Disappointedly reporting that writing long content on the Nokia N810 using its hardware keyboard is slow, uncomfortable and not practical. Typing requires more effort than tapping on a glass surface. My thumbs get tired.
As a dedicated writing machine it doesn’t cut it, unless maybe pairing it with a Bluetooth keyboard. Of course, the form factor and portability changes radically; you might wonder, «why not use a smartphone instead?»
And you’d be right.
I’m discovering the limitations of using my Nokia N810 internet tablet in 2025.
Big one is, the web has moved. SSL ciphers have evolved, HTTPS pages won’t load. I’m aware there are proxies for old browsers, but I’m not keen on pursuing that way.
Neovim over SSH glitches. There must be some escape codes or stuff not in terminfo. I thought it was tmux, but it glitches the same outside of it. ROXTerm has only 16 colors. Mutt throws errors with my 256-colors configuration but fallbacks to black and white.
Nethack works, hah!
I can read ePubs using FBReader. But I prefer reading on my old Kindle Paperwhite.
I don’t think reading comics will work that well. The screen is smaller compared to my iPhone, I don’t think it will be a comfortable experience given that I don’t like to read comics on my iPhone as well.
I can always use it as what nowadays they call a «WriterDeck» — a dedicated, portable, writing device for focused writing. I can start writing my Morning Pages there and copy them over with rsync. I have Vim 7 here. It’s funny that Vim thinks an .md file is a Modula source code. Markdown existed back then, but wasn’t as widely popular as it is today.
There’s a port of Leafpad, a GTK+ text editor. Wow, did I really used that small font size? I’m getting old!
Resuming setting up SSH on my Nokia N810 (aka Nyon).
I couldn’t login from Nyon to Tomcat, but I made it work from Tomcat to Nyon! I had to add RSA as an acceptable algorithm (because SHA-1 went bye-bye) and login as root:
ssh -oHostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-rsa root@192.168.0.115Afterwards, I copied an SSH key to login as user, rather than root. Makes me nervous.
Look at that, rsync works!
Next up, I configured the reverse. Now I can login from Nyon to Tomcat! Aaaand it’s so insecure, haha. I’m deliberately poking holes in my secure configuration. I should be ashamed. But, this is for science!
First, I tried generating the RSA key in Tomcat since it was awfully slow in Nyon, but for some reason, it didn’t work. Rather than figuring out why not, I generated it in Nyon again. I went to prepare some tea and, when I returned, it was finished. I copied it manually to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys and, bam, it worked. So. Great.
Also, I deleted the Bomberman stale entry in the main menu. There was a stray /usr/share/applications/hildon/bomberman.desktop file that apparently wasn’t correctly removed when I uninstalled the game a long time ago.
Connecting via WiFi on my Nokia N810 worked without problems. I couldn’t find where to edit the DNS settings, tho. Looks like I’ll have to edit /etc/resolv.conf directly. The list of old access points brought back more nostalgic memories.
Infocoders, must be when I visited Karina Manrique’s offices.HAVANNA LARCOMAR.sandwich.com.barcamp, hah. I remember Nestor Sertzen trying my N810 there.I couldn’t remember how to enable the on-screen keyboard, I even took my time to read the User Manual. It doesn’t work and I have the theory that it thinks it’s always slid-out. When the built-in hardware keyboard is opened, the on-screen keyboard doesn’t work. That’s my theory. Anyway, I can live with that.
Later that afternoon, the battery status changed to «battery is full»! Reporting 7 hours estimate. Battery seemed to work fine that day.
I deleted my «Tip Calculator» from my Personal Menu — which is a command line program that’s opened using RoxTerm. This is the command used:
roxterm -z 2 -e /home/user/bin/tip.rbLast thing I tried that day was SSHing into Tomcat from Nyon (I forgot that’s the hostname I gave my N810). It refused with Unsupported option "GSSAPIAuthentication" and then Unsupported option "GSSAPIDelegateCredentials". Looks like my N810’s OpenSSH client is too old and is using old ciphers. Big bummer. Maybe I can configure Tomcat to accept old ciphers, but I definitely won’t do that on Mia; I’ll just jump hosts.
Right from the start, the BP-4L battery I bought for my Nokia N810 didn’t seem to be healthy. And that’s understandable, it must be an old stock.
On the first day, when I put it to charge, it never increased from 0.3%. My hunch was this software, called ASUI, that I installed before my N810 died called, provides a lot of features but hooks into a lot of things including the charging process. I left it charging for 10 minutes and it still reported 0.3% charge. I proceeded to uninstall it. I had to read the manual to remember how to uninstall programs, haha.
There’s a lot of things I don’t remember!
There’s this status bar applet called «Advanced Power» and it reports as charging, but it estimates an active time of «< 1 min» and estimates idle time as «45 min.» Not good.
Then I remembered I set up my own alarm notification (with sound!) when the battery was low. I wrote this in my notes:
alarmtool -a -t 1232772718 -R 1 -C -1 -d -e check-battery-level.rb -r -u /home/user/MyDocs/.sounds/j-alarm.wavBut doing alarmtool --help or trying to find a man page produces nothing. I don’t know how this alarmtool is used! And doing a web search returned nothing useful.
I couldn’t cd into /etc/init.d, I must be root. How do I become root? Oh, flashback! Just type root!
Then I remembered how to type Tab: Fn+Space.
It’s all slowly coming back!
It seems the battery is indeed not charging correctly or can’t hold a charge. Bummer. Well, at least the device’s powering on and the device is OK, which is the most important thing. I can always try to find another battery.
I’ve edited /etc/init.d/rc.local and removed my script to check the battery level. I’m trying to remove as much stuff as possible to discard variables that could be interfering.
And, yes, the N810 uses the old and great System V init!
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.
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!
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!?