I am starting to find my way in this new school. It has lots of challenging children who all want to be gangsters for some potty reason. There’s nothing funnier than seeing a 14 year old strutting around trying to act grown up. The dopey ones are also amusing.

While the children might be mad as fish, and the building all scuffed and one of those concrete monstrosities from the 60’s the staff are good and there is a definite feeling of working together - “yeah, the kids are mental, we know what you mean. Want a hand?”. You can accidentally wander through someone’s classroom and the teachers just say “hello” and might stop to chat for a while. Having a departmental office helps, as does having it in the middle of all the computer rooms so moving from one lesson to another is often a case of walking through a door or down a set of steps.

Now how to crack the problem of children who can’t be bothered. Some of them couldn’t care less and come from families who only send their kids in to school because it’s less hassle. It’s different to the last place, but it does make a change having children who don’t care, compared to highly intelligent rich kids who can’t be bothered. There’s a changing of mental gears that goes on - for some of the kids, the fact they turn up each day is an achievement.

It’s a challenge, but one of those challenges that are beneficial. Once I’ve been run through the wringer here I’ll be able to wander into any other school and not be too phased by crazies storming the room, running around and running out again (why invade a lesson? Surely it’s better to try and escape school?).

After ringing UPS and getting through to a human in a very short time (shouting “I want a human!” at the automated system seemed to work - it stopped part way through listing my options and said “Please wait while you are transferred to a customer service rep”. The robots are listening!) it was discovered my parcel had been given to my neighbour. Fair enough, so I sent my sister round, and by the time I had got home there was a nice box waiting for me.

It’s a nice bit of kit. It speaks to my network and browses the web perfectly. The screen is the right size and I can read full sized websites properly with no horizontal scrolling, proxied images or other weird PDAisms. Text entry is also quite a bit better than my Zodiac, with the onscreen keyboard being larger and the touchscreen more responsive. It has “finger detection” where pressing buttons or textboxes causes larger buttons to appear. Tap a text entry box with the stylus and the small keyboard appears, tap it with a finger or sausage and thumb-sized buttons come up instead.

As usual I can’t leave things alone. Within three hours of owning the N800 I’d bricked it… All I did was install an SSH server, ssh into it and become root. Then I installed some software which told me it needed a reboot. So what did I do? Reboot it by typing “reboot” into the ssh session.

Evidently this was a Bad Thing to do. It did reboot but then things were subtly broken. Neither the web browser or control panel worked. I got the unhelpful message of “The application Web.application has terminated due to internal error” (or something similar). OOh bugger, I just broke my new toy. Now since this is a pre-installed device, it must have a way to reset the contents to factory defaults. The Palm has one, so does Pocket PC.

From looking round the web the only thing I could find was instructions on how to flash a new OS image into the device. Well, if that’s what was required, it was my only option so I downloaded the OS image and flashing program, accepting the scary “this software might not work and is not supported, voids your warranty, causes the sky to fall in and dogs to turn into cats” warning and began flashing.

It was all over in a few seconds. One power cycle later and it was back to normal, asking me what time it was and where it was.

Well at least I managed to unbrick it in a way that doesn’t require screwdrivers or a trip back to Nokia. It’s Linux, so when it breaks you get to put it back together

Now to investigate software development. This device sorely needs a good music player that can handle MP3s and OGG files in a sort of iPOD way. None of these media players that play single files and have a video window, or play just one file type and not another. I want something I can run then stick in my car without fuss. I wonder if porting XMMS2 would be tricky. The N800 runs Linux, GNOME and a few extra bits. I might not have to rewrite much.