I used up until last race the nice live-f1 application to see live timings in the linux terminal. But starting with the last race I couldn’t. But today I got great news. The official Formula 1 website just released a mobile version available at mobile.formula1.com and oh joy and happiness they also released a mobile application that will offer Live Timings on your mobile phone.

To my biggest surprise, my symbian based Nokia E71 is supported. I seriously awaited to only see android and iphone there because they are all the rage. I suppose it’s because Formula 1 is much more popular in europe. Anyways I have live timings on my phone for free now.

Also many more services are available for your phone for free – like sms text services – that I find very nice.

So have fun !

# Wake-On-LAN
#
# Copyright (C) 2002 by Micro Systems Marc Balmer
# Written by Marc Balmer, marc@msys.ch, http://www.msys.ch/
# This code is free software under the GPL

import struct, socket

def WakeOnLan(ethernet_address):

  # Construct a six-byte hardware address

  addr_byte = ethernet_address.split(':')
  hw_addr = struct.pack('BBBBBB', int(addr_byte[0], 16),
    int(addr_byte[1], 16),
    int(addr_byte[2], 16),
    int(addr_byte[3], 16),
    int(addr_byte[4], 16),
    int(addr_byte[5], 16))

  # Build the Wake-On-LAN "Magic Packet"...

  msg = '\xff' * 6 + hw_addr * 16

  # ...and send it to the broadcast address using UDP

  s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM)
  s.setsockopt(socket.SOL_SOCKET, socket.SO_BROADCAST, 1)
  s.sendto(msg, ('', 9))
  s.close()

# Example use
WakeOnLan('0:3:93:81:68:b2')

I tried to settle on using just one but I just couldn’t. If I want to watch some flash video online or browse a really heavy site Skyfire is really the only option.

For browsing mobile sites or sites that fit enough on the small display I still prefer the default Web browser because I don’t have to zoom.

For others I like Opera 10 Mobile because you have a nice bookmarks page, it’s snappy and looks good.

That’s why I don’t really get the browser wars found around the forums and the internet. Having the choice is great. The only way to get decent video and performance of heavy sites it’s trough a proxy based browser so this is where Skyfire fits. On the other hand I don’t like trusting 3rd parties with my passwords so for private pages I use the default web browser. For some pages Opera is faster and more confortable.

As always YMMV so be sure to give them a try.

As you know that’s a 5th edition, touchscreen phone. I was a bit reticent because it’s never a good idea to get the first product from a series (that being the first Nokia touchscreen), still after reading a few reviews getting the 5800 seemed like a good idea. She doesn’t write that much and so missing a keyboard is no problem for her.

There are probably 1001 reviews online so I’m not getting into that, and there are enough top 10 freeware and top 10 shareware lists too. I’ll just list the software that I found useful for her and working on the 5800:

• Fring - not using voip that much, but it’s great for consolidated IM-ing (yahoo, google talk and skype)
• Facebook – the iphone interface works great. I tried Symabook but it’s slow and unstable
• Garmin Mobile XT – wonderful on the wide screen. My wife travels a lot as a professional interpreter so a GPS application comes handy. Using nokia maps on a roaming connection is not really an option, and the Garmin maps seem the best around.
• Accuweather applet – looks good, shows the weather.
• FreeUnRar

Still to come:

• Quickoffice.  I’ve been spoiled with the E series devices especially since the latest offer QuickOffice 6 is free.
• Skyfire – still not working on 5th edition but it’s been promised for some time now.

I noticed something annoying when watching streaming video in Skyfire on my Nokia E71. The official Youtube app and the built in media player don’t experience this but Skyfire does: the backlight turns off (according to the settings) even if a video is playing in skyfire – that’s pretty annoying. I had to keep pressing random keys so that the light comes back on.

I discovered that S60SpotOn has the option to keep the backlight on no matter what. Yes there’s an extra step – start s60SpotOn, set backlight on, and after that watch videos but it works. I hope that the Skyfire team corrects this problem soon, untill then this is a viable sollution.

BTW S60SpotOn’s certificate is expired, you need to set the date back in 2007 or 2008 for it to install.

Ovi Blue from Nokia Conversations

Aviator, Enterprise and Zen Touch from Tehkseven – those are both with sevan and ovi icons.

Zen Touch:

Aviator:

Enterprise:

Ovi blue has screenshots if you follow the link above.

Have fun with your E71 that is no longer graphically chalanged.

It’s simple, fast, and has access point prioritization built in.

It may not be as feature full as Gravity, but it’s free – so you can’t argue there. You can write your tweets, follow others and click links and more. Even more I find it faster than Gravity. Of course if you need or want to be able to upload pictures and other advanced features that Tweet60 misses for now you’ll need to shell out the (modest) price of Gravity.

Have fun twittering !

Ovi.com SyncML Profile

Some time ago I tried goosync, Scheduleworld and others promissing easy sync between a SyncML capable device (my phone) and Google Calendar. None proved satisfactory. Nokia started the Ovi online suite and I saw a bit of light. It works very well, you can send the configuration automatically to your phone and is all nicely integrated. I use Ovi to update my notes, calendar and contacts directly from a web browser. The only problem left was automatisation. Remembering to sync my device every time I changed something online was a bit tedious.

Thank you swim. Now my ovi sync profile is run every 4 hours (that seems to be enough for me). The only problem left is that, since Smart Connect is not working, I must set for Sync an access point that is always available – so mobile internet ap is the only choise. Still, syncing is not data intensive, still, if you are on an expensive plan you might want to monitor it.

Swim is running Ovi.com every 4 hours on my phone

I searched, and DEdit came up. It has a ton of features, but more important you can easily edit text files on your phone. From it’s features one can note:

• Remember last editing position in each text-file, that you edit;
• Remember user-defined positions in file
• Use many encodings, ascii and unicode
• Supports editing of big files (several megabytes or even more)
• Easy-to-use one-hand hotkeys

Even more, it has versions for older phones too, like s60v2 not only s60v3. You can find this fine, freeware text editor for your Nokia Symbian phone here:

http://jbak.ru/dedit_en.php

Well I have a small update. It’s crap. From time to time my phone was unnable to connect to the internet, be it 3g or wi-fi untill I restarted it. I kept thinking it’s the phones problem, and waited for a firmware update. Well I managed to track the problem: it’s Smart Connect. At some point it will ask “Hotspot log-in, add to the list” or something like that. No matter what I answer (yes or no) after this messege smart connect hangs and the phone cannot connect to the interenet. I cannot start smart connect after this either. I managed to dig on Birdstep’s homepage an updated version but it has the same problem. I tried to use Y-tasks to identify the stuck process but I couldn’t.

So I removed smart connect because having to restart my phone from time to time is not acceptable. Psiloc connect is not a sollution for me because untill Psiloc does away with their crap DRM (which runs all the time, eating ram, battery and cpu) I’m not touching any of their products again. So I’m back to choosing manual access points, or in case of stuff I want to run unattended (like swim for SyncML sync) to using just the mobile 3g access point.

So if your phone cannot conect to the internet from time to time, no matter what access point you try, do yourself a favour and get rid of Smart connect