NOTE: I probably shouldn’t even be posting this. As I say later all images/specs of the N9 online are the result of unconfirmed rumors that are pretty widely contested for technical and logical reasons.

The current phone I would like to swaddle and carry around like a baby is the Nokia N9 (picture from SlashGear).

Nothing has been officially confirmed by Nokia yet. We’re not even sure the device pictured above is what the phone will look like (there are some pictures online of a black phone claiming to be the N9). EDIT: It sounds like the phone will be available in silver and black (the keyboard will be black on both versions).

Rumored specs: (found here, originally obtained here I think)

Did a little surfing around yesterday looking for new or updated animation programs. Currently in my spare time I’m using Blender for 2d animation, but I try to keep updated on proper 2d animation programs.

Apparently everyone is wrong. The internet is not a series of tubes. It is a series of windows. Copying a file illegally is apparently identical to breaking a window and stealing physical property. According to US Vice President Joe Biden.

Hey, it least he didn’t call proponents of copyright reform radical extremists, then blatantly lie about it, as Canada’s heritage minister did (and oh yes, he did call them radical extremists, as the end of the linked article points out, it’s on tape).

No no, our VP simply chose to blatantly lie about the damage and impact of file sharing, trying to make it sound like something dangerous and violent–evil, really, when in fact it’s something that is mostly harmless (“Downloads have an effect on sales that is statistically indistinguishable from zero.”) and largely blown out of proportion–the actions of both sides, file sharers and the RIAA, are more misguided than anything else.

Perhaps more on this later, I’ve got a rant brewing, but whether it gets posted or not only time will tell.

Till then,

Lark

So let’s retrace my old steps.

I bought an eeePC 701. Loved it. Don’t mind the tiny keyboard. Prefer it, actually, because my fingers are now used to moving and pressing down less than on any of my other full-size keyboards.

Upgraded to an eeePC 901. Bigger screen. Better battery life. Loved the flat finish of the 701 and the beveled edges. By contrast the 901 is just a glossy, rounded fingerprint magnet. With crappy speakers. I don’t regret buying it. It does everything I bought it for, and I have watched many a season of TV shows on it during long car trips.

Can’t really use either outdoors, in bright sunlight. I’ve tried.

Got my eye out for a netvertible now. Use it like a netbook, or fold the touch-screen back and use it like a tablet. Hopefully could write on it with a stylus and stop using so much paper. Looking at:

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.