Author: chuma

A few weeks ago I caught wind of a new portable computer, called the Pepper Pad. Obligatory product feature photo:

Link to actual photo I was immediately drawn to it for a number of reasons:

• It’s very much like a Newton on steroids: an 800×600 touch-sensitive screen, in the middle of a split QWERTY layout thumb keyboard as well as a D-Pad and scroll wheel for input. No HWR input though, but that’s not the focus of the OS…
• A whack of standard I/O possibilities: USB, Bluetooth, IR, SD/MMC slot, 802.11b, sound in/out, composite video out
• 20GB hard drive, 256MB of RAM, powered by Linux 2.4 and a 600MHz Intel XScale CPU
• Software that sounds really darn nice… the focus of the OS is as an information tablet, sort of what I’m trying to accomplish passively with my info board, but with a built-in Mozilla based browser, e-mail, AIM, music/photo/video libraries (supporting MP3/MPEG1/MPEG2/MPEG4 at least), and a journal.

Now, lots of people will say “screw this, for my $850 I’m buying a laptop.” Sure, a laptop is nice, and you can run Windows/Linux/OS X and do whatever the heck you want on it, but I don’t want or need that kind of horsepower on my lap. It’s in my office. What I do want to do is surf easily from the couch, and not have to worry about defragmenting my C: drive or that my CPU temperature alarm is going off. I want it to work. The Newton delivered on this, and if these Pepper guys can hit the same mark, I want in.

Well, one week later, the info board software is good to go. It boots up, connects to the wireless network no problem, and starts up into links in graphic mode, full-screen, and pulls up the info page, which displays:

• Weather Forecast (via the excellent RSSWeather)
• CBC News Headlines (via CBC RSS)
• IMDB News Headlines (love that RSS)
• GO Train Service Updates (via my page-scraping one-liner)
• Links to Maptuit routing, GO Train schedule tables, toronto.com, and a Canada411 search form
• The latest traffic camera image from 401 and Harwood (courtesy of the Ministry of Transportation COMPASS system)

Refreshing every hour. Mmmm, RSS….

Now to figure out how to mount it. It may end up just being affixed to a piece of plywood or a 1×3 wood frame and then using that to hang it.

I got the 802.11b networking finally, thanks to double-checking the SSID (note: SSIDs are case sensitive!) and upgrading the kernel for good measure. Ended up scrapping SVGAlib and installing an X server and using links on XWindows with no window manager, just one full-screen browser window. Looks good! Now that I’m running XWindows though I could theoretically run Netscape 4… shudder. It probably has better JavaScript support though. Links handles some sites fine (like toronto.com, us.imdb.com), some a bit less than fine (Maptuit HTMLClient works to a degree), and some break horribly (anything using Maptuit ActiveMap). It is a fast little browser though.

There are still some hitches though. I installed mad perl packages on the machine because I’d like it to handle all of the scraping and parsing on its own. Also, I powered it off and then brought it back up this morning and it wouldn’t connect to the wireless network anymore. Crap…

It’s getting time to figure out how I’m gonna affix the panel to the back of the laptop again, and then where the unit is going to go and how it’s going to be interfaced… if I could rip the integrated keyboard and trackpoint out of the thing and mount it externally… I’m going to need to experiment on this.

Well Sandy loved my infoboard idea, so I’m slowly moving ahead with it. I’ve been trying hard to get 802.11b drivers running on RedHat 6.2, but it’s just not flying. I’m going to have to try and upgrade the little laptop to RedHat 8.0 so I get a 2.4 kernel, and then things should be good to go. (Hope I can manage that on 16MB of RAM!)

In the meantime, I’ve been taking the scripts I used to use to send weather and news headlines to my cell phone and making them output a simple HTML page instead. The plan is for the laptop to display this page using Links 2, a lightweight browser that supports graphics, tables, and JavaScript, and also can display using SVGAlib. It also makes testing a snap as I can run Links in a window on my Linux box and set the resolution.

Here’s what the page looks like so far. It won’t refresh. Yeah, I know it’s really simple, but it should do the job. Plus I’ve still got some room on the 800×600 screen, not quite sure what else to put on there.

Instead of scraping web pages, I’m reading RSS feeds (from rssweather.com and cbc.ca) and writing out simple HTML. The CBC Top Stories link to the CBC website (which Links actually displays pretty well), which is nice. The clock is JavaScript. The GO Transit status is a lynx/sed one-liner that scrapes the page, since GO Transit’s website is still in the STONE AGE.

You might remember a long time ago I started to make a digital picture frame out of an old laptop I had. It was basicially finished except for the external stand or hanging hardware. However since I’ve worked on it we’ve moved twice and the hardware is still sitting in a box in the closet.

Lately I’ve been thinking about it again, and pressing it into service in another way: as a digital “info-board” for the ground floor of our house, where we often find ourselves wondering:

1. What’s the weather forecast?
2. What’s the phone number for (friend/relative/business)?
3. Anything else that might be useful

Assuming that my hardware hasn’t died after being in storage for so long, the same system should be up for the task. The one major thing that’s changed is that I’m no longer using a crappy RangeLAN2 network, but I’ve graduated to full 802.11b. Also I’d have to figure out how to display the above information. I was using an SVGAlib-based image viewer before, since the hardware only has 16MB of RAM to speak of. There is a half-decent web browser called links that will use SVGAlib. I could whip up a portal that would show basic information on the screen using links…