Random Notes

As my first OpenRepos release ever, Pitot is now available for download there. You can find it here.

This is just a temporary step to get the app available for people until it is accepted in Harbour, the Jolla app store.

I removed my old blog at nicd.nytsoi.net today and pointed Nginx to serve a permanent redirect to this site instead. The old blog served me from my days on the once free webhost 3rror.com, to my first webhotel and from there through three different VPS installations to where we are now. When I started, WordPress wasn't the household name it now is and the web was very different. I wrote for years about stuff I saw, did and felt…

And I'm glad the blog is gone. Because that shit was embarrassing. Funny how your opinion of your own cleverness changes when time passes. Also I got fed up with updating WP every two weeks and fearing that the next time I visited, it would've been replaced with greetings from my friendly neighborhood hacker group. Aaand I had stopped posting somewhere in 2011.

RIP in pieces.

Pitot -- my SailfishOS GPS/GLONASS speedometer app -- has reached a state where I'm confident to release it for others to use. You can download the RPM in the BitBucket repository.

Some screenshots showing the basic functionality below:

Some notes about the accuracy when using with the Jolla phone:

• It takes a long time to get a location when you are moving. This is due to the phone's GPS being pretty bad. I don't know of a way to alleviate it in the app.
• Jolla's speed readings come rounded to around 0.25 m/s. So for example when walking, the app will report 4.5 and 5.4 km/h but nothing in between. To my knowledge this cannot be changed from the app either.

The app is feature complete and I'll just wait until QtPositioning is allowed in Harbour to publish it. There's still one little problem, the font is really jagged and ugly. I tried following a Jolla employee's instructions in setting the text's renderType to Text.NativeRendering but it seems to have no effect. I'll take a better look at that later. (Also the logo is quite ugly, but I'm bad at graphics, so any help on that would be much appreciated!)

If you encounter any problems, I'd appreciate bug reports or even pull requests in the BitBucket repository!

An interesting look into a chinese Bitcoin mine and what working there is like. It's funny to think that since the video was made, all that hardware has probably been made obsolete and replaced already.

Now, if I could just find my Bitcoin wallet with the 0.07 BTC I mined a while ago, I'd… have enough money to buy some candy. :)

"Stop a Douchebag" - is a Russian youth movement that attempts to enforce the road traffic regulations in Russia.

This is seriously great stuff. I've selected one video here, but you can see many more on their YouTube channel. In case you want to see idiots get what they deserve, this is the right channel for you.

My work laptop got its first sticker today -- a Code from Finland sticker. I think it's a nice idea of marketing that we do our work in Finland, employing Finnish people and boosting the domestic economy. Kind of akin to the Key Flag Symbol for other products.

You can check koodiasuomesta.fi for more info.

Disclaimer: I work for Vincit Oy, where the idea originated. But there's currently over 90 companies on board.

First post of undoubtedly many to come in my SailfishOS adventures. This time it's to tell about a small app I made during the weekend.

Pitot is a simple GPS/GLONASS speedometer for Sailfish. It will display the current speed of the device in big letters on the screen. It has a few different units, including kilometers per hour, meters per second, miles per hour and even knots.

It still needs some polish and a good smart cover. Also, it can't be released in the Jolla Harbour yet, since it uses QtPositioning to get the speed.

Having used it a couple of times, it seems that the Jolla phone's GPS is really terrible, though, since it takes ages to get a speed reading and when you do, the readings jump up and down even though your speed is constant. It also seems the resolution of the speed readings is too bad for trying to measure walking speed – I either get 4.5 or 5.4 kph, nothing in between.

Hopefully I get enough time to finish it next weekend. Now I'll have to be off to work!

I just literally opened this site about an hour ago and I'm already getting scanned for vulnerabilities.

blog: 62.210.248.36 - - [01/Feb/2015:20:25:10 +0200] "GET /vtigercrm/test/upload/vtigercrm.txt HTTP/1.1" 404 162 "-" "curl/7.29.0"

Isn't the Internet amazing?

Slow sunday. Wife is at work. Dog is happily sleeping behind me. The best time to set up that pesky blog I've been thinking about for ages. Though, calling it a blog is a bit too much. More like a place to put all my random thoughts and snippets (usually about technology and programming).

So, this site is going to be the replacement for nicd.nytsoi.net, which has served me well over the years. Nowadays the content is too embarrassing to display publicly and Wordpress is getting too annoying to keep updating every week. Since I have no use for any advanced features, I'm moving everything over to this ultra simple Laine-powered site. Google+ was another option, but I'm really getting wary of the amount of data they have on me, so I've set a long term goal to ditch Google services. This will be a good first step, though G+ was pretty nice for what it did.

My intention is not to start actual blogging or post in any scheduled way, but more just dump all my small thoughts and observations so I can link to them easily in case I wish to display my ignorance for others. This will also serve as a good test site for Laine.

Well, go and explore!