My first impression is fairly good: even though it’s the first decent Android phone and quite old now, I find it very nice to use and quite customisable (which is great, considering all the applications and widgets available for the platform). And even when using an old version of Android (1.5) I don’t find it slow. At least not enough to be irritating.

However, there are several annoyances and things I found out that I figured I’d share:

• It doesn’t automatically import SMS from the SIM card, let alone use the SIM card as the SMS storage. I find that really silly, but to be honest it doesn’t bother me that much. You can of course import your backed-up SMS using some utilities (I haven’t bothered).
• It took me a good deal of effort to import my contacts from the old phone. I tried some app called vCardIO, which sounded awesome but it didn’t work for me. The final solution was using a utility called “Import Contacts” that doesn’t seem to be in the Android Market (?). I had exported my contacts using gammu/wammu, but I had just in case removed the X-GAMMU-* lines from it. I don’t know if it had anything to do.
• I found the default mail application to be kind of sucky, so I looked around and found K-9 Mail. I’m quite happy with it.
• The default browser is some sort of bad joke, but luckily there’s Opera Mini. Opera Mini 5 totally rocks, especially with Opera Link.

So, why the concern? I’m glad you asked. You can get a rough idea by reading these articles:

• Facebook’s Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline
• Facebook Further Reduces Your Control Over Personal Information
• Six Things You Need to Know About Facebook Connections
• Who Knows Who Your Facebook Friends Are?
• The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook (infographic)

After reading all that, for me it’s pretty clear that Facebook doesn’t give a flying fuck about your privacy. Actually, even Zuckerberg presumably said so. That is for me the big issue: the exact problems we might have now, the current workarounds, the fact that you now have this or that option to counter some of the automatic changes by Facebook… is all irrelevant. To elaborate a bit:

1. Facebook started as a much more “private” space in which you only shared information with your friends. This has radically changed, and I somehow find it disrespectful toward their users. We’re not talking about evolution here, but of pretty big “philosophical” changes. This is not what I signed up for.
2. It has happened several times that Facebook has changed your privacy settings on updates. Some of those changes can’t even be countered, or it’s fairly hard to do so. That pisses me off.
3. The “Facebook messing with your privacy settings” will no doubt happen again. So now, instead of using/enjoying the service, I have to fight against it.

So the current situation is that I know that Facebook can, at any moment, change something I don’t want it to, and I’ll have to read a bunch of articles to understand the threat and counter it. I don’t want to review my privacy settings from time to time “just in case”. I don’t want to wonder if my data is available to more people I’d like it to. I don’t see the point in using a service that is designed to do the opposite of what I want. And that makes me wonder why do I bother at all. Or if I want to support a company or service that behaves like that.

So, what does the Dingoo have to offer? Well, it’s a nice and small portable gaming console that apart from games, it plays music, video and radio, and has a simple picture viewer and a basic plain text reader (with features like bookmarking). On the gaming side, it has its own game format (it comes loaded with around 30 games) and emulators for quite a bunch of different machines, so you can play games from NES, Super NES, Neo Geo, Mega Drive, Game Boy Advance, and the arcade machines CPS1 and CPS2. I don’t have words to say how awesome that is. The Dingoo has an internal memory of 4Gib and supports one external MiniSD card, so you have more than enough space for a lot of games, some music and even a couple of films.

In general, I have to say that both the emulation and the video playing works very well. A handful of games can’t be played (they crash or behave funny) and other games can be played but are too slow/annoying to play (e.g. Super Mario World for Super NES), but in general there aren’t any problems. I have a couple of minor complaints though:

• I find some of the button conventions confusing (e.g. for menu navigation). It doesn’t help that different consoles have different conventions on which buttons to use for which actions.
• The Mega Drive emulator doesn’t seem to support the .bin format, which is slightly annoying.
• There are a lot of video formats supported (the console comes with several sample videos), but the first video I tried to copy and watch wasn’t recognised :-( I hope that won’t happen often.

All in all, I think it’s a great console and it’s quite cheap, so I’m very happy I bought it. If you’re curious about how it looks and works, have a look at this video review:

The PlayStation 2, well, it had all the games I wanted to play when I bought it (the Prince of Persia series, ProEvolution soccer, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus and God of War), it was cheaper than the alternatives and it had a ridiculous amount of second hand games and websites with reviews. The phone I bought mostly because of a recommendation, but actually I find other brands stupid and confusing, so I really like it and my next phone might be another Sony Ericsson. The PlayStation Portable… well, the DS is awesome in many ways, I realise that, but again the games I want to play (God of War, Patapon, LocoRoco, Echochrome, Katamari Damacy) are all for PSP.

There’s something similar with Apple. Some of their products (most? all?) look awesome, and I’m sure they’re awesome in many ways… but I can’t stand that they’re so closed in their own world. So far I haven’t bought anything from them, and when I read certain news I’m really happy that I haven’t. That’s more or less why it bothers me that the iPhone is so successful and that no vendor seemed to be able to do anything about it… until I saw the HTC Hero.

I haven’t used it myself (only played with it a bit and seen some videos), but it looks seriously good. According to these videos it’s still a bit rough around the edges compared to the iPhone, but it has more functionality, the same kind of app store (only open) and based on Android. I’m not sure what else I could ask for. Ah, yes: a couple of models more so they can polish it further :-) So I wonder if the Android platform, through HTC Hero and similar phones, will allow me and others to escape Sony (and Apple) on the phone arena.

Now, I only have to find some “open” portable console that will allow me to play PSP games ;-P

• It does have a (lame) name now: Bubug (supposedly stands for “Barely Unconventional Bug Untracking Gizmo”. Whatever).
• It has improved a lot here and there, and it now has authentication and multi-user support, not to mention a lot of UI bling bling and goodies.
• The development has moved to BitBucket, an excellent free service built by ex-Opera’s Jesper Noehr, where you can follow it more easily, comment on, check the Wiki, fork, or whatever you want. You even have a screenshot there ;-)

As you can guess from the last point, for this project I’ve been using Mercurial instead of Git. Although I certainly don’t have sophisticated needs, so YMMV (heavily), I find Git more pleasant to use. Which is kind of surprising, because I always thought that Git’s UI was a pain in the ass. Oh, well. That doesn’t mean that Mercurial is hard to use, though. I think it’s more that I’m used to Git now, and there are a couple of things that I find more convenient: the coloured diff (possible in Hg, but you have to install some extension for it, and only thinking about installing some Python extension that is not even packaged for Debian makes me want to switch to Git) and the staging area are the most important ones I can think of.

So, if you thought I had abandoned the TODO application thing, you were wrong ;-) If you’re interested, have a look at the Bubug BitBucket project page, download it, play with it, and tell me what you think.

In case you have been hiding under a rock these days and you don’t know what I’m talking about: Opera Unite is the latest crazy idea from Opera Software. Basically, embedding a web server inside the web browser, so that people can be more than spectators on the web, share their data without having to upload to third party services, and generally change the way they interact with the web. The cool thing is that the system is not limited to sharing files or whatever, you can actually program your own Opera Unite services to do pretty much anything you want (check the documentation in Dev Opera if you’re a developer). However, do note that this is just a Labs release, that is, just a preview of relatively immature software. For a more complete introduction, go to the Labs blog post introducing Opera Unite.

Opera created quite a bit of hype before the release, which seemed to work pretty well. In particular, the teasing in the HTML comments of the preview URL (http://opera.com/freedom), which were being updated every day by adding some more words, was brilliant. There has been a lot of press coverage of Opera Unite this week, and even some Russian fella created the website unitehowto.com the same day Unite was released, and he wrote (collected?) a bunch of information, articles and tutorials about Opera Unite.

I have to say that, although there has been some quite challenging times while developing Opera Unite (it’s a quite ambitious project that involves several departments with massively different backgrounds and values, what did you expect?), I’m quite happy with the result and I think we have made, in general, a good job. As I said, this is just a very rough version, and there’s a lot of work left to do, but I’m sure it will improve a lot before we release the final version. That said, I’m sure that the most exciting things about Unite will, without doubt, start happening once people start writing interesting services, changing the way we see Opera Unite and the way we see the web. I’m so eager to see what people are going to build with this…

I couldn’t resist the temptation to have a look at the documentation and start thinking about some application to use it. Soon after I started reading I came up with the idea of writing an Opera widget. There were a couple of reasons for that:

1. I had never written a widget, so it sounded like a good excuse to learn how to write them.
2. Widgets use Javascript, and that felt like a natural fit (as the API returns JSON).
3. I didn’t really know that much Javascript (just enough to write a couple of event handlers), and that seemed a good opportunity to start learning the language “properly”.
4. A widget in http://widgets.opera.com had more possibilities of actually being used than a random pet project of mine lying in some obscure repository of some obscure version control system (well, actually I ended up using Git for it, so it’s not that obscure in some sense; but you get the point).

So I started by learning a bit of Javascript. After asking around, the best thing I found to learn quickly was a very good series of videos by Douglas Crockford hosted in Yahoo! Video.

Then, I had a look at the excellent articles in Dev Opera about creating widgets and started creating one. As I had the idea of creating something that would show loans around the world, I started looking for HTML and Javascript for building maps, and found a very good article in A List Apart about accessible maps. The sad part is, once I understood how everything worked I destroyed the whole accessibility of the solution, but it was for a widget anyway (you have excellent support for CSS and Javascript in Opera, no need to have a fallback to show textual data in a widget) and my code ended up much much simpler and easier to maintain.

Finally, for Git, I had a look at the screencasts hosted in GitCasts. I already new some basic Git things, but I think I started to feel more comfortable with it after watching a couple of those videos. Still, too many references to the obscure objects and SHA names and whatever, but clear enough to understand your way around it.

In short, I have to say that creating the widget was easy enough, and it was lots of fun to write it. I had some frustrations debugging it, but things worked fairly well in general. When I finished it, I uploaded to widgets.opera.com and after a couple of days it was already approved and public for everyone.

So, if you want to give it a shot, just go to my widgets page and download the World Loanmeter! Enjoy it! :-D

1. The whole lending-money-to-people-who-need-it (and to whom banks will probably not lend) really attracted me. You help communities develop, and you don’t even lose money, because it’s a loan.
2. It seems that they really know who you’re lending money to. They make complete profiles (including pictures) of all the people, they follow up on every change in the loan, etc.

So I started digging a bit, and said “what the hell”, and created an account. So far I have only lent money to one person, and I’m waiting to see how it goes and how much information you get. For now I know the person has received my money, and with that and the money from other people she has all she needs to buy a new oven for pastries for her shop :-)

I suggest you go and have a look at Kiva.org, and create an account and lend some money if you like the idea. I have added a banner to the sidebar just now to show my support :-)

The idea is very simple: you take texts that have been blocked in some country and allow people to show them in their own websites. It’s a simple but poweful way of showing your rejection for censorship and your support for freedom of expression. As for what you have to do to join the campaign, it couldn’t be simpler. You just have to copy some Javascript code from the instructions page and you’re set.

I have of course added the information box to the sidebar, under the “Irrepressible info” header.

This is very easy to do in mutt, my mail reader of choice (for personal e-mail; I have found that, at least for work e-mail, Opera’s M2 works quite well too). You just have to limit to unread messages (pressing lowercase “L” and then using “~N” as filter), and then sort by subject (:set sort=subject). I have even created too “macros” in mutt to switch back and forth between “spam filtering mode” and “normal mode” :

 macro     index     Cs     ":set sort=subject<return>l~N<return>"
 macro     index     Cq     ":set sort=threads<return>lall<return>"

Let’s hope it doesn’t begin again tomorrow :-S