User:Dov

Contents

[edit] About me

I'm a very experienced Gtk hacker who now is a pride owner of a N900.

[edit] Ideas

[edit] QMod

I got the idea that perhaps it would be possible to simplify the input of European (and other) on the maemo keyboard by stealing one of the rarer characters of the US keyboard and making it into the a modifier key. My plan was to use the "Q" character as it is both rare and close to the other modifier keys. I would then use xkbcomp and turn it into the key Multi_key. To type the character q, the user would have to do "qk" or "qK". Other combinations would be up to the user. E.g. I need to type occasional Swedish, but I don't want to use the Swedish layout. I could then use the following mapping:

q[ - å
q; - ä
q- - ö

where the positions for [, ;, and - correspond to the positions of the corresponding characters in the Swedish layout.

The problem was that I couldn't get it to work in Xephyr. I did the following:

xkbcomp $DISPLAY foo.xkb
edit foo.xkb to make Q into a modifier
xkbcomp foo.xkb $DISPLAY

But neither xterm nor vim that I downloaded would honor the multi key combinations. Q would just be a dead key.

On the other hand, if I ran any other program from the my fedora desktop and redirected the output to Xephyr, the multi key would work.

Thus I conclude that Maemo has been setup to disregard this key. :-(

[edit] Anti theft

A program that periodically would check a website for an indication that it has been stolen. If the stolen flag is turned on the N900 should go into stealth mode and transmit its GPS coordinates, pictures taken from the front camera, telephone number of sim, telephone numbers called, and anything else that may help in retrieving the phone to a remote web site.

[edit] Burgler alarm

During the night the phone would use the camera to do motion detection and if motion was detected start recording sound and/or call a phone number.

[edit] Offline Wikipedia

A system that:

  • Allows viewing wikipedia (or any other MediaWiki?) for read only on the device without the redundant margins etc.
  • Allows saving a page with images, but without history to device.
  • Allows visiting a category and saving all referenced pages to device.
  • Allows popping up a check list of pages referenced from a page that should be downloaded.
  • Allows refreshing all saved pages.

[edit] Programs in progress

Hebrew calendar

[edit] Tutorials etc

[edit] Python desktop widget

I have rewritten the hello-world.py button so that it may be tested on a plain PyGtk system (e.g. Linux/X11 or Windows). All that is needed is:

  • Make the entire contents of the widget a subclass of some other widget. E.g. a GtkLabel for widgets only displaying info or GtkButton for widgets that launch a dialog or other windows.
  • Wrap all the hildon stuff in a python try/except and in the except clause launch a normal Gtk.Window and add the custom widget.