Nexus One: after a few days

So far my impressions of this device are very positive. It's fast, it's very flexible, has loads of options (being a KDE user on Linux probably means I'm one of those people that just loves options) and looks nice to boot.

Like many people have commented all over the world, I think Google should try investing in better graphic and interaction designers for its operating system, Android, because in a first-impressions comparison the iPhone wins hands down in my opinion. The Android interface just seems more cluttered and chaotic and somehow less appealing and intuitive.

On the other hand finally having real multi-tasking is a blessing. Not being constrained anymore by Apple's weird decisions about what you can and cannot do with your phone is even better and the integration with all kinds of Google services by default is just the best part about it all.

But the Nexus One and Android do have some glaring faults. The touch buttons just below the screen are horrible: every time you write on the virtual keyboard and try to hit keys on the bottom row you run the risk of accidentaly hitting the Back or Home keys. That just plain sucks. I've tried an HTC Desire, which is basically the same phone, that has real buttons and it doesn't have that same problem because you need to press them with more force than you normally use for the touch screen.

Another big problem for me as a multi-lingual Dutchman living in Spain is that I very regularly switch languages while writing messages. I might be writing with several people at a time in three different languages and need to be able to switch with a single key-press. Not only is that not possible in Android, it doesn't even let you select a different language than the one you use for the operating system! So either you switch your entire phone from Spanish to English (including all Locale settings like dates, money and whatever) or you disable the keyboard corrections (which doesn't help too much, because I want the OS in English but I need the special keys for the Spanish language!).

But in the end, this being an Android phone from Google (which is definitely not Apple) , I'm sure that the problem can be solved looking around on the Market. Because where Apple says: "you can't do this", Google says: "go ahead, have fun".

So although the new iPhone 4 seems like a nice piece of hardware I'm glad to have "escaped" Apple's "clutches" (yeah, overly melodramatic, but hey, the post is already boring enough).

Nexus One

Today I got my Nexus One and I decided to do one of those silly unwrapping things, just for shits and giggles.

So this is the box it comes in:

And here is what is inside:

/proc/self/fd/0

cat somefile | cp /proc/self/fd/0 someotherfile

I never knew this was possible!

Now you might ask yourself what this is good for but just the other day I was wondering how I could turn a copy of a drive partition made with dd into a sparse file. For example this copies the entire first partition of your first disk to a file:

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=partition.backup

Of course, depending on the size of the partition this file can get quite large. But knowing that most of the time a disk contains a large number of empty blocks and at the same time Linux supports sparse files wouldn't it be great if the file would only contain the blocks that actually have any data in them?

Now, the dd command doesn't support sparse files, but cp does have a --sparse=always option. So you could just use that to make a sparse copy of the file. But then you would have two copies of a potentially very large file on your system, which you might not have room for.

So I had been wondering if there was a way to pipe the output of dd to the input of cp. For dd this is simple because by default it writes it's output to the standard output if you don't give it an output file name, but cp does no tsupport reading from the standard input... until I found the above option on the ntfsclone man page. Cool stuff!

PS: Quite often free blocks on a drive aren't actually empty, but might still be filled with old data that used to be stored there. In those cases it doesn't help trying to make a sparse copy. To remedy that situation you can use zerofree before making the copy of the partition.

Notion Ink´s Adam tablet

I've just watched this video and I must say: color me impressed! When you read the comparison with Apple's iPad you'll see that Apple will have a difficult time convincing people that their product is really worth the price they're asking for it. I mean, this Adam thing actually has all that you would expect in a product like this: regular USB ports, HDMI output and even a swivel around camera. Overall a really nice job, let's see if they can pull it off. They're supposed to come out in june so Apple willl have a 2 month head start.