A couple of interesting things have been announced recently. Two separate announcements, both pretty cool. Steam is coming out for the Mac, and Crysis 2 is coming out in Q4 2010.

These things in and of themselves aren’t big deals, and in fact have been known or at least suspected for some time. The news riding along is what holds the greatness.

I’m a simple man with simple needs. The Nokia N900 is awesome. There is a huge body of people developing cool applications for Maemo 5, the N900’s operating system. In fact, I only have a few problems, none of them very large problems.

For instance, there’s no Shazam app for the N900. I used that program all the time on my old phone to identify music in restaurants and on the radio.

You can’t have multiple ringtones on the N900, for instance giving each contact a custom ringtone. Not a big deal, but still odd that the N900 doesn’t allow it. In fact, that feature is so common in all phones now, it’s not even anything I thought to investigate when researching the N900.

The biggest problem for me was reading RSS feeds in Google Reader. I love Google Reader. On my pc. The interface is a little hard to use on the tiny N900 screen, and using the iPhone’s mobile Google Reader interrface doesn’t sort feeds by web site, nor does it act at all like I want it to.

This was a problem, and I have even been evaluating other web-based feed readers for a better mobile interface, when I read about Grr.

I occasionally take it upon myself to ramble about how great Blender is. As soon as the 2.5 release is finished I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to talk about, though production-wise I’m locked into using 2.49 for a few more months, for safety and compatibility’s sake.

I’ve toyed around with Blender’s Video Sequence Editor (aka video editor) previously, but not much. I used it for a slide show once, I used it to put a watermark on a video, but nothing more complicated than that.

It wasn’t until this week that I actually used it to do some heavy-duty editing. An 11 minute video, broken up by scenes, and I used Blender’s VSE to stitch it all together and tweak the timing.

One of the reasons I bought an N900 was so I could put a 16GB microSD card in it and use it as an mp3 player. The N900 has 32GB of storage–about 26GB of that are available due to the N900 needing about 6GB for system files. Adding a 16GB SD card makes 40GB total available for files such as mp3s.

I don’t even have 40GB of mp3s on this device, because I need to save space for downloaded files, photos, etc. Right now I have maybe 35GB of music on my N900, split between the internal storage and the microSD card. This, by the way, from someone who nearly ran out of space on a 120GB Zune. 110GB – all music, no videos (the Zune Pass subscription service was primarily to blame).

Right now the device has 8,465 songs on it, according to the N900’s default media player.

If you have or want an N900, then I’m sure it has something to do with it’s amazing web capabilities.

Here’s a quick run down of my experiences with the 2 main browsers you’ll play with, the default ‘microB’ and Firefox.

I’ve started and stopped this post about a dozen times. The N900 is a relatively new device, and a lot of the times I start to write something, I think, “Oh, maybe it works this way…” and I get sidetracked by playing with my new phone for another while.

Then I get into forum posts, wikis, tutorials, etc. I completely forget I even started a blog post.

Trying not to get in over my head here, I’m going to try and write a lot of small posts instead of one big one.

First, let’s talk about T-Mobile. I had the phone for a day before I got my T-Mobile SIM, so I already had 40GB of mp3s put on it, as well as a lot of games, apps, email accounts, etc.

Guess who has an N900? I’ll give you a clue, it’s me.

So even though I was a bit worried in previous posts, I eventually got enough info that led me to just mellow out and wait for the damned packages to arrive.

I have to say, I was mentally going over my history of tech, and it seems like every time I’ve wanted a device this bad the experience of actually receiving the device has usually been marred

Okay guys, I’m seriously trying not to constantly post about the N900. That said, there’s another N900 post coming up in a day or so but, like this post, it’s just a link to some video.

The one problem I had with the N900 thus far is it’s lack of a really good twitter client. I’ve heard good things about the few clients that were available, but I want the advanced features I’ve come to expect from desktop apps like Seesmic and TweetDeck, but with a finger-friendly interface.

Well as this video from Nokia Experts claims (and shows), Witter delivers:

Can’t wait to try it out. I was all set to buy an N900 this month, but unfortunately I had a few financial problems, so it’ll be a few more months. Dammit!

Till then,

Lark

I had a N800, the first or one of the first mobile devices to use the Mozilla web rendering engine. I really didn’t notice any difference between Mozilla’s engine and the N800’s stock engine, so it wasn’t a big deal to me.

In addition, it wasn’t a big deal to me when I heard that Firefox for Mobile would be used on the N900, either. Until I heard that it supports Mozilla Weave.

Weave is an addon for Firefox that syncs bookmarks and passwords like Xmarks, but in addition it also syncs history and tabs that are open on your other devices. I just started using it today (on my desktop and netbook, I don’t own an N900 yet), so I’ll have a more in-depth Weave post in a few days. Watch this short video to see Firefox’s mobile browser in action on the N900 (Weave is only touched upon briefly), I’ll talk about more after.

Imagine you’re at your desktop, reading an article online, waiting for a friend to come pick you up. You get a text, your friend is outside. You go to a restaurant where there’s a 30-minute wait. You can now pull out your phone and resume reading the article you were reading at home. After that, you can continue your browsing in full on the N900, because it supports the full web.

That’s really cool. Another reason to buy one.

Lark

You know what I haven’t posted in just under 2 months? This Maemo 5/N900 video:

Since the N900’s out now, it just occurred to me to throw this video up again.

Because I like it.

Lark