TimesToCome Mobile

More importantly for whom the phone does not ring, like telemarketers, and other undesirables.

The Treo phone has a nice option. You can select to have the phone not ring for people not in your contact list. Since up to now all my cell phones had been Treos I thought this was an option on all phones.

I almost returned my new Mogul to the store when I found it didn’t have that option. However there is an easy fix and it should work on just about any cell phone.

First you need a ring tone that is silent. This was not easy to find. (Silent.wav )

Install the silent ringtong in your ringtone directory. ( My Documents/My Ringtones on Windows Mobile )

Assign it to be the main ringtone for your phone.

Lastly assign a ringtone that makes noise to all the contacts in your phone. ( Tone Manager will let you do bulk updates on Windows Mobile )

Quipit is a free online service that lets you take pictures of documents, book pages, class notes and more, and Qipit will clean up the document for you and save it as a pdf.

You sign up for a free account, take a picture, send it to Qipit and they handle the rest. You can now use your cell phone to make copies of documents, fax or email documents, or post them to your blog through Quipit’s service.

It might be a way to keep you from getting arrested. Harvard Coop calls cops on students who wrote down textbook ISBNs

Google send to phone is an extension for your Firefox browser that will let you highlight text and send that text to your phone. Handy for sending directions, address and phone information from businesses you look up and product information to your phone before you go shopping.

Just be careful not to take notes in the Harvard bookstore or you may get tossed out.

If you have a cell phone that syncs with your computer you might find it will crash or hang occasionally.  All the synch software I’ve seen will let you into a log file.

Go into the log file and see on what item is hanging. Is is a specific contact or event? Almost always you’ll find it is just one corrupted record causing the sync to fail. Delete that record. Stop and restart your synch software and all should be well. You can just re-enter the offending record by hand when you are finished.

Fennec M9 alpha release for developers is available

MobileCrunch says no Firefox Mobile for iPhone or Android, just WM

Download Squad says Sept 9th for FF3 for WM. Soon but not quite yet.

Well Firefox 3 is out and word is that Fennec ( the current name of Firefox mobile ) is rapidly being developed. Details can be found on the Mozilla mobile wiki, and if you are sufficiently brave you can download a test version here and be the first on your block with Mozilla Mobile. The first public release is expected late this summer ( 2008 ). It will be available for Linux and Windows Mobile 6 and up.

Firefox for WM is supposed to be released after Firefox 3 for desktops is out.

Then check out Grump’s Iphone interface

He’s written:
Main Screen Interface
Contact Manager
and a Slide to unlock programs.

I prefer the HTC interface to the Apple interface but the contact list is hard to beat. These look and behave just like the iPhone applications.

Today my micro sized keychain GPS receiver arrived. I ordered one from Freedom Input.

It took a while to get hooked up but here’s what I have:

First go to bluetooth and pair the device, the passcode is 1234

Settings->DevicesGPS20C

You should get a choice to use a Serial Port with the device – check mark that box. If you don’t get that choice try pairing again. Sometimes it takes several seconds for the serial port option to appear. Tapping and holding on the device in the list of bluetooth devices will bring you to the screen that has the option for serial port.

I use ComPort 4 under Settings->Bluetooth->Com Ports

Then go into Settings->System->GPS

GPS Program Port I set to Com2, Hardware Port Com4, Baud rate: 57600

Go into Windows Live -> Menu Settings and choose GPS Com2

Now your Freedom GPS will flash blue/orange/purple when all is well. Blue is bluetooth, orange is gps satellite lock and purple/red is battery. If you don’t see an orange light flashing go outside and wait a few minutes. Once locked it works inside as well.

If you lost your book, the passcode is ‘1234′.

The trick is to set the hardware port to an open one, then the GPS hardware port to match that. Then any open port for program port and set your programs to talk with that port. So you need a hardware and software port.

If I convince Google Maps to work I’ll post the directions here as well, but so far no luck.

We have a wireless router at home that we secure using MAC addresses. So in order to let our new Windows Mobile phones use the wireless network we needed the MAC addresses of both phones. They were no where to be found.

Turns out you must turn wireless on, on the phone before you can find your MAC address.

First turn on your wireless on the phone:  then go to settings->connections->wireless lan->advanced

You’ll find all the information you need there.