varunnangia.com

T-Mobile is my “choice” of carrier here in the US, inasmuch as one can have a choice in a closed and stagnating mobile telephony market like the US. Google is my choice of cloud computing platform – from email and IM to news and weather, I use Google. I have also been an ardent supporter of open-source solutions wherever possible. Thus the T-Mobile G1 phone, powered by Google’s Android, an open-source, Linux-based mobile platform sounded like a marriage of all my favourite things: Google, open-source, and T-Mobile. Toss in some Lego, and I think we’d be all set.

Coming from a background of Nokia S60 and, lately, the Apple iPhone, I am a power-user in many ways; except an instance of theft, and an instance of a lost SIM card, I have not been without a mobile phone since I first got one, the better part of a decade ago. What drew me first to the Nokia S60 platform was the applications – and the browser. My experience with the N80 were dismal; an awful in-warranty experience at Nokia’s NYC flagship convinced me of the folly of supporting a company that had no interest in supporting its users. While Apple has much of the same “thanks for the money, goodbye” mentality to its customers, both the community of Apple fans (rabid and otherwise) and the iPhone itself has over the months left me happy with the iPhone experience. That said, I am aware that few companies have the UI and hardware expertise of Apple and was willing to forgo some creature comforts in order to put my money where my mouth is: in open-source products. This is a review of the T-Mobile G1. It’s also a comparison, because I believe that Google has started a quiet revolution, that needs support, encouragement and criticism to make it truly the best product money can buy. (If you’re only interested in the bottom line, though, skip down to the antepenultimate paragraph – begins with “In its current form…”)

Read the rest of this entry »

I was reading a pretty interesting story on Slashdot about the impending death of Windows XP. Well, impending may be too strong a word, but certainly, it’s scheduled and the date is getting closer and closer. The comments were, unexpectedly considering this is Slashdot, very well thought-out and aligned closely with what I’ve thought for quite a while – killing off XP now is akin to Microsoft shooting itself in the foot.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is going to be a bit of a long review, so I’m going to cut most of it, and if you’re interested in reading more about it, follow the cut.

A brief introduction to the Nokia N800: about the size of two decks of cards put side by side, the N800 is the successor to the Nokia 770, and now has a sibling in the GPS-equipped N810. Unlike the majority of Nokia’s previous offerings which ran some flavour of Symbian or another (or Symbian’s predecessor), the N800 runs a customized version of Debian called Maemo.

The latest version of this operating system is called OS2008 and debuted with the N810 device around the middle of October 2007. Theoretically, OS2008 was made available for the existing base of N800 users in December 2007. I say theoretically because Nokia’s servers collapsed under the load and it was not until the last half of January 2008 that I managed to successfully download the whole thing and install it. So this is a review after using it for a month – and is primarily a catalogue of one reasonably power-user’s take on it.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been writing a primer on backups for a few people who have asked me and for my own reference when I go out and build my next backup system. Hidden behind the snip is the article itself (almost exactly correctly formatted) – some things don’t translate well from RTF format. I’ll share details of my next backup system when I’m ready.

Also available as a PDF if that sort of thing interests you.

Read the rest of this entry »