17 posts tagged “cellphone”
Just when you think Facebook could not get any worse, it did.
For those who follow my saga on Twitter, or, worse, on Facebook, you will know I have been having no end of problems with the Facebook site this week, with false accusations about copyright infringement being made against me. Innocent till proved guilty? Yeah, right. Write a defence? You must have this site mixed up with some place that cares.
Ironically, I have heard from one friend who has experienced the opposite: having copyrighted images on Facebook, which she has asked to remove. Nothing has happened.
It seems Facebook encourages the uploading of illegal content, in that case!
So, today, I wanted to write an intro that told people that Facebook might not be the best place to reach me on my profile page. Not only could I no longer make edits to my little blurb under my profile photograph, I discovered this little gem:
Yet I have gained a cellphone number on Facebook! Not only that, my cellphone is now based in Sweden, with 46 704 at the beginning. Strange? You’re telling me.
The incorrect city details I did enter, because I wanted to force Facebook to broadcast Swedish advertising to me, which, strangely enough, is usually more relevant than the New Zealand ones. (I used to have this set to Hong Kong.) It also gives me a chance to read the language, which I am still learning.
The strange Facebook things continue …
Got to love technology.
For the last few days, Windows Vista has been trying to find drivers for my Nokia 6275i. It has failed most days. Today, it downloaded the driver by itself, but failed to install it.
I have noticed that Nokia PC Suite no longer works. I was running the latest version.
So, I hopped along to the Nokia website. However, it refuses to let me just download a new PC Suite. I had to select the 6275i model first (a process which took minutes before the website finally realized I had, indeed, clicked on the model icon). It led me to a link, which allowed me to download the version that was compatible with my phone.
Only thing is, this version does not install. It claims I have a newer one already on the system. Never mind that the newer one does not work: that’s not Nokia’s problem.
Again, as I have said many, many times before: (a) doesn’t anyone ever test this software?; and (b) is it so hard for computer boffins to make things that just do what they say on the box?
Or is this someone having a grown-up rendition of the old ‘40 GOTO 10’ command line we used to do in BASIC just to be stupid?
Oh well, that was four hours gone trying to get Bluetooth to work on my new laptop (sorry, Stanley).
I was surprised that Bluetooth wasn’t built in to the new Asus. So I bought a Digitus dongle and expected it to work flawlessly with Nokia PC Suite, as Tanya’s one had. Not so.
Windows Vista could not find a suitable driver so my first port of call was Digitus’s site. The driver worked, but it conflicted with Nokia PC Suite, which ceased to work. I wouldn’t have minded, but the Obex file transfer put in a new timestamp for my cellphone pics. For legal reasons, sometimes, I prefer having the correct timestamp.
Windows Vista suggested that I go to the Broadcom site to see if I could get a newer driver, after it failed to install one. Fair enough. I noticed that the Digitus driver was a Broadcom v. 5 (which Windows Vista insisted did not need upgrading), so a v. 7 on the Broadcom site seemed a better bet.
Problem: Broadcom v. 7’s set-up program could not update my driver. It needed something called a Microsoft Windows Bluetooth stack. The error message was ‘Could not start Microsoft Bluetooth stack’, one that was so new that no one had ever mentioned it for Google to pick up! (That changes with this post!)
The only Stack that came to mind was that dude off The Untouchables. Had no idea what it was talking about.
The irony was that I think my laptop had such a stack (which I gather just means a driver, but the word sounds more butch), but the first Digitus installation killed it. I think that was how Tanya’s D-Link dongle got working in the first place. So in terms of Broadcom software, it seems that one application killed the very program that its successor required. Way to go.
I went to Asus next to see if its driver would work, but that failed to install, too. And I went to Google to find where I could download the stack from, but no one seemed to have it.
To keep a long story short I should note that I was installing and uninstalling the programs and drivers during this time. That much I knew I had to do after tinkering with this stuff since the early 1980s.
When I realized that Nokia PC Suite worked with Broadcom v. 6 and up, and we knew v. 7 would not work, I set about looking for a driver for v. 6. I found it at Gateway’s site. I opened the archive, but never got around to installing it.
On my last driver removal, I pulled out the Digitus dongle and restarted the machine, then reinserted the dongle. Getting ready to install the v. 6 driver, I told Windows Vista to not search for a new driver, but to ‘Ask me later’.
Obviously at Microsoft, this means ‘Install the Microsoft Bluetooth stack’, as this is exactly what Windows Vista proceeded to do! Result: there is a Broadcom driver and a Microsoft Bluetooth stack existing side by side, working perfectly (something the experts say is not recommended), Nokia PC Suite works perfectly, and I can add more devices using the dongle, whose light now flashes confidently (it did not with some of the earlier drivers).
The lesson, as I have documented here and elsewhere over the years, is to do the exact opposite to what instruction manuals, software companies and boffins tell you, and that will serve you very well when fiddling around with computers.
No, these photos do not form a theme. Just some totally random shots around Wellington during the last few weeks. With the borrowed dongle I was able to get most of them off my phone.
Good points so far: voice recognition (I can say, ‘Radio … FM … 107·7’, activate the cell, the CD player or an external device). The last time I had that was in a BMW. The technology has evidently come down to the Ford level. Bluetooth connection was also quite easy though Craig at Capital City Ford sorted this for me.
Down sides: steering is too light and I have not found a seating position I am comfortable with yet.
I’ll write this up properly in Lucire in due course.
I have been a Clear customer since the 1980s and Li at the Telstra shop in Courtenay Place remarked that most clients had nine-digit customer numbers (ours has six).
So far I have been delighted with Li’s candour and courtesy and the phone has amazed me from a technical standpoint, especially those MicroSD cards and the 1,600- by 1,200-pixel resolution on the camera (2 Mpixel).
The unit has a lot of silly things compared to the old Samsung: no flight mode, no mid-sentence capitalization (it’s either all caps or all lowercase) no T9 texting for filenames, no European languages (the Samsung had French, Swedish and German, all of which I used at various times, and Italian and Spanish as well). TelstraClear tonight stripped out all European characters out of a Swedish SMS I had to send, yet I understand that one can send in Chinese—technologically a far more difficult language to support—perfectly.
I certainly welcome the chance for my fellow Chinese to send their text messages, but what of even the English language? Someone at TelstraClear has not thought this through: words like café, for starters, will appear as caf. There are still people on this planet who are proud of their writing—even on a cellphone.
I also haven’t figured out how to record an outgoing message, so I will probably bug Li tomorrow to get that sorted.
I still dislike these things on principle and, not being a parent, can really only see a reason for them for courtship and, admittedly, digital photography.
I’m not the only one who thinks cellphones are hazardous to your health. Spotted outside Foodtown in Takapuna:
This Google video is worrying, especially as I refuse to carry one of these things except when I am out of town—and even then never in a trouser pocket. Yet some people’s lives are dominated by them—such as this chap’s:
I can’t remember if I shared this one with y’all: a billboard from January 2008.
Yeah, that’s what I thought it said, too.
From June 2008, a billboard for a TV series, but I thought it was the real thing—that someone had gone missing. Have they not heard of the boy who cried wolf?
Some random photographs from this year, none of which make any real sense together.
When my friend Doug Rimington flew back from Sydney, I was waiting at the airport and saw this on a vending machine.
No one uses the Fahrenheit scale in New Zealand for temperature, and while I know 160°F is hot, it’s hard for us to place just exactly how hot. What was this sort of sign doing on a machine here?
Here are a couple from September that were a bit odd. Any idea what this personalized plate means?
Here’s the second:
Stranger things exist. How about this, at my friend Katie’s house? She said she tried to find a George W. Bush one to keep things balanced but it was not available.
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