Zaheer Abbas Merali

So the Nokia Music Store launched today in the UK. A few observations:

• On a PC, this site can only be accessed by Internet Explorer. What milennium are we living in?
• On phones/mobile devices, only the Nokia N95 8GB or a Nokia N81 can be used currently to access it. Surely on launch day, Nokia should have made sure that the other phones which they plan to make the store accessible by would have have had at least the ability to upgrade their software so that they can try out the store on launch.
• From what I can tell, all the audio is DRM’ed windows media. Amazon and iTunes stores have been for a while now selling non-DRM’ed music. Why launch a store now with no non-DRM option?
• The tracks are 80p, compared to iTunes’s 79p (for non-DRMed tracks also) and amazon’s 99 cents (about 50p). Does not sound too tempting, especially as the Nokia web browser is decent enough to browse on amazon’s site.

However, all in all, with the amount of people using their phones now in the UK as ipod replacements, it does seem like a shrewd move by Nokia to try and get more business from their phones. This and the ngage relaunch that Nokia are doing should ensure more after-purchase business from Nokia phone customers.

Alia and I have just got back from watching a preview showing of probably the funniest movie we’ve watched this year: Death at a Funeral. Highly recommended.

So I started working on working with DVB and encrypted streams at the end of last week. I have a DVB-S card (Technotrend S-1500) , a valid satellite cable, a CI daughterboard and a CAM that when given a valid viewing card should be able to decode encrypted streams. I spent quite a while with Kaffeine trying to get it working after verifying it works in the Dreambox. Kaffeine kept reporting some error code -2 which when I looked up pointed to a read/write error with the CAM. So I tried the work Alessandro has done in the SoC project this summer, and it just magically worked. I was impressed in a major way. It also works seamlessly and so allowed me to get flumotion-dvb working with hardware CAMs very quickly. If you want to play around, you will need CVS head of gst-plugins-bad and trunk of flumotion-dvb (along with trunk of flumotion of course).

Obviously, I have only tested all this with DVB-S. If someone is willing to send me a DVB-T card with a CI interface such as a Technotrend T-1500 and a CAM that supports top up tv/Setanta in the UK, I will happily test this for them and write up how to watch or stream a DVB-T channel with flumotion (encoded in Ogg/Theora/Vorbis of course).

Update: Of course I would take a DVB-C card (and a CAM that supports virgin media uk) also and try and get Virgin to install a tv package here so I can get DVB-C working.

Like many, I made use of the extra hour last weekend to extend my night out on Saturday. Alia and I were invited to an Eid party organised by a friend at a restaurant in Covent Garden. Of course with 18 months spent living in the centre of Barcelona and 0 days living in central London, my knowledge of the small roads in London leaves a lot to be desired. I decided with modern technology, I needn’t look on the map before I left with how to get to the restaurant. Alia was invited to a bridal shower of a friend of hers and would be coming back later so I was alone on the way. I decided beforehand to install an e-book reader for my Nokia 770 and a public domain book to keep myself entertained on the journey. Knowing central London and the parking situation especially on a Saturday night, I decided to take the tube into London (it helped knowing that on the way back I would have a lift). The tube was pleasant enough, I got to my local tube station and didn’t have to wait long for a train. In the train, there were a lot of weirdly dressed people. I realised later that the Saturday night just gone was the Haloween party night. Undeterred, I took out my Nokia 770 and started reading the book I had downloaded. I then realised first-hand what Josep meant when he told me about how great an experience it is reading e-books on the Nokia tablets. When I got to Covent Garden, I took out my Nokia N95 and went straight to the Maps application. I searched for the road that the restaurant was on and told it to plan a route there. The GPS lock was quick due to the use of A-GPS to get a quick fix. I followed the route with the application tracking me and reached the restaurant within 2-3 minutes. The last year way of doing this would have been to ask random people in the area if they knew where the road was and how to get there. With about 5 or 6 people asked on the route all giving me slightly different directions, I would have got there.

Since I got my Nokia 770 a few weeks ago, my main uses have been:

1. casual browsing and jabber IM
2. responding to Nagios alarms using the Terminal and openssh, wherever I am
3. testing the mosque’s audio streams using the Internet Radio application

The 1st and 2nd uses would be made much more efficient and less frustrating with a built-in keyboard. Also the GPS would be much better with a high-res screen like on the Nokia tablets than on the N95.

Thank you Bastien for the This is Anfield audio cd. I received it in the post this morning.

Update: I forgot to thank Iain for gifting it to Bastien in the first place!

Christian Schaller, ever the hospitable host, cooked the Norwegian national dish ( fårikål ) for us yesterday with halal lamb. I have to say that even though i am not a fan me cabbage that it was delicious. Thank you Christian.