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  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
  
  Cartoon artwork created with Stripgenerator; dialogue copy/pasted from #ubuntu-offtopic on Freenode.
  

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Slashdot pointed out a cool student project at Cornell: Levy Lorenzo has built a MIDI device controlled by six hamsters. The music sounds much better than most music today, and the hamsters probably are more entertaining than most videos too!

The Communicator saga continues: after much fussin’ and fightin’, I have decided to make peace with the darn thing, at least for the time being. Sigh. Here are the terms of our pact:

1. The device shall at all times yield the data I have created to me, via my personal preferred method, namely p3nfs on Linux.

2. In return, I shall respect Nokia’s right to be a clueless corporation, and never attempt to write to the device via p3nfs, but shall for this purpose use a “Compatible computer” as defined by Nokia (ie. Nokia PC suite on somebody else’s Windows box).

Fortunately, use case 1 is far more common than use case 2: usually you just need to transfer things jotted down on the Communicator to your computer. For stuff you already have on computers, you hopefully have smarter transportation means. Another fortunate thing is I actually do have a Windows box, but it still isn’t exactly my preferred environment, which is why I’d really like Nokia to wake up an do more for interoperability issues and offer standards-based interoperability with “your favorite system” and substitute that for that lame “compatible computer”.

Oh, and there’s another undestanding: I’ll use Nokia’s cruft for backups, which is not very good for one’s peace of mind, but it might still be less worse than relying on the mysterious workings of p3nfs…

I wrote email to Nokia Support, asking simply what is the preferred method for a 9210 to communicate with Linux boxen. The reply was, “Unfortunately we do not support Linux software”. Well d’oh! I sort of knew that already. but they might as well read the question beyond the word “Linux”, and answer it since they’re supposed to be one of the greatest FOSS/Linux companies in Finland (if you’ve ever seen a Nokia representative speaking at Open Source or Linux happenings, you will easily be tricked to believe so).

The bottom line: I can read and write to the Communicator, albeit not with the comfort I’d like to. And it’s a very cool device in itself. I probably wouldn’t have written such a long note on many other phones. All the cool functionality the Commie has, actually woks quite well. It does leave me hungry for the new model with wireless LAN though, it would solve these data transport problems at once. Perhaps Nokia is learning? Maybe the biggies can learn too.

I can use p3nfs for reading my phone now. Writing is still impossible. Nobody seems to use p3nfs anymore, and those who do, are getting perfect results. Not very encouraging, as no-one seems to have had any reason to fix the problem I’m having. Also, I can’t get irda working on Linux (this one is certainly my own fault). So I’m still reduced to a Windows user when I need write support.

Helped newbies on #ubuntu, which is a nice hobby.