Holidays, N800 and so
=====================

Well, I  we (me and  my wife) was on  holidays in Austria.  Weather was
good as here was  only one rainy day (there were  some rains and storms
during nights). Two  klettersteigen, two found geocaches  (I still have
to find a geocache of one of  these klettersteigs), a lot f walking and
tons of great  food. Very nice holidays, I must  say. Salzkamergut area
in  Austria (Bad  Ischl -  Hallstatt -  Obertraun area).  We of  course
weren't able  to visit everything so  there are many reasons  to return
here in the future. And of course,  it's somewhat mystic to go on paths
once used bu the Emperor Franz Josef I or to eat its favorite dishes in
the area of its summer residence.

I will try to upload some pictures here or to my SDF gallery later.

This time  I decided to take  just a GPD  Pocket and a Nokia  N800 (and
phones for case of emergency). Of course we had a GPS but it was useful
just for geocaching as we visited only areas which we know rather well.
And of course a  digital camera (the Kodak FZ101). The  GPD was used to
some planning, to find train and bus schedules and to store and preview
photos. And for writing of this text in the train. The Nokia was useful
mainly as a e-book reader in train  (my wife used it to read some books
from Karl May).

Actually I have taken  the Nokia N800 with us because  I was curious if
this "internet  tablet" from 2008  is can be  still useful to  surf the
Internet. Well, there are WiFi networks on railway stations and in some
of trains. The poor old N800 can  connect to some of then but it cannot
open the login  portals. So no luck. In the  apartment in Austria there
was a normal  WPA2-protected WiFi network so it worked  well. Of course
many pages are not accessible (an usual "no common encryption" error on
some HTTPS pages) or  they are just too big for the  Nokia (it was just
128MB of RAM) or  too "new" (the browser uses a Gecko  or Opera core of
2008  vintage).  Anyway, Mastodon  works  via  the Brutaldon  [1].  The
browser cannot do the Gopher, though.  But one can find a older version
of Lynx online so  there is an easy fix. The  problem is that available
font sizes for the Terminal are 12px  (way too small) and 16px (too big
so the  80-character line  does not  fit in  the Terminal)  and nothing
between is  available. It can be  probably fixed by installation  of an
additional fonts  package but  I have not  did it on  a device  with so
limited disk space. Surprisingly, the  weather applet for desktop still
works  (the  OMWeather  -  it  uses  data  from  the  Weather.com).  It
has  somewhat  limited  database  of  cities but  it  is  good  enough.
Unfortunately there  is no  "finger" command so  one cannot  obtain the
forecast with the usual "finger salzburg@graph.no" command.

Among the  WWW browsing it is  still possible to listen  music and read
e-books.  The  music  player  can  use  MP3s  and  (with  some  add-ons
installed) teh OGGs. But it does not like the UTF-8 (not-speaking about
non-latin characters) in song names  and descriptions. If you have such
ones, you will see a mess instead of song/album/singer names.

E-book  reading is  OK  with the  FBReader (it  is  still available  in
repositories) except one  thing: it cannot correctly save  data on exit
if it is  closed in any manner  but by using "Exit"  from its pull-down
menu. One should not  close it by pressing on the  "Close" button or by
turning the device off. If it happens then it simply fails to start and
"rm -rf ~/.FBReader"  is necessary (and it deletes ALL  setup data, all
bookmarks and all  links to books, of course). Except  of this it works
well. It can  open PalmDOC and Plucker files, and  ePub files, too (the
ePub support  is somewhat  limited because the  formal as  developed in
last 10 years and but this FBReader port wasn't updated).


Reference:

[1] https://brutaldon.online