Gadgets and gifts

The great sport that is Vincent sent me a copy of Hacking vim for my troubles. Hopefully, I'll be able to get more code written, as requested.


In the free stuff department, last week, a kind soul at Ericsson sent me 2 Sony Ericsson mobile phones, one being the pretty new Sony Ericsson k850i. The other (less interesting) phone is already on its way to one of the gnokii developers without such a device.

I've started playing around with it. It has a good bunch of interesting modes when plugged in via USB, or over Bluetooth, which beg to be (better) supported including:

• MTP device (Rhythmbox and gvfs)
• Mass Storage media player (Rhythmbox)
• ObexFTP over USB and Bluetooth (gvfs, obex-data-server)
• Serial port (NetworkManager, gnome-phone-manager, gnokii)

Funnily enough, poking people at Nokia didn't get me a test phone in the ~2 years I tried. My wishlist is online :)

gvfsd-obexftp

I committed my work on the ObexFTP backend for gvfs yesterday, and fixed a good number of bugs in it today (one deadlock, missing icons, etc.). And it's looking quite neat.

After selecting the device in the Bluetooth applet's "Browse Device..." menu, the device shows up on the desktop with a nice name and a window pops up.

Nice icon!

Photos I need to upload somewhere!

The nice thing is that it'll automatically unmount when the phone is out of range, or the Bluetooth adapter is removed/disabled (such as when suspending).