Nokia N810: setting up SSH

Wednesday, October 8, 2025 · Permalink

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@192.168.0.115

Afterwards, 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.

Nokia N810: SSH woes

Monday, October 6, 2025 · Permalink

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.rb

Last 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.

Nokia N810: Battery woes

Friday, October 3, 2025 · Permalink

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.wav

But 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!

«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 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.