Autarchy of the Private Cave

My motivation is simple, and Kevin Michaluk had nicely written down the benefits of physical keyboards: Why there’s still demand in 2014 for phones with physical keyboards. For many years I’ve been using Nokia E71, and now, after switching to a screen-only Android 4.4.2 device, I dearly miss the physical keyboard (and the compact, durable metal phone body, too, as well as week-long battery life…).

I really hope that phone manufacturers offer something that:

• is about the size of E71, possibly slightly higher/wider/thicker
• has a physical QWERTY keyboard, either E71-style or a slider
• runs Android Lollipop
• has decent (but not necessarily the best) smartphone hardware (5-8+MP camera, 1.4+GHzCPU, 1.5+GB RAM, 8+GB internal storage, etc)
• has a good screen, e.g. HD (~4.3-4.7″) for a slider-keyboard version, or half-HD for Nokia-style keyboard
• is minimally waterproof (can withstand heavy rain for 30 minutes)

Reasonable price would also be welcome…

Inspired by video encoding with handbrake.

HandBrake is a very high-quality piece of software – next time you need recoding something into H.264/MPEG-4 (using MKV or MP4 containers) – try HandBrake. It easily saturated all my CPU cores – which I failed to achieve with ffmpeg, which even with threads=8 was only saturating 2 cores.

Attached to this post are 2 profiles for recoding movies for Nokia E71. The “_best” profile has exhaustive motion detection, otherwise is identical to the base profile.
E71.plist
E71_best.plist

Related:

• x264 ffmpeg mapping and options guide
• ffmpeg audio/video encoding cheat sheet

I’ve been getting this message for a long while, when trying to log into Ovi from within my Ovi Suite:

Nokia Ovi Suite could not connect to the Nokia account server. Make sure the internet connection is working properly and try again.

However, both my internet connection, and logging into ovi.com using a browser work fine. Even looking for updates from within Ovi Suite works fine!

Here’s the solution (tested on Nokia Ovi Suite 3.0.0.290):
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