Simon Huggins's blog

Fri, 23 Jun 2006

9300i Putty UTF-8 Trick

I can't claim any credit on this one; James Rice told me about having met the author of Putty Simon Tatham in the pub. Anyway, if you want to switch the version of putty into utf-8 mode when you run it from your phone you can (simply?!) use:


I tried to work out what this means and in the end asked some chiark users who pointed me at a list of terminal escape codes which explains that ESC % G means switch to UTF-8.

For reference there is also a UTF-8 bug on sourceforge for s2putty but for me at least with the above fix mutt redraws happily.

Fri, 12 May 2006

SSH on the go.

I know every other geek in the world has had this forever via a variety of devices and indeed I was able to get net access with my trusty 6310i, bluetooth and my laptop. But I rarely did. Mostly I think because I didn't take my laptop everywhere but also because when I did, getting it all out and setup was a pain.

I have managed to get my contacts onto my 9300i not using gnokii (gnapplet doesn't like me) or SyncML (I still haven't tcpdump'd the stuff it sends to try to fix up the opensync/multisync syncml bits) or the phone's backup manager (nothing seems to read contacts.cdb in linux which is apparently a Psion 5 file type?) but using a piece of software called Best Vcard. It's not amazing but it is at least free (small f) and it's meant that I can start using the phone as my main phone. I exported to the MMC card, used a flash reader on my linux box and put my vcards that gnokii saved onto that. After a few round trips with some more massaging of the data I'm more or less where I want to be.

But the point of this post (well other than providing the relevant google juice for people with a 9300i that want to try to get their contacts onto it) was to say that ssh on the go is really nice. It's great to be able to check my email at any point just by flipping my phone open. I haven't had to test it during an outage yet (and hopefully I never will) but it's nice to know it's there.

I have got irssi proxying my IRC out to different ports but that's a bit hackish. If anyone knows a good IRC proxy that takes multiple servers onto one port that would be useful. psyBNC should in theory but in practice it seems to connect to each server very slowly and then periodically just drop the connections and get very confused by one user having multiple servers defined.

I must find time to hack on the SyncML stuff.

Mon, 24 Apr 2006

Toy (part 1)

Woo! One of my new toys arrived this weekend and I now have a Nokia 9300i. It's a phone-cum-PDA but it's not too big and the idea is I'll eventually replace my 6300i with it and maybe change providers.

It does indeed work and the interface is a little odd but I think that's just me getting used to Symbian. I got it working with my AP after I realised which field was SSID and which one was merely a nickname for the network (after all using SSID would confuse people wouldn't it?). So then I grabbed putty to it (zipped) and realised it didn't come with any unzip program. I think there's a lot I need to configure up before I'm entirely happy but I'm getting there.

The big issue I have at the moment is getting at its address book. It supports SyncML but the only Free syncml tools are multisync which connected but then didn't work (I've yet to tcpdump) and some 76meg Java based monstrosity called sync4j which just scares me. All I want is some text and numbers from the phone after all. Gnokii has its own applet that installs on the phone that I've yet to try; this might end up being the most sane approach after all.

Once I have the addressbook swapped over I think I can use it as my main phone and then the other configuration bits will just fall out as I work things out.

My other toy also arrived today ;)