Update on gripes:

Contacts list: My gtalk address is james at polley.org.I initially set up my gTalk account as a Jabber account, as I didn't realise the client allowed you to change the "@gmail.com" part of the username.

Because of this, all my contacts ended up with two addresses: one bound to the "Jabber" account, one bound to the "gTalk" account. The Jabber account had been deleted, but the addresses remained. This seems to have been causing some of the confusion.

To fix it, I did the following:

* Go to control panel -> accounts and delete all accounts

* I found the database where the contact details are stored (~/.osso-abook/db/addressbook.db) and deleted it

* Restart device

* Check that the contacts list is empty

* Re-add accounts

* Contacts are pulled from server and magically work now.

Date: Mysteriously solved. I re-set it to the correct Australian time in the Sydney location last night, and it works fine. Don't know why. Still need to work on getting a locale that allows 24 hour time though.

Sudo access: I followed one of the many guides on how to get root on my device, and ended up giving myself sudo access, but only with password authentication:

user ALL = PASSWD: ALL

This lets me run any command I like, but requires that I enter my password first. This breaks things like Application Manager, as it uses sudo to elevate its privileges - one has to remembe to go to a terminal and do something like "sudo ls", just to supply the password to sudo, just before you run Application Manager every single time.

I've now changed this to not require a password:

user ALL = NOPASSWD: ALL

This is less secure; if someone has physical access to my device, or can take control of it over a network, they can now jump straight from my account to being root.

I don't think it's any worse than the default configuration of the device though, where the user account doesn't have a password (and thus PASSWD in the sudo config is effectively the same as NOPASSWD). then again, the default config runs no network-accessible services, which minimises that method of attack.

Actually, this may have something to do with the date working now - perhaps it needed to use sudo to set the date, and my password was preventing it?

Next step: migrating my feeds out of Gregarius and into Liferea, so that I can attempt to then copy the config into ~/.osso_rss_feed_reader/feeds.opml and have them being read there.

Oh, one other hacky thing I've done is to move a few things that are going to be read a lot (~/MyDocs/Maps, from Maemo Mapper, and the aforementioned ~/.osso_rss_feed_reader) off the internal flash and onto the memory cards. This should do three things: Speed up access (they're on fat16 now, rather than the compressed jffs), give me more space on the internal flash for installing applications, and prevent some writes to the flash.

To do this, I just used standard unix commands on the commandline:

mv .osso_rss_feed_reader/ /media/mmc2

ln -s /media/mmc2/.osso_rss_feed_reader

Now every time the feed reader accesses ~/.osso_rss_feed_reader, it's transparently redirected to /media/mmc2 - the app doesn't need to know that the files have moved.

To address one of Sean Luke's issues with the mail client - this could be used there, too, to move the mail off the internal flash. Of course, it's not something that you can do with the Nokia-supplied OS, and it's not something the average user is going to know how to do...