Archive for September, 2006

Funny translations

Monday, September 18th, 2006

Yesterday I needed to open a zip file on my mobile phone, so I had my first encounter with ZipMan, which was preinstalled on the phone; I knew it was there, but I never used it in two years with my Nokia 6600. After the program started, I was presented with this cryptic message (in Italian):

“Lime del Zip del socio con ZipMan?”

It’s so completely meaningless that it took me a few seconds to realize what it meant, then I almost fell on the floor laughing. I don’t know if “to file” in English is used in the sense of working on an object with a file (the tool, not the computer abstraction), but if that’s the case, the back-translation to English could be (with some interpretation, as the original is incorrect to start with):

“File the Zip of the associate with ZipMan?”

I’m sure none of my associates would like me to apply a file to their zips.

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Go, TomTom GO

Thursday, September 14th, 2006

My father got a TomTom GO 510 as a gift. Interesting piece of hardware and it runs Linux, so there’s no way I’ll keep my hands off of the internals for long.

git

Wednesday, September 6th, 2006

git is wonderful. I converted my repository from CVS to git and set up gitweb in minutes (save the time needed to read the docs thrice to make sure I was doing things correctly).

Bluetooth and Nokia 6600 with Linux

Sunday, September 3rd, 2006

Hamlet Bluetooth USB adapterFinally I bought a Bluetooth adapter to manage my Nokia 6600 mobile phone. It’s marketed as a “Hamlet Bluetooth USB Adapter”, but it really is a “Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle” according to lsusb. It works fine on Debian GNU/Linux using kernel 2.6.17, the BlueZ stack and kdebluetooth, but I had to update bluez-utils and bluez-libs to version 3.4 otherwise the phone wouldn’t see the PC…

Here’s a very nice add-on called GnuBox for your Symbian phone: it allows you to browse the Internet on your phone through your PC’s connection when you’re at home.

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