maemo.org - Talk - a brunch with the N900

Here is how I organized and carried out a post-new year (2013) gathering of my friends using the N900.

First, I composed the invitation email using Opera Mobile 10 and gmail. On the day of the gathering, I used SMS and voice to receive updates on the invitee’s arrivals, and keep in touch so I could get them through security.

To accompany the ethnic food I was presenting, I wanted to play some music and show a video and some photos. To that end I first turned on the big screen Sony TV I had at my disposal using Peirogi. The remote control was nowhere to be seen, and, it being a communal room, it tends to be missing or not working a lot of the time, and it’s perhaps more hygienic to use your own.

I then plugged the N900 into the TV using the cable that the N900 comes with. I played the music (which I had transferred from the CDs) using the built-in Media Player; the volume had to be turned way up (Pierogi helped again here), but the sound did eventually come from the speakers.

I then switched to the Photos application, flipping through the photos I had taken with blessN900. The music was still playing, and I also switched to the dashboard several times to read and respond to the SMS messages from the late arrivals.

I wanted to play a video as well. It had been filmed years ago with an analog camera and transferred to a DVD (and then to the N900 by me), but it would not play smoothly using the Media Player. A few days later I installed mplayer and the SiB interface, which made the video play correctly (though not every time; occasionally the audio and the video go out of sync).

Once I ran out of multimedia to present, I continued to show off the phone with espeak command line (the whisper voice is especially eerie), espeak GUI client, Numpty Physics, Stellarium, Attitude…I forgot to try to shoot a video of the party while showing the video, as it was being filmed, on the big screen. I could have also used PresenceVNC to connect to my office desktop, but the 3G signal was not that great there.

The story has an anti-climatic ending, though, because, once the show was over and I was shutting down the applications (with some switching between them), the desktop froze and the phone had to be shut down using the long press on the power button.