Random Notes

Viewing posts for tag jolla.

TOHKBD Review

If there’s one thing I miss from the old pre-touchscreen phones we used to have, it’s physical keyboards. Physical QWERTY keyboards, to be exact. From the Nokia 6800 series, to the Communicators, the E70 and all the way to the N900, I’ve always loved their typing speed and power, especially with regards to terminal usage where special characters are essential. Sadly, after Nokia’s betrayal and the subsequent flop with the N950, the market wasn’t looking that good. There were mostly a couple of Android phones, but I’ve never been a fan of the OS.

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TOHKBD

My wife just sent me an email that the TOHKBD I have been waiting for has finally arrived! I believe this accurately displays my feelings right now.

I will be posting pictures of the unboxing and some sort of review of using it later this week (no promises, but I’ll try).

AAAAAA! 😊

The Future is Now: IPv6 Dual Stack with Sailfish


Update 2015-06-08: With the latest update, 1.1.6.27 Aaslakkajärvi, there’s no longer need to do this from the command line. You can now find the same setting in the Settings app, System → Mobile network → long press your mobile connection and select Edit → select “Dual” in the “Protocol” dropdown. It seems you still need to reboot the mobile network connection after doing this, so I suggest you disable and re-enable it just to be sure.


IPv6 has surely been a long time coming. First RFC’d in 1996, it has been 19 years and it’s still not widely available. In Finland none of the three major ISPs offer IPv6 for regular broadband services. We are way past the end of IPv4 address space, but so far no one has seemed to care.

Times are changing, though, at least in Finland. The Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority — FICORA — has dedicated the 9th of June this year as the National IPv6 launch day. Any ISP participating must enable IPv6 permanently for all or selected contract types. All the big ISPs are on board, so the future is looking good. So far DNA has opened the game by enabling IPv6 on all of their mobile data packages. And not just some lame transition technology, they have native dual stack IPv4 and IPv6 on the same network, giving a /64 prefix to each client. Elisa have also started IPv6 trials on selected mobile contracts. No word yet from Sonera. Hopefully this will eventually push them to add IPv6 for non-wireless broadband too.

As I have a DNA mobile contract, I obviously had to enable IPv6 straight away. My phone runs Sailfish OS, which got dual stack support in the latest update (1.1.4.29 Äijänpäivänjärvi). There’s no UI for it yet, so it has to be enabled through a D-Bus message. The command for enabling dual stack is the following:

/bin/dbus-send --system --print-reply --dest=org.ofono /ril_0/context1 org.ofono.ConnectionContext.SetProperty string:"Protocol" variant:string:"dual"

It can be executed without devel-su. Note that the mobile network must be down when executing the command. So it’s easiest to turn airplane mode on while running it. The setting persists through reboots.

Suddenly, IPv6!

Based FingerTerm.
As you can see, my public IPv4 address is different from the internal one (it's NAT'd), but IPv6 allows for direct connectivity.

This is a good start, really looking forward to an IPv6 enabled Internet. Thanks, FICORA! 😊

PS.: If you tried the above and want to go back to single stack IPv4, you need to change the command so that the last part says variant:string:"ip".

Pitot on OpenRepos

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.

Pitot released

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:

Screenshot 1

Screenshot 2

Screenshot 3

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

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!

SailfishOS: Pitot

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.

Screenshot 1Screenshot 2

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!