devices? Given that it just went on sale just slightly more than a week ago this makes a pretty short lifespan. Even for cellphone standards, … I wonder if there is more behind this, such as a batch of faulty memory chips, PCBs, high return rate in general?

Copyright (c) 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1994
The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.

DragonFly v2.4.1-RELEASE (GENERIC) #14: Wed Sep 30 18:12:31 PDT 2009

The network configuration goes into /etc/rc.conf:

ifconfig_re0=”inet 192.168.2.20 netmask 255.255.255.0″
defaultrouter=192.168.2.1

(The “re” comes from RE(4) - RealTek … PCI/PCIe Ethernet adapter driver, and will certainly differ, see “ifconfig”.)

The nameserver as usual into /etc/resolv.conf:

nameserver 208.67.222.222

The services are enabled in /etc/defaults/rc.conf:

sshd_enable=”YES” # Enable sshd

Have fun.

You fiddled for some days to get all needed operating systems installed on your new portable? Got dual, triple or whatever boot manager set up properly? It was a painful process, your fingers, brain are still hurting? Backup the whole disk on some storage near you (some Unix-like OS required):

On the target:

netcat  -l -p 6666 > your-portable.img.gz

On the source:

cat /dev/sda | gzip -1 | netcat the-nas-name-or-ip 6666

On very low end (read Intel Atom & Co) this might be CPU bound. If you have LZO / LZOP around it might speedup the backup process somewhat - while still compressing to a reasonable degree (on the wire or over-the-air and on the remote storage):

cat /dev/sda | lzop | netcat the-nas-name-or-ip 6666

Optimizing compression ratio

If you want to optimize the compression ratio and thus storage space you should zero out the whole disk before installing the systems:

Most Unix’s, including Linux:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

Mac OS X:

Disk Utility: Security options: Overwrite with zeros.

You can archive the same with slightly lower efficiency in the running operating systems by creating a file with just zeros:

dd if=/dev/zero of=file-with-zeros ; rm file-with-zeros

This has a slightly lower compression ratio, because it usually leaves a little noise in the file-system (allocation bookkeeping) meta data. However, it’s better than not zeroing out formerly random data at all.

Update: And LZO is still good enough to compress my now triple booting (3 OSs, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows 7) Nokia Booklet 3G 120 GB disc down to just 19GB on the server. (And I even haven’t zeroed out the HD too carefully, because I actually had to re-install Windows 7 quite some times to get rid of the recovery, as well as the extra boot loader partition, and until it was able to be loaded by the external boot loader all right, …)

There is no install/recovery media in the box, and Nokia will apparently not send you one (in case you need one, e.g. after ruining your NTFS partition’s superblock by an off-by-one typo in the partition number while fiddeling your Linux and OSX on it, …). They rather wanted to pick up the laptop for “repair” on their side. Autsch!
Of course the Windows 7 Starter sucks big times anyway, so the loss is questionable. However, I have not yet even taken a look at this rumored Ovi & Maps things.

With an intact hidden restore partition (as in my case), it should be possible to manually restore the image from a XP, Vista, 7 repair console like:

imagex /apply d:\Recovery\restore.wim 1 c:\”

I’ll probably give it a try, just to see the Nokia bloatware before I’ll install a more potent Windows flavor, one that can Aero and change the desktop background wallpaper, …

Update: Of course Microsoft does not ship the imagex within the installation media, that would obviously be too convenient. Instead it is part of some Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK) that is some whooping 999MB in size! Oops.

Google has some hits for some freestanding RAR archives. Let’s hope they do not contain malware, though, …

Update 2: Ok the “bundled” software was not worth it. I thought there would be an Nokia Ovi Maps application included, but instead only some “Update and Marketplace” enabler was. According to the printed docs included, the Maps has to be downloaded an is an over-the-internet app.

As a picture tells more than thousand words:

More details, howtos, etc. soon.

Update: How to open, disassemble, upgrade the Nokia Booklet HD, SSD

It has a normal (Phoenix) BIOS (with Nokia splash), boots my Linux from a USB stick just fine. Does apparently disable VT in the BIOS :-(

Comes with Windows 7 Starter, at least in Germany, at O2.

Stay tuned.