In my last post, I asked why couldn’t Nokia deliver a system wide portrait keyboard for the N900? In this post I am glad to tell you that the community has once again stood up to the challenge and produced a system wide portrait keyboard that can be used by any app automatically.
The ‘portrait-keyboard’ package by Robin Burchell and Frals is available in extras-devel and once installed, it replaces the inbuilt virtual keyboard and pops up in its place wherever you need to enter text be it Conversations, Notes, Web …

The Nokia N900 PR 1.2 firmware came out for yesterday. UK users got it over the air yesterday itself while the rest of us will be getting the much sought after fix for the N900 today. But if you do not wish to update over the air, or cannot do so because you do not have enough free space in the rootfs, or for some other reason and you also happen to have a Mac then here is how you can update.

Updating on a Mac is much easier than having to manually flash on a Windows machine …

There are tonnes of times when you open the camera cover to take pictures and then forget to close it once you are done. The result is that the camera lens keeps accumulating dust and that is something no N900 owner wants.

Enter ‘Lens Cover Reminder’ by nicolai that notifies you of an open lens cover by displaying a small icon in the status bar, as soon as you close the cover it vanishes. In cases where you somehow happen to ignore it, the phone will vibrate when you use the …

Last time we told you about the awesome Lfocus hack that allows you to get manual focus in the video mode on the N900. Apart from that the same hack (packaged as a .deb for easy installation) also gives you the ability to turn off the annoying red light during video capture and even turn on the LEDs for better lighting. If you have not installed the Lfocus app, use the following part else skip to the next section.

In order to get started you will need to download the script, …

The world has been anxiously waiting for the PR 1.2 firmware for the N900 for what seems like ages now. The release date speculation thread has crossed 4 thousand posts and we have numerous others that keep popping up.

It is common knowledge that the code has been frozen for quite some time now, so what then is causing the delay? Does bug fixing and testing really take so much time? Apparently it does, read on for some of the reasons as to why the world’s favorite firmware is delayed.

The N900 records video in the 800 x 480 resolution and is one of the few Nokia devices to be able to focus before starting to capture video. But if the position of the subject changes, the N900 is not able to keep up as the focus remains fixed once the video capture has started. This however is about to change.
m2cm2c has put together a python script using v4l2-ctl that allows you to change the focus during capture. It adds two buttons to the status bar that allow you to …

Yesterday we told you that the N900 had been overclocked to run at speeds upto 1GHz. Since then a lot of people have tried overclocking their N900′s for that speed bump and have reported that the N900 stays stable and performs faster even after being overclocked.

But before you start flashing your own N900, please keep in mind a few of the ramifications …

As promised, Day 1 is here and with it comes the first release of MeeGo for the N900. As of now this release is intended for the experienced N900 hackers only and should be of little interest to the majority of N900 users. Once installed on the N900 you will see that there is no GUI (Graphical User Interface) and the activity is limited to the terminal only.

If you have decided that you absolutely need MeeGo on your N900, there are numerous ways to install it. You can get pre-built images …

One really nice aspect of the the N900 is its four completely customizable screens, but setting them up sometimes becomes a problem. You keep wondering if there is nicer, more efficient or better looking way of placing your bookmarks, shortcuts, contacts and widgets.
For those of you who like a organized homescreen, the sheer fluidity of the setup process sometimes makes it difficult to align those icons symmetrically. This post aims to fix, that. First is an amazing application called Tweakr (available from the extras-devel) that allows icons to snap to …

There is no call blocking application for the N900 yet, but that hasn’t stopped Vinu Thomas from coming up with a hack that lets you do just that. He clearly mentions that this is a stop gap arrangement until until steps up to create a real application with this functionality. What I’d like is an SMS blocking app as well, as SMS spam has really increased over the last one year or so.

Anyway, if you are being plagued by unwanted callers and have had enough, here’s how to get rid …