When you decide that it is worth to risk your ipod touch's warranty in order to install a vast number of third party apps, you are sure to end filling up all the space dedicated to the ipod operative system. This ain't good for a lot of reasons: you won't be able to install new software and some will fail (as of YouTube not being able to create its cache files).

The Apple new toys come initially with two disk partitions:

• /dev/disk0s1 /var/root [300Mb]
  
• /dev/disk0s2 /private/var [7,3Gb]
  

The former partition (300Mb) holds the ipod's operative system and applications. The latter partition stores all the media files: music and videos. If you install the iphone applications (Mail, Google Maps, Notes, etc.) and some third party apps and games (ssh, Finder, Books, etc.) you will probably have less than 1Mb space left pretty quickly.

Here it is a quick and dirty trick to free some space by moving applications from the root partition to the media one. Courtesy from the fellows at tuaw. First of all, you need access to the itouch's shell, as you will need to execute some unix commands there. You can gain access to the shell by installing TermVT-100 (appinstaller sources) or by ssh login.

Once being at the shell prompt, you will have to follow these instructions carefuly. READ THIS ALL BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING!

• mkdir ~/Applications
  

You are creating the Applications folder in the media partition, because there are usually lots more of space there.

• mv -iv /Applications/AppNameZHere.app ~/Applications/
  

WHERE "AppNameZHere" DOES NOT INCLUDE ANY OF THE DEFAULT APPS (MobileSafari.app, MobileMusicPlayer.app, MobileCal.app, etc.).

We are moving the applications from the root partition to the media one. By doing so we are freeing space on the root partition!

• ln -s ~/Applications/* /Applications/

This makes a link between the files in ~/Applications/ (which has a lot of space) and /Applications (which does not). It fools the iphone or itouch into thinking that nothing has happened. Now that we are done, let's see how much space have we freed by typing:

• df -h
  

We probably will have 4-5Mb of free space, which is good enough to keep installing new things, at least until february (when third party apps will be finally welcomed by Apple). Hope that it helps! Of course, everything you do is under your responsibility!

The excellent launcher (and much more) Quicksilver that Mac users have been using for so long has been opensourced. This is great news, since more developers can join the product and improve it and extend it.

My hope is that someone will make a cross-platform version, or other projects like Launchy or gnome-launch will add more features thanks to quicksilver knowledgebase. The code can be reached via Google Code.

A few days ago I said: ipod touch, I'll pass on this one. Can you guess what happened next? Well, it is pretty obvious... I bought one. I was extremely happy with an ipod nano 8Gb I bought 2 weeks ago, but a colleague of mine came to the office with a shinny new ipod touch, bought at the Apple store. One touch that had no TFT contrast problems, one touch jailbreaked with lots of apps, one touch with a terminal, ssh access and even an ebook reader...

I was shocked, I knew I had to buy one. My perfectly usable Nokia 770 seemed a brick in comparison.

Well, a week has gone by since and I have finally bought a touch and have sold the Nokia 770, by the same amount of bucks I paid for it four months ago.

All in all I can say that I am extremely happy with the purchase, because the ipod touch:

• Has a fantastic screen, not as sharp as the Nokia's but more vibrant nonetheless. Downgrading from a 800 to a 480 pixels wide screen has proven to be a pain in the ass the first days, but I have got acostumed now and I just don't care anymore, thanks to Safari zooming capabilities and the adaptations of gmail and google reader, my most used applications so far. 
• Has a superb battery life in terms of a pda, although it is less impressive as a music player. I am playing/demoing the touch at every moment, and a charge is lasting me a couple of days so far. It holds 5 hours of video and 18 of audio easily. Surfing the web drains battery as much as viewing a video. 
• It has few apps out of the box, but thanks to the hackers that have created exploits like iJailbreak, and the community sources that come when installing appInstaller, you can empower the touch with a web server (apache,lighttpd), ebook reader (Books.app), ssh server/client, pdf viewer, wifi hotspot finder (Stumbler), etc. Once you install these apps, the ipod touch becomes a full blown pda, not just a music player with a browser thrown in for authentication on wifi networks, in order to buy on iTunes anywhere. How cool is to restart your zope instance from the shell of an ipod touch while listening to Radiohead's New rainbow album? For me the touch scores 5 geek points.

• It has a shinny bright future as a device, I'm pretty sure it will be sold by millions and by february the customers will have access to 3rd party high quality native applications: note taking, calendar, communication, games and productivity apps will appear by hundreds, and they will be conveniently sold through iTunes as well as delivered as opensource projects. 
• The design, form factor, quality of materials and size/weight are amazing, period. The software is also as polished as it can get by not today, but future standards, something only Apple can do. 
• There is no sign of Apple branding on the front side of the itouch, which is so simple and beauty. I LOVE this Jonathan Ive's minimalism design thing.
• Finally, the multitouch interface delivers a great experience. You'll want to interact with the ipod touch at all times... It's not a novelty thing, I assure you, it will last for years.

Now let's move onto the gripes of the ipod touch, as no gadget comes without a full basket of inconveniences:

• The keyboard is difficult to operate, no matter how long you practice with it. Predictive text seems not to work, at least when writing in spanish. There is also no tactile feedback and the thumbs get tired of typing easily. 
• No copy/paste. I was aware of it before buying the device anyways, and yes, it sucks big time. Apple doesn't consider it necessary to buy songs from iTunes, which seems the only aim of providing a keyboard on the device. Oh, well, and searching youtube videos. 
• No printed user guide. Come on Apple, you are 289 euro richer with my purchase and you are unable to put a 30 page manual with a clear explanation of the ipod-touch-revolutionary-and-not-so-intuitive features... As an example, one of the complaint points of this post was about no accented characters appearing on the virtual keyboard and it took me some days to find that long pressing on a vowel was all I had to do... Expecting your clients to download a user guide in pdf format from your website is not the best way to explain how to get the most of your devices. 
• No bluetooth connection and no bluetooth headsets for such a high end music player! And you Apple do this only because you are afraid that the touch eats the iphone sales... 
• No speakers! It would have been extremely easy to put a little cheap one, as on the Nokia 770. It would make watching videos a tad more enjoyable, and the ipod could be perfect then for waking me up in the morning, or playing calendar alarms with more audio quality. Jeez, I could open my eyes every morning watching a video of Shakira... well, maybe.

Drawbacks aside, I am extremely impressed with the ipod touch, and I would say that it will be in my pocket for years to come if I wouldn't know me enough... All I can predict is that I will probably sell it when something better comes along, and I am not only talking about a simple increase of storage capacity. I am talking about an Apple ipad or a 2nd iphone version. Will this happen soon or later? I don't expect it to happen in less than a year. So I will enjoy my ipod touch during that time.

I have been using subversion (svn) for years from the command line... But some months ago I changed my job and I started using windows environments. And I must admit TortoiseSVN is the best GUI SVN client i've seen ever before. While my needs are satisfied in Windows with TortoiseSVN and in Mac OS X with SCPlugin and SvnX, I was lacking a subversion tool to manage my files while exploring files in my Ubuntu (nautilus file explorer). That's why i decided to create my own set of scripts to integrate them on Nautilus contextual menu for a quick access without opening SVN programs or shell. I took the icons from the SVN Workbench since that is the client that I mostly use in Ubuntu and my eye finds the actions faster.

I created these scripts  in 2007. You'd rather  read this article about TortoiseSVN for Linux before setting any of the following scripts if you want a poslished package without manual tuning.

This is how it looks like

The following actions are supported by now:

• svn status
• svn update
• svn add
• svn commit

It takes no more than 5 minutes to implement, for example, the svn checkout. I leave it to you. I post this quickly because there is people around willing to test it. This is not tested anywhere other than in my own machine, but these are easy scripts, I don't think you cope any problems with them.

Installation

Requeriments, not much, really:

• nautilus-actions sudo apt-get install nautilus-actions
• Zenity (already shipped with your Ubuntu)
• Subversion of course, sudo apt-get install subversion

Steps:

• Uncompress the TarGz in your home folder
• Execute nautilus-actions-config (or go to System -> Preferences -> Nautilus Actions Configuration )
  
• Import every file inside the schemas directory. I deleted the Schemas, since users were having trouble.
• Press "Add" in the Nautilus Actions, and fill the information as follows:
  Label: Commit (Name you'll see in the menu)
  Icon: ~/nautilus-actions/blah/blah/commit.png (Select the ICON you want to show in the menu)
  Path: ~/nautilus-actions/blah/blah/commit.sh (Path to the commits.sh script)
  Parameters: %M
  
• Go to Conditions tab and select Both in the "Appears if selection contains" section.
  
• Press OK and repeat for the rest of scripts.
• Logout your gnome session and log in again.

Download nautilus subversion integration tool (free)

UPDATE, 02 March 2009: Scripts and instructions modified for Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex

Get the files in Github

Possible problems and solutions

• The script doesn't launch: Check the scripts are executable (chmod 755), and launch them from the terminal to see errors.

I upgraded my dell computer at work from Ubuntu Feisty to Ubuntu Gutsy, but I have to say that this time the upgrade went far less smoother than previous ones. The process halted the computer at some point in time, I had to start it up again, and in the end I lost all my compiz - beryl configurations (3d desktop, effects), which I have not been able to recover by now.

I don't see nothing new fancy in Gutsy for now, and another negative side effect is that I've had to switch from the XFCE desktop to Gnome, and deactivate the 3d effects (GL Desktop) as it is impossible to change the 2 virtual desktops preference. I am so found on 4 virtual desktops (shells, gvim, internet, other) that cannot cope with this bug/limitation.

The worst thing came when the computer booted in the shinny Ubuntu Gutsy with a 100% cpu consumption, regardless the desktop I chose. Further investigation showed that 'udevd' was goggling up the cpu time, and looking in /var/log showed it was also busy writing to a log file.

Googling took me to a lwn.net page with a note about evms/udevd not getting along very well in Gusty.

So ...

• apt-get remove evms
• /etc/init.d/udevd stop
• /etc/init.d/udevd start
• 1 Problem fixed :) 

Let's hope to see some updates and fixes, 'cause I want my good old XFCE back! I keep wondering what are the benefits of Ubuntu Gutsy over Feisty, any help?

Update: the update has broken vmware as usual. You have to download vmware any-to-any (versions 113 and up), untar it and run ./runme.pl. If you have compile errors, try to install g++: apt-get install g++

I'm having some fun testing a Samsung i600 (a.k.a. Blackjack) windows mobile smartphone edition. I will probably sell it to someone else who has more respect for Microsoft software, but the Samsung hardware is top notch nonetheless, and I'm liking the device more and more.

Samsung tries very hard to disguise windows on this mobile, and the result is very good, frankly. Just like Nokia's Symbian 3rd edition mobiles, this Samsung i600 comes with no automatic keylock, which is INSANE.

Third parties are always to the rescue, and here is a perfect freeware solution, Automatic keylock. I also installed Dataviz Documents to Go 6 onto the Samsung, and it is top notch software too, not like the Mobile Office 6 crap Microsoft sells which cannot create new documents, only open them (WTF!!), and it also cannot do simple things like copy & paste.

Usability dregraded to 0, on a new shinny 2007 version. Anyway, bad feelings apart, did I said I like the Samsung i600? If only I had not my ultra useful Nokia E61...

Para formatear un teléfono (hard reset) samsung sgh i600v como los que proporciona Vodafone, hay que hacer un ejercicio de dedos muy interesante. Primero de todo apagar el teléfono, y a continuación pulsar simultáneamente TODO esto:

• Arriba
• Ok (si tienes un dedo gordo pues ya están estos dos)
• Número 0
• Botón volver (el del lateral debajo de la rueda) 
• Sin soltar todo esto dejar pulsado el botón de encendido (igual necesitas un pié)