Alexey Smirnov's blog

I have been dreaming about such gadget for a long time. It is a small video camera in a water-proof case. Why do I need such a gadget? Since I am a long-distance runner I often visit nice places – forests, mountains, sea-shore bikeways, etc. When I run I keep looking around, enjoying the surroundings, and I often wish I could share it with my friends. This is why I take a camera with me, which is actually my iPhone. But I often want to shoot video, which means the device should be able to stay outside for a long time, rain or shine. An iPhone is simply too fragile.

And here comes a DVR in a water-proof case. Small but strong, and rather cheap. I bought it today for just 4000 NTD (about 100 EUR) in a local electronics store. And it perfectly fits into my wet hands when I am running. So now, in addition to the text and pics, expect videos to appear in my running reports.

Tablets are those pesky gadgets that everybody wants to buy these days. Last Sunday I finally realized that I need a book reader, one of those monochrome slim devices which make reading books enjoyable. Honestly, I am really tired of reading PDFs from my desktopʼs monitor. But after I arrived to local computer store I realized that book readers are totally unpopular in Taiwan. Apparently, local stores are trying to sell more expensive tablets from HTC and Samsung. I spent quite some time wandering through a myriad of stores and eventually became quite frustrated as I was only able to find a single model of a book reader priced at $200 USD.

However, suddenly I saw a SALE sign advertising a 7-inch touch Android tablet from an unknown Taiwanese manufacturer. The name of the gadget is Ergotech MD7057 TabletPC, and I only found information in Chinese. But it was pretty straightforward to switch the device language to English, after which it became a pretty standard Android gadget. The only exceptional thing was its price: 100 EUR. Amazing. The competitorʼs offerings cost 3 times more.

The device is quite solid, built of good quality materials and the overall user experience is very very smooth. Here is the technical spec:

• CPU: ARM Cortex A8 1GHz
• Graphics: ARM Mali 400 MP
• RAM: 512 MB
• Screen: 7-inch, 800×480.
• Wifi: 802.11
• SD-card: 32 GB

For some reason it does not work with Android Market, but you know, you can find tons of APKs online – just google for your-app-name download APK and there it goes. Today I spent some time playing with it, installed my favourite apps: Evernote, Dropbox, Kindle, so that I can read books and PDFs now. The battery life is rather good – the indicator barely moved after a couple of hours of using Wifi actively.

I am pretty sure the device will run some nice games, but I am mostly interested in productivity and multimedia features. On the negative side one might notice the absence of GPS and camera, but you know, for 100 EUR you could expect much less than what you get in this device. Really, really recommended. Taiwanese second-tier manufacturer delivered a very nice product at a very nice price. So bigger established companies have something to learn from it.

The mandatory unpacking ceremony pics follow.

I have lived in many countries – the United States, Finland, and now Taiwan, and each country has its own food. But the topic of food has not ever been covered in my blog. What a shame! Now it is time to write a few words on what I eat.

I like to cook. I am not saying I am particularly good at it, but this is anyway somewhat different activity, other than just sitting in the office in front of computer screen. This is why I like it.

Another passion of mine is gadgets, and cooking gadgets in particular. I think that technology is an important component of cooking, even though cooking is probably more art than technology. Anyway, enough for an introduction, I already hear rumbling in my stomach, so lets get to food.

It is pretty easy to make cakes. You will need to buy a package of cake flour in the nearest supermarket, add egg and water, and off you go:

You will need toaster as well. These machines are very popular in Taiwan. Put in the cakes for approximately one hour.

As a result, you’ll get this. Does it look good?

These cakes taste certainly better than what you can get in a shop. You will like its crispy surface and soft chewy inner parts. The only problem with this recipe is that it takes a lot of time to cook it. So I usually do it in the evening when I come back from work. But in the morning I need some radical way of cooking, it should be fast! Waffle machine comes to rescue. This kind of machine is more difficult to find in shops, but I found it in RT-mart. Also you will need a pack of waffle flour (not the same as cake flour) which you can get in local supermarket or in SOGO store. Put an egg for a better taste.

It takes only 3 minutes to bake the waffles!

And of course you will need chocolate spread after the waffles are ready!

So, that’s the end of introduction on what I eat. I like bakery and I like to bake things. It does not take long and generates good results.

I love this company.

But what follows sounds like total abuse to its products. To start with, I always wanted to get Apple products even though I cannot describe myself as fan of Apple because I never owned any of its products. However, earlier I have bought a few books of Leander Kahney which deal with Apple culture. They are quite interesting because of their unusual formatting as well as content. I have been waiting for two years before there was a chance to buy an Apple gadget. I have been spending money on various things such as a laptop with a touchscreen similar to iPad but it works as a normal laptop as well (btw. I am very happy with it after 2 months of usage even though it is more expensive than typical laptop).

But on June 28th 2010 I turned 29 years old. What a nice number of years, it is not even 30. I guess next birthday will require me to draw big conclusions from the part of life I have lived so far because this stretch of years was by far the most important in my life.

But 29 years is also quite important date to get a special gift for yourself. So I thought yes I should get an iPhone! And I went to the only store in our town that was selling it. Suprisingly on the one hand and quite predictably on the other, most people are still using the kind of phones they were using 5 and even 10 years ago! Nobody here wants to buy an iPhone. Not necessarily because it is expensive but also because it is not trendy, at least in Russia.

But I thought it is trendy and cool and nice to have this amazing gadget. The unboxing ceremony went with lots of excitement:

Then I was able to turn on the phone. It asked me to insert the SIM card. Here is the interesting part. When I got the SIM card and removed the plastic frame that was protecting the hole to which I was supported to insert the card I realized that I had to insert the card with the plastic frame. I tried to do it but unsuccessfully because the frame got stuck in the middle. I removed the card with the frame and then I thought that I needed to insert only the SIM card (what a mistake) which is how it works in many other phones including those that I was using earlier. Of course, I was doubtful because of the plastic frame but I thought that it was possible to always eject the card from the hole or if that does not work to remove the cover of the iPhone to get direct access to SIM card as again is the case in many other phones.

However, when the SIM card got into the hole it got stuck there. There was no obvious way of removing it. Then I spent a horrible half an hour trying various ways to release the SIM card. It was possible to lift it up but during the final attempt to get hold of it it was falling back deep into the hole. I used various kinds of screwdrivers and needles to get into the hole. I have scratched my gorgeous iPhone. It looks so shiny after you buy it but when you treat it with needles the nice paint disappears and the phone gets a tough appearance.

Then my parents asked me why amn’t I enjoying the dinner and they realized what I have been occupied with. They joined me with their set of tools! They have used smaller needle and finally after an hour of intense fighting the SIM card was freed! Whoo-hoo! Now everybody was wondering if iPhone is still alive. Yes, it is working! Apple is such a great company, its products are so tough. On that day I even managed to get a free account at iTunes and downloaded a few apps to my iPhone.

Well, after using quite few other phones I should say that iPhone delivers. It is great and simple, and this is the only gadget that my parents found intuitive to use. I agree, its user interface is exceptional. And so is Apple’s hardware!

After years and years of waiting and working on others’ laptops I decided to get my own! It is funny that I bought my previous laptop a whopping 8 years ago when I started graduate school at Stony Brook (I also own a netbook but that is used exclusively when I am on the road).

This is why I decided to get one of the best models available at the moment. I got a 12-inch tablet HP TouchSmart tm2. It has Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300, 4 GB of RAM, 320 GB hard drive, and a Windows 7 with multitouch support.

In fact, it is multiple gadgets in one box: it is possible to use it as follows:

• an e-book reader because it supports landscape/portrait orientations
• watching movies is also quite convenient
• it is a nice development machine with its dual-core CPU and 4GB of RAM.

One of the features that I like the most is hand-writing recognition – it is so accurate nowadays. I only had to go through a small training session in which the computer asked me to write down a number of sentences in my own style. Multitouch gestures is another cool feature which is supported for example in a few games that Microsoft has developed.

I have also installed BumpTop – a state of the art 3D desktop. The only problem with it is that it does not support native input methods, this means that I always had to use keyboard for typing.

While looking for a suitable model at Verkokauppa I have noticed that it offers lots of bigger laptops with screen sizes as much as 17 inch. Of course one can say that 12 inch of TouchSmart is not enough. But this is not the case when size matters. The screen has exceptional brightness which makes it possible and even convenient to use small font sizes. On the other hand, monstrous laptops have so much unused space in the keyboard area. It looks as if I am buying not a laptop but a pad for the coffee cup.

To summarize, TouchSmart is a compact and lightweight (2.1 kg) yet extremely capable device! The only problem that I have experienced so far is learning which touch gesture is doing what – there are so many possible gestures on a multitouch screen! But the time spent learning multitouch is not wasted as this is the technology of the future, undoubtedly.

Obligatory unboxing ceremony images:

I have attended Mobile Dev Camp. It was an event that included presentations from all major mobile vendors as well as workshops. To me it looks like it was targeted to younger developers as the level of the presentations was introductory. The funny thing was that organizers announced a development contest 48 hours before the conference. The topic of this application contest was outdoors. I did not participate because I thought I could not create a usable application within such short time. But in one category the winner has created an application while he was sitting in the conference. This means that there was almost no competition but the prizes were quite good. In each vendor category a new phone was offered as the prize. For example in the Apple category an iPad was awarded.

The conference started with a Nokia presentation in which Qt framework was described. This is a cross-platform development framework. A number of new features was described including Smart installer for Symbian that allows to add dependencies from your applications similar to debian packaging. Also changes were promised to Ovi Store which is now open for contribution only if you are a company. Obviously, it will become possible for individual developers to upload their apps to Ovi Store soon. It was recommended that developers take a close look at WebKit because it makes porting applications easy. However, later during the day the participants of a panel described the difficulties involved in porting WebKit applications because of lack of standards. But WebKit makes it possible to use native APIs from your web pages. For example if you want to find a pizza restaurant near YOU then you need to ask your device what is your current location and then use Ovi Maps API with those coordinates to display a map in the browser.

Another interesting presentation was that of Jürgen Scheible, the author of Mobile Python book. He described a number of tools such as Pluthon – python using Eclipse. It turns out that Python is available on touch devices nowadays. Jurgen mentioned that during his 3-5 day workshops people learn to program games involving touch gestures and animation. That’s a great achievement as teaching people to program is a challenging task.

There was a presentation dedicated to Microsoft Phone 7 system. As always, Microsoft has impressed the attendees of the conference with a game console available in its workshop room. I remember that when I attended another conference dedicated to Microsoft Mobile OS there was a whole Formula-1 simulator in that building! The new mobile OS looks quite impressive. They are saying that their goal is to add a 3rd dimension to the 2D screen of a mobile phone. That 3rd dimension comes from animations and effects, and therefore the new Microsoft Phone OS has lots of those.

In the Ericsson presentation the importance of a web browser was stressed. In particular, this company is developing web background service which allows the browser to perform tasks while in the background. They have also implemented a notification system as part of the browser. I guess they are moving in the direction of implementing a whole browser-based OS.

To summarize, the attendees of Mobile Dev Camp had an opportunity to meet with representatives of all major mobile vendors and listen to their ideas on the future of mobile technology. It is surprising that each company has its own view on this subject, thus we can expect lots of competition and interesting ideas implemented in the next generation of mobile devices.

Besides visiting the conference I tried to spend a lot of time exploring the city and its magnificent museums.

Last time I was in Amsterdam in 2000 and that was actually the first time I was abroad. But during these years I had to travel a lot, I spent a number of years in New York as well as in Finland. Before arriving to Amsterdam I was mentally comparing it with Venice because of its canals. But after walking in the city I think it more resembles New York. It is well known that New York was earlier called New Amsterdam. The similarity is in the narrow buildings that can go as high as 5 floors but their width is 3 windows.

Another interesting detail is that in Amsterdam there are lots of bikes, a lot more than in Helsinki. The number of bikes is greater than the number of cars and there are probably more bikes than people.

On Saturday afternoon I went to the hotel and checked in. As soon as you enter the hotel’s door there is a huge staircase going up and up a couple of floors. There is a turn only at the end of the third floor. Fortunately, the window of my room was going to the inner court, not to a busy street in the center. I was surprised that the court looks so quiet and a bit rural.

Then I went to Rembrandt’s house. In this museum there are lots of paintings of his predecessors on the first floor. But the most interesting part of that museum is a collection of Rembrandt’s etchings. Works of his pupils and followers are also available. Unfortunately, his paintings are not present in this museums as I expected. The gorgeous Night Watch is located in another museum in Amsterdam which I did not have time to visit.

After visiting Rembrandt’s house I went to Russian museum called Hermitage. It is a division of Russian main museum in Saint-Petersburg. In fact, it opened only this summer and now it occupies a huge 3-storied building which was earlier a nursing house. In this museum it is possible to see the items of Russian Tzar court including portraits of Tzars and their wives. The museum also explains a connection between Russian Royal family and that of Netherlands. It turns out that their connections are pretty intertwined.

On Sunday I went to van Gogh museum. There was a huge line of people trying to get the tickets. It was either because it was Sunday or because van Gogh is very popular. In other museums I did not see any lines at all. But after I got my ticket and went through the security check I realized that I was in this museum when I visited Amsterdam on previous occasion. I actually did not remember where I was back then. But I definitely enjoyed visiting van Gogh museum once again. His paintings are so interesting…

Overall, I spent two absolutely fantastic days in Amsterdam! I visited a great conference and a number of gorgeous museums! Amsterdam has so much to offer. I had to go to the airport earlier on Sunday because of the track repair. In fact, I had to take a bus to the airport. But then the plane arrived on time to Helsinki and at 1AM I was already at home. Nice trip, I have got a few souvenirs and lots of nice memories!

This weekend I went to Amsterdam to Maemo Summit 2009. In fact, the summit consisted of 3 days but because I am quite busy at work now and also because I was going on my own expense I decided to spend only 2 days in Amsterdam. Finally, I was interested not only in the summit but also in exploring the museums of Amsterdam. The names such as Rembrandt and van Gogh make it worth visiting Amsterdam. Last time I was in Amsterdam in 2000 on a bus trip through European countries. We spend only half of a day back then.

My plane was at 6:45 AM from Helsinki airport. As my apartment is located only a 10-minute walking distance from the train station I woke up early in the morning and went to the bus stop near the train station. I was surprised to find out that so many people were hanging out on this chilly Saturday morning. I needed to change a bus at Tikkurila. I missed that stop and actually got off the bus on the next stop. But then I walked to Tikkurila and was at the airport in time.

When I arrived to Amsterdam I needed to take a train to the center of the city. Mistakenly, I got on a train going in the opposite direction! In the train all the announcements were made in Dutch, quite contrary to Finland in which the announcements are made in 3 languages: Finnish, Swedish, and English. Overall, I now realize that Finland is a lot more English-speaking than Netherlands.

After spending 20 minutes in the train going in the opposite direction and not seeing anything resembling Amsterdam I asked people and they told me I was going in wrong direction. Then I went back but in the middle the train was broken and the passengers had to spend another 10 minutes on the platform waiting for the next train. Meanwhile, the conference was beginning…

When I arrived back to the airport I spent several minutes waiting on platform that the right train should have arrived to. But nothing arrived. Then I heard a radio message in English saying that the trains to Amsterdam center were cancelled because of track works! The people going to the center had to take bus instead. When I got to the bus stop I saw a huge line of people and no buses. After spending half an hour at the bus stop and seeing only 1 or 2 buses coming I decided to take a taxi. I kept asking people around me whether they wanted to share a taxi. After a few attempts I found 3 other guys and we went on taxi. Since the cost was shared I payed only 12 Euros for the taxi.

Oh well, this is how I arrived to Amsterdam.

I have started using Nokia Sports Tracker that works on my new 5800 device. Here is an example of a workout that I did yesterday.

The application has two parts: a web-based analysis tool and a mobile part that runs on your phone. The former uses GPS to track your current location and measure speed, distance, etc. After you are done with your workout you can upload the data to the web to share it with others or analyze it.

Very useful application indeed except that when running longer distances such as half-marathon I get wet and the moisture can damage the phone as it happened to me earlier.

I have got Nokia 5800 – a touchscreen phone with a lot of nice features:

• 8GB of memory
• 3.2MP camera
• GPS

Doom has been ported to S60. An episode consisting of multiple levels is available for free.

This is a graphics editor. Thus, the gadget becomes a touch pad. I was surprised to discover how easy it is to draw using a stylus compared to using a mouse.

Development for S60 has become more convenient as well. I have implemented the expense tracker, the program that I am using on a daily basis. Previously, it was web-based. I used Qt for S60. Qt is a portable GUI framework. Previously it was available on Linux, Windows, MacOS. But now it is available on mobile as well. The development is surprisingly easy. You only need to take the project profile for the desktop version and use Carbide IDE export feature. The project is converted to mobile application automatically.

Web browser is nearly as good as the desktop version. It is possible to play Flash video such as YouTube. It is obvious now that mobile HTML will cease to exist as full-fledged HTML support has been implemented on mobile devices.

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