Last weekend was a long weekend in Spain with two holidays and I took the chance to go south to Portugal with my girlfriend and meet my family and friends who I was missing.

Now if you’re a Maemo user/developer, why should you care about this? Because during the days there, I had the chance to show the N900 to two of my best friends and to my girlfriend’s family and it was interesting to see their reactions.

The two friends I mentioned have different profiles: one is Luís Seco, a high-school English teacher (and the best I had) who can be considered an advanced internaut who also runs a very good website about traveling; the other is Luís Rodrigues, a genius programmer and my pal in several projects. Note that as you see by me, not everybody in Portugal is called Luís… but for the sake of clarification, let’s call them “The Teacher” and “The Programmer”, respectively.

The Teacher:

He wanted a device where he could access WIFI, do calls, play simple games and have a reasonable camera. In fact, he had already pre-ordered an N900 from a store and was waiting for it. I should also add that he has a Winmo smartphone but is not really satisfied, like most Windows’ users are not.
After I gave him an introduction to the device, his questions were, among others, about the battery autonomy, the quality of the photos, how messaging looked like and the keyboard felt like. He also liked the fact that he can play mp3 in his car, without having to connect any cables, by using the FM transmitter. The one thing he complains about is the lack of MMS support. The key question he asked, for me, was if he could take a photo and send it right away to Facebook.

The Programmer:

He is a GNOME user and is always looking for the perfect device, owns a Winmo powered HTC which, apart from the phone, he uses mainly for its agenda and notes.
He really seemed to like how the contacts, email and Skype were integrated seamlessly. He explored how to choose a list of contacts to send a message to and how contacts were organized and didn’t like that he could not create custom groups of contacts. Since he deals with groups of students normally, this would come handy for him. Plus, he thought it was really  weird that the device doesn’t have a general portrait mode support.
He also asked about text editors and I mentioned the notes application, Conboy and even KOffice that have been shown on video some time ago.
(Okay, he asked also a few technical questions not relevant for this post)

Both of them were interested also in the GPS and were not really happy when I told them about the lack of efficiency when it is not connected to the web.

The Family:

My girlfriend’s family didn’t really try the device (instead I showed them its main features) apart from her little brother (9 years old). He played a bit with Sketch (”look this is you!” he said pointing to some stick-man that resembled me when it came to the beard… black), Xournal (”look, I even got an eraser!”) and with the media player (”don’t you have any music apart from the TSHUN! TSHUN! TSHUN! ??”, Lamb of God was on).

As you can see, N900 can please to please that are not familiar with the “old” tablets. Of course, an internet literate and a programmer are not the usual “mainstream” but I think N900 targets a new mainstream, people that have been using the internet since a while now and like to share their photos, read their email and browse their social networks anywhere.
If you’re part of this new mainstream, the N900 will please you.

Hi folks,

I’m happy to announce the first OCRFeeder’s tarball release.
Because not all of you are programmers and a packaged release makes more sense to you, today I did it.

I wanted to have done this longer ago but there was some bugs (simple but annoying ones)  that I wanted to have fixed before a tarball release.

This first tarball represents the version 0.1-beta. Although named like that, don’t fear and go try it and report bugs/improvements.
Why the beta on top of such a low version number? Because I wanted to make sure that it was “runnable” in most computers out there. This means that I haven’t tried to run OCRFeeder from scratch in other boxes but mine.
So, if you’re gonna give it a try, please be so kind to write down every step until you can run it. Then you can fill in bug reports on the project’s Google Code.

Before I released this tarball I fixed the following two bugs:
* All the temporary pictures are now being removed after they’re no longer needed;
* The “Pages to Export” dialog is no longer being shown if there’s only one image/document loaded;

Today I also created an entry for OCRFeeder in GNOME Live as I think the project is related to our favorite DE.

So go on and enjoy OCR made easy on GNOME!

So tomorrow after lunch I’m heading down to Vigo to attend a conference by Richard Stallman, yes, that one.

It will be the second time I see a presentation given by him. The first one was in Badajoz, back in 2007 at OSWC.
He’s not by far the better or most enthusiastic speaker I watched in our Open Source world but it’s nice to attend his talk, specially if it’s your first time.
If you’re attending and haven’t been into this small world of FOSS, I hope he inspires you to come in, the door’s always open. If you’ve been living in it for a while, then I hope he remembers you its basis and makes you proud to be part of something (still) so ahead of our times.

An important thing to mention is that Igalia had rented a bus that will get people from A Coruña, Pontevedra and Santiago de Compostela there. The bus is prioritized for employees but not restricted to. It’s available for anyone who asks up to go and obviously limited to its number of seats. Yup, Igalia is just great and I’m proud to be a part of it.

Even though I got up later today (don’t really understand why the damn time should change… would we die if there was a fix hour for summer/winter time?) but wanted to do a bit of hacking in OCRFeeder.

So, I did some tiny enhancements that you can check out by updating your SVN repo.

Here you got a couple of screenshots cause everybody loves them:

So, it’s the middle of the week and I’m posting about last weekend (yeah, it’s sad…).

Last weekend I could do some work on Rancho and I committed a patch to make its width fluid, that is, to be relative to your screen resolution instead of having a fixed size. (let me know if it’s working right in your machine)
The rest of the day was dedicated to watching some movies with my girlfriend

On Sunday I had the pleasure to show the beautiful city of A Coruña to my parents who came to visit me.
We had a great lunch at La Penela, a restaurant in the main city’s square.
They really liked the city and the people and specially enjoyed the landscape where the sea meets land and the mix of buildings with traditional tapas cafes and small grocery stores.

You should also take a break and visit this kind city where, as the people here say, “No one is an outsider”.