5 posts tagged “gadgets”

My trusty iPod Nano (generation 1) served me pretty well.  I didn’t use it every day, but I did use it extensively on trips and in the car occasionally.  Yes, I did have to swaddle it in thick heavy plastic to protect its scratchable body and face.  Yes, I did have to use it with the backlight turned off in order to get more than 1/2 the promised battery life.  But, as my first iPod, it certainly was cool.  Now, it is dead.  When we got back from Hong Kong, I turned it on, and the display was all messed up.  The bottom half of the screen was frozen in a pattern that looked like a UPC code, and the right upped quadrant was blank.  I hadn’t done anything to it, but i figured that somehow the screen must have been broken (which seemed unlikely given its protective plastic suit that it wears all the time).  Well, I went off to class, and when I got back to my desk, the battery had gone dead.  I tried to charge it.  Nothing.  OK, not exactly nothing — a high pitched squeal.  It could have been the sound of a tiny whirring hard drive, except the Nano doesn’t have a disk drive.  I have no idea what it is.  It doesn’t charge.  It doesn’t reset.  It doesn’t do anything but sit in darkness or squeal when plugged in.  I guess I’ll take it by the local Apple store and see if they’ll do anything for me, but I don’t hold out much hope since they don’t even know where to lookup the meaning of “customer service”.  Oh yes, and it’s conveniently out of warranty.  Silly me, my wife is getting me a new Nano for Christmas and I got myself a matchbox-sized new Shuffle to work out with, so I’m hooked on iCrack.  R.I.P.  iPod Nano #1.  Long live iPod Nano #2 (or at least more than two months past its warranty running out).

… [inspired on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann’s nightly feature “Worst person in the world”].

As you may remember from our previous episode, I made the unfortunate decision to purchase an Invisible Shield for my Nokia N80, a super-durable plastic sheet that would protect the screen of my wonderful new cell phone.

I ordered it on July 28th and waited patiently for it to arrive via US Mail.  It arrived, but the shield they sent me was too small to fully cover my N80’s screen.  DOH!  After having customer service person #1 doubt me and grudglingly agree to send out another one, I waited another week and… that one was the same size — too small.  Double Doh!
I contacted them again, and got a very helpful sounding customer service person, Darryl, who took down the dimensions of my N80 screen (that the previous customer service person didn’t seem interested in) and told me that they would send me one that would fit (unlike the first two).  Even more hopefully, I received an e-mail telling me that I was not alone in telling them that the Invisible Shield for the N80 wasn’t the right size.

Bruce,

I just wanted to let you know I received your email and the pictures.  I
have passed everything on to one of our designers.

Ironically we received an email with pictures from another customer
yesterday out of the blue with the exact same complaint about the Nokia N80.

We are working on it as fast as possible.  I will keep you updated as to our
progress.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

All the best,

Darryl W.
ShieldZone Corp.

OK, now things were on track, and I would finally have my N80’s protective shield (crucial since I had almost unbelievably managed to keep it unscratched by keys/coins for over a month).  When I got home today, I got my new UPS-delivered Invisible Shield and rushed to install it — when I opened the package, I found… a shield the same size as the one I had been shipped twice before (triple DOH!).  This one might have been an eensy bit wider than the previous one (unfortunately it needed to be 2 full millimeters wider) and the height might actually have been an eensy bit shorter than the previous one (unfortunately, it needed to be 2 full millimeters taller).

I bought this based on Rich’s strong recommendation of their iPod product (which may be a fine product — they probably have iPods at their company to measure them against to make sure their designs are correct).  But when you’re selling mobile phone shields for phones you have never really seen in person (like the N80 which wasn’t even available in the US when I ordered the shield originally), getting the size right is really hard and these guys aren’t doing it (certainly not when it comes to the N80).

And, as Keith Olbermann would say in his booming newscaster voice… “making Invisible Shield… today’s WORST company in the world!”

[This post is a work-in-progress, but I want to have it online to use as a reference]
The Nokia N80 has some cool applications that involve typing on your phone (Lifeblog, Agile Messenger), so I have, of necessity, been introduced to T9 predictive text entry. T9 has been around for a long time, but I’ve never invested the time to get to know how to use it. I’ve always relied on multi-tap text entry (”bruce” being typed as “2,2,7,7,7,8,8,2,2,2,3,3″); and “Bruce” isn’t nearly as bad as some words. Needless to say, multi-tap typing makes text entry on the phone an extremely painful experience; bad enough to drive me to type like Prince lyrics (”R U Ready 4 Din-R?”).

My old Nokia 6600 also had T9 predictive text entry, but the learning curve isn’t particularly friendly. First of all, as the opposite of multi-tap, I have to remember only to hit each entry key once (”Bruce” is just 2,7,8,2,3). Then, when you get a word, you don’t want (sometimes a sequence of keys has more than one corresponding English words), you need to know what to do. Since there’s not much help or a manual to refer to, that occurrence usually was enough to get me to turn off predictive text entry and go back to multi-tap.

OK, I’ve become a convert. I like T9. A lot. It even has proper names in its dictionary, and you can add your own words. You can even handle apostrophes, commas, capitalization. I have seen the light.

Since I have had to pick up bits and pieces from various sources, I’ve decided to try and create the definitive collection of T9 tips, tricks, and shortcuts. With any luck, it will serve as a reference for me and provide a central source of information for others.

OK, so here goes…

• Don’t get freaked out if the letters that you’ve typed don’t make sense before you’ve finished typing the whole word. Since T9 gets context from the full combination of letters, its guesses get better with each additional letter. Hang tight, and it will very often get you the word you want. (1)
• If you don’t get the word you want and there are several possibilities, you have to walk through them until you find one you like (or you run out of words and find out that it’s not in the T9 dictionary). To do this on the N80, you do that by repeatedly hitting the XXX key. If it’s not there, you’ll eventually see the word “Spell” come up on the screen where it can be accessed with the left function key.
• Punctuation: if you type 1 in the middle of a word, it will default to an apostrophe, and if it is at the end of a word, it defaults to a period. Repeatedly hitting the XXX key will cycle through possible choices (commas, exclamation points, question marks, etc.). To get a symbol, hit the asterisk key and you’ll get a screen of symbols to choose from. Helpfully, the list of symbols has frequently used symbols at the top, so you can access them more easily with cursor keys.
• Hitting the asterisk key twice should activate CAPS LOCK.
• Numbers is non-obvious, but easy. Just hold down the key you want and keep holding it for a second or so until the number pops up. Simple!
• If you spell a word for T9, it’s automatically added to the dictionary. I have added words including “cabana” and “Geraldine”. You can also switch out of T9 mode to multi-tap, enter a word, and when you switch back to T9, the word you typed in multi-tap is automatically added to the T9 dictionary.
• Emoticons: Type the number of 1s necessary to create the emoticon and then use the NEXT key to pick the emoticon you’re looking for. This is cool, simple, and again non-obvious. Also, if you are in T9 mode and type in your own emoticon using symbols, when you hit the space key, that emoticon will be added to the dictionary.
• T9 should also do its own form of autocomplete. As soon as it hits a word that is defined uniquely, it should give it to you when you hit the space key (CHECK THIS). It is very useful with URLs because when it recognizes a URL, NEXT cycles through all the URLs in the dictionary (CHECK THIS).
• The forward key allows you to create compound words easily. If you wanted to create the word “slaphappy”, you can type in “slap”, hit the right arrow key (locking in “slap”, but not adding a space) and then typing happy. Of course, when you finally accept the whole word, it will be added to the dictionary and available for next time. I used this to add the word “self-portrait” — “self”, right arrow, 1, several next keys to get hyphen, right arrow and then portrait.
• Add a carriage return/new line by hitting 0 three times.
• Holding down the pound key puts you into number mode (really? check)

I loaded the software on my phone, ran it, lined up the barcode in my viewfinder, and… nothing.

I got a variety of errors, usually involving being unable to interpret the barcode and other times just freezing for long periods of time until I restarted the phone.  I tried shooting the barcode with my phone vertically, horizontally, and even upside down, but none worked.  Regular or macro?  Nope.

A post on one of the forums says that the reason why the Nokia N93 is the only one with barcode software built in is the advanced optics of its camera.  That may be true, but it makes no sense — barcode readers are common on Japanese cell phones, most of which do NOT have Carl Zeiss lenses and fancy optics.

OK, I’m a colossal geek.

I have a new Nokia N80 cellphone that I got from my brother-in-law in Singapore that does everything except slice bread (and they’re probably working on software for that).

Supposedly, I can install an application on my phone that allows me to use my phone’s camera to read a barcode and go to that website automatically (in addition to having radios for all 4 bands of GSM phone service in the USA and the band for 3G coverage in Japan, my phone can also use WiFi networks like the ones at home, at school, etc.)

I want to see if this works, so I’m doing a test post.

Here’s the barcode for my MUS Lower School website.

Now, I get to see if this works…

I’ll let you know.