I received my FritzBox 7170 today, as a present from XS4ALL for renewing my ADSL subscription for another year (cheap deal — I would have done that anyway). And it totally blows away my Thompson Speedtouch!

As regular readers of this blog may remember, the Speedtouch doesn’t properly support the “exposed host” feature, whereby all incoming traffic on any port is redirected to a single machine on the internal network, in combination with Voice Over IP. I eventually came up with a really crappy workaround for that, but it never really worked nicely. Also, I never quite managed to explain to the Speedtouch that when a machine on the internal network tried to access 82.95.250.5, it should be sent to the internal address of my server, rather than get stuck in a loop trying to forward traffic to itself.

Well, the FritzBox didn’t have either of these problems. Port forwarding was just a few mouse-clicks away, and configuring VOIP in combination with that was trivially easy. Despite the fact that the router seems to have much more options than my Speedtouch (in ‘Expert mode’, at least), it is much easier to configure thanks to the well-organized menu structure.

So now I have it setup exactly the way I want it: all external traffic gets forwarder to my Linux server at 10.0.0.1, VOIP is handled by the FritzBox (I can even connect my ISDN modem to it!) and when a machine on the WLAN wants to access mwolf.net, it gets sent to 10.0.0.1 as it should. I couldn’t be happier.

Except.. There is one setting in the menu which worries me a bit. On the “Provider Services” tab of the “Network” menu, there is an option called “Permit automatic updates” which apparently allows my service provider to change the device’s settings without having to ask my permission. This setting is enabled and the checkbox is greyed-out so that I cannot disable it:

Suspicious checkbox

Needless to say, I don’t really like the idea of anybody being able to mess around with the gateway to my local network without my consent. Now, I do generally trust XS4ALL, which has a reputation to uphold when it comes to respecting its users’ digital autonomy and privacy, so I assume that there’s an innocent reason for the fact that this checkbox cannot be easily unchecked by the user. I have already mailed AVM, the makers of the FritzBox, about this, and I plan to contact XS4ALL tomorrow. Let’s see what they say about it.

UPDATE: false alarm, fortunately! Turns out it’s just a bit of a misleading user interface. The “permit automatic updates” option is dependent on the “allow automatic configuration” option above it. So when the latter is disabled, the former becomes greyed-out because it is no longer applicable. However, the software remembers what it was set to, resulting in a checkbox which incorrectly suggests that it is still enabled. If it makes you feel better, you can temporarily re-enable the “allow automatic configuration” option, then uncheck the “permit automatic updates” box and then disable automatic configuration again.

In a little over a month, I will be

years old.

What’s that, you didn’t get it? Here, I’ll repeat it for you in terms you may understand more easily:

At work, it has become a bit of a tradition that when people announce their birthday, they do so in an at least somewhat obfuscated format. Hexadecimal, binary and more obscure number formats are always popular, of course, as are silly descriptions of the form “my age is the ninth distinct biprime“. But last year I decided to take it to the next level, and write a little generator in Ruby for expressions such as the ones you see above. As you can probably guess, the expressions are generated using TeX.

You can play with it for yourself, if you want to, and also download the latest version of the code. But please be gentle with my server, as you can probably guess it’s a rather heavy application and I’m running this site on a little home PC..

(Bias alert: my friend Dirk-Jan works for Nokia in Finland as a project manager on the N810, so that made me a little more interested in this gadget than I would otherwise have been.)

With a 4.1″ screen, the N810 is a little bigger than your average PDA or smartphone. From the negative side, that means it’s just too large to comfortably fit in my pants pockets (especially since it still requires a separate phone to make UMTS calls — the device does not have built-in UMTS capability) while not being large or powerful enough to be a laptop replacement. From the positive side, it’s a lot more pleasant to do webbrowsing or e-mail on than a regular PDA (after all, not so long ago many people would have considered an 800-pixels-wide screen perfectly adequate for a laptop or even a desktop) while still fitting easily in a pocket of my jacket. My Sony Vaio SZ is pretty lightweight for a laptop with a full-sized keyboard, but I expect to leave it home more and more often now that I have the N810.

Apart from the size, it’s a really cool-looking toy: sleek, with good “fit and finish” and no more bumps and frillies on the outside than necessary. And of course there’s the slide-out keyboard, the lack of which was what made me decide to pass on the N800. In several reviews, I had read some complaints that it takes a while to get used to the keyboard, because there’s no space between the keys so it’s easy to unintentionally hit multiple keys at once. However, I didn’t have much trouble with that. The trick, in true Zen style, is not to worry about hitting multiple keys: just hit the one you’re aiming for right-on, without consciously avoiding the eight keys around it, and the keyboard will usually register only the one in the middle. On the other hand, if you try to awkwardly avoid hitting multiple keys by touching them with the edge of a finger or with a fingernail, typing will be slow and frustrating.

But of course, the real reason why I went for this device instead of the hundreds of other PDAs on the market, is that it runs Linux — Maemo to be precise. By default, you get a shell, a bunch of standard Unix tools (from Busybox), Perl, and a minimalist version of vi, in addition to the stuff you would normally expect on a device like this, such as a webbrowser, e-mail client and media player. Needless to say, there is already a sizeable community around Maemo, which has ported all kinds of Linux software such as the SSH client and server, Vim, Python, Ruby, MPlayer, lots of games including LXDoom, rdesktop and many others. Except for a couple of toy scripts in Perl and Python, I haven’t tried building any software myself yet; from what I understand, Maemo has its own GUI framework so porting an X11 app may require some code changes, but porting a simple command-line tool should be a matter of just doing a cross-compile to the ARM platform, in many cases.

What’s a bit disappointing is the lack of tooling to synchronize e-mail and calendar entries with Outlook/Exchange. I guess when you specifically go out of your way to get a Linux-based device rather than the much more common Windows Mobile based ones, you don’t really have much standing to complain about that. Nevertheless, since this is one of the most obvious uses of such a device, and most businesses use Exchange, it would have been nice if something were included by default. But of course, there are various open-source options being worked on by third parties. Haven’t tried them yet, though.

Another thing I’m still looking for is the perfect media player for this device. The built-in player would be perfectly adequate for my needs, except for one snag. By default, it does not support Ogg Vorbis audio files. Fortunately, that’s easy enough to add. However, when you do that, suddenly hundreds if not thousands of .ogg files from the Navicore directory (which contains a demo version of the Wayfinder route planning software) are added to the library. There does not seem to be any way to tell the media player to ignore that directory. The alternative UKMP skips the Navicore directory by default, but it doesn’t seem very stable — it has already crashed on me several times. Then there’s Kagu, which is mostly written in Python so it’s very easy to modify the list of directories to be searched. However, while it looks nice, the user interface does not work well for me at all — you apparently need to add all your songs to the playlist individually before you can play anything. The ‘add all’ button only appears when you’re already at the list of songs for a particular album. Hmm, it’s written in Python — how hard could it be to modify that? In the meantime, I’m open to suggestions on either a different media player to use, or on how to solve the problems I’m having with the three ones mentioned.

You can download his firewall script here. You can contact the author at the address meetscott at the domain netscape.net.

The config program could be more intuitive, but once it’s set up it works really nifty. It’s great for working on my laptop and desktop at work, or for switching between my Mac and my Ubuntu machine at home. Which is why I hereby give Synergy the official “recommended by Martin” award.