«Do you really need it?»

Wednesday, October 1, 2025 · Permalink

My Nokia N810 is a time capsule. There’s so many things of my past, circa 2010, contained in there, frozen in time. There’s lots of insights of my old self found in to-dos, notes, documents and pictures.

I found an iphone.txt text file where I was taking notes about buying my first iPhone 3G 8Gb. Actually, I wanted a 3GS 16Gb. There’s prices there (trivia: the iPhone 3GS 16Gb costed S/1,999 in February 2010) and other tidbits, but one thing stood out for me.

I wrote (translated):

  • Is it convenient to have a permanent Data Plan? Do you really need it?
    • I’ll need to read articles if it’s convenient or not to be always-on, always online.

Look at that! Back then, Data Plans were a lot more limited and throttled than today. Plans started at 50Mb up to 3Gb per month. 700 kbps speeds. Forget about streaming videos on your daily commute! Today, you get free unlimited data for specific services on the least. We take being online 24 hours a day for granted, not giving a moment to stop and give a thoughtful, careful decision if that’s even a good thing or not.

I’m delighted that, back then, I had the right mindset to be wary of this.

And then…

Tuesday, September 30, 2025 · Permalink

YES! It booted! My Nokia N810 is alive again!

There’s some bumps down the road. SSH is not working. The on-screen keyboard doesn’t launch for some reason (and I wanted to play with the writing recognition). Maybe I’ll be able to fix that, but it’s not that important right now.

I need SSH and rsync to be able to copy stuff over. Maybe I can do the reverse and SSH into Tomcat from the N810.

One of my ideas is to use it to write my Morning Pages, and copy them over to Tomcat with scp or rsync.

I remember writing using the hardware keyboard drained quickly the battery. I remember taking notes once about some article or book while I was at San Martín de Porres church waiting for Juampa and the battery was almost over when I finished. But don’t let that deter you! Let’s use it and make it count! Yes, it will eventually break, it’s hardware, but I’ll be happy with all the good use I did with it, rather than lament all the things I never tried because of fear. Nothing lasts forever.

I hope Tmux works! It should, right? I also discovered, and I don’t have a recollection of this, that I was using other Terminal Emulator than the default one. It’s called RoxTerm. So many things to find out.

I’m excited, yay!

A JSON tale of tracking

Monday, September 29, 2025 · Permalink

I asked the seller of the N810’s battery to send it via Shalom, and I’d pick it up from their agency. Shalom’s service has improved a lot in these years, it’s really good. They have a website now for tracking your package.

The only downside is, when you reload the page to get an update, it asks again for the tracking code and order number. By the 10th reload (yes, I was excited) I got tired of copying and pasting.

But I’m a developer! Automation’s my game! I opened Firefox’s Dev Tools, inspected the Network requests and, yup, there’s an endpoint there that returns a JSON payload.

I tried it with curl and it answered, it doesn’t require authentication at all. I piped the output to a basic jq . for readability and then called these commands using watch, so they’ll get executed every 300 seconds (5 minutes). I moved my terminal emulator to my secondary monitor and, voilà, now I have realtime status updates!

As I did this, I was laughing maniacally like a mad scientist.

Hours later I noticed the destino («destination») key has changed and was now populated. It arrived and it’s ready for pick up! Yay!

And this is how the final payload looked like after I picked it up:

And now, time to face the moment of truth. Will the battery be fine? Will the N810 boot without issues? WILL IT WORK!?

A battery for my Nokia N810

Friday, September 26, 2025 · Permalink

Some weeks ago I showed Franco Quispe my Nokia N810. It’s always amusing mentioning how Nokia marketed these as «Internet Tablets» back when the devices we call «tablets» today didn’t exist. Franco loved the aesthetic and design of it. And the sliding keyboard didn’t fail to impress. Really, it’s a pretty cool device.

For years I wanted to buy a replacement battery, and while certainly prices are cheap in AliExpress, it’s the shipping that raises it beyond the budget I’d allow for such a project. Also, I wasn’t sure it’ll boot. Last time I bought a new old battery, I installed some application which took over the charging process and the N810 kept doing an endless reboot. It initiated charging, then rebooted over and over. I bought an external battery charger but concluded the battery was dead.

This happened in 2013. After all these years, perhaps spending some money on a battery could be seen as if I was buying a new (old) device. In 2019 and then 2020 I wrote in my N810’s logbook my desire to resurrect it and ideas on what to do with it. Perhaps I can give myself permission now, 12 years later?

It never occurred to me to search for the battery in Mercado Libre. To my delight, I found a seller for S/27 (around USD $7)! Surely it’s an old stock, but the price is right! There was the possibility the battery would be a dud, that the N810 itself is faulty and wouldn’t boot, but I felt overly optimistic. So I purchased it.

Of course, I immediately started to write yet another list in my logbook of things I could use it for!

  • Like an external «monitor.» If I find a VNC client I could setup an additional small screen in Tomcat (my desktop PC). Or do some sort of «poor man’s external display» and use the web browser to refresh a page served by Tomcat.
  • SSH duties. Would WiFi work? Checked, it should, it’s B/G.
  • Music player, podcasts, etc. for listening while doing the dishes.
  • Drawing… not sure, because the screen is resistive. But, anyway, the possibility is there. What drawing apps were available? Can’t remember.
  • Oh! I could do some fancy notifications using the color LED light!
  • Look at that! There’s a Game Boy and Game Boy Color emulator!

I decided to stop daydreaming; if it didn’t work, it would hurt a lot.

The seller answered promptly and shipped it the same day. It would arrive the day after. The waiting begun.

Screenshots and History

Monday, August 25, 2025 · Permalink

I stumbled again with this old nice article by Alex Chan on taking screenshots as history preservation. I have a small screenshots collection of old machines of mine, dating back to 2000 and they always bring a smile to my face. I can vividly remember where I was and with whom, how life was back then, etc.

This one’s from December 2004. I had a two-monitors configuration which wasn’t common at the time, you needed two graphics cards and play with Xinerama to get it working. I just finished writing a script that captured and stitched each monitor’s screenshots into a single image, using ImageMagick:

I should do the same with Real Life. I should take more photos like I used to. While I enjoy artistic photography, composition and stuff, there’s also a place and value for casual snapshots, like the old days with point-and-shoot cameras. Nowadays, I always carry a camera with my smartphone, I have no excuse. Just snap without much planning. This is not about art but about history and logging.

We were there. We lived like this. Our kids looked like this. We dressed like this. Our house looked like this. Our pets looked like this. I looked like this. I have so few photos of myself; I’m always behind the camera.

Just capture things with a screenshot, with a photo; all its imperfections, mess and lack of glamour. History. Preserve it as it is.

Lex Fridman interviews David Heinemeier Hansson

Friday, July 18, 2025 · Permalink

I’m listening to Lex Fridman’s interview to David Heinemeier Hansson. Put a mic in front of him and the man can talk for hours. Quite literally in this case, it’s a 6-hours interview! I’m not even halfway through; I listen to podcasts in small bites while dishwashing late at night.

David shares lots of insightful things. I respect he respects PHP. I didn’t know he was aware of the demoscene and even attended to The Party. Also, he ran his own BBS when he was 14-years old, owning several landlines.

Good bye, Tumbler

Friday, April 11, 2025 · Permalink

Inevitably, it came the day where no matter how many times I tried, Tumbler refuses to bootstrap. It powers on, some of the LEDs light up but never reaches POST. I suspect it’s the mainboard. I tried disconnecting everything within reach, with no results.

This is a great machine, I love its compact form factor and its superb keyboard and the sharp and crisp screen. It served me well even well past its prime. From time to time a glimpse of hope ignites in me and I give it one more try. Perhaps disconnecting the CMOS. Perhaps leaving it overnight. Perhaps it’s a faulty RAM. But no.

And then I dream, what if it powers on? What would I use it for? Why, lots of things! Writing! Drawing with its integrated Wacom tablet! Reading comics! Retro gaming! Making music with Renoise! I could SSH or VNC into my desktop machine if I’d need to do heavy stuff! But it won’t boot anymore. And I can’t justify spending any money on it. So, it’s official.

Good bye, Tumbler, and thanks for all these years of service!

(Here she is at Nodos Digital, a decade ago (2015), my daily driver at the time)

Friday, February 28, 2025 · Permalink

Just Write.:

Whenever I face a problem that requires tough decision-making, I typically open a new entry in my diary and start typing whatever comes to mind. After flushing out whatever is in my mind at that moment, I then start organizing it. Sometimes, this process results in definitive answers to my questions, and sometimes, not. Either way, I still have a clear outline of the choices available and a better understanding of their potential benefits and costs.