TimesToCome Mobile » How to

Where to trade in your old gadgets for money

Linda MacPhee-Cobb — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:40:50 +0000

Now that you have the newest, latest, iPad, iPhone, Kindle, etc what do you do with the old one?

You can trade them in for an Amazon.com gift card Amazon Electronics Trade in

Or you might try eBay Instant Sale which will give you cash back via PayPay.

Other file taking up all the iPhone space

Linda MacPhee-Cobb — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:48:23 +0000

This morning, before my coffee, I plugged in my iPhone to sync and it refused. A moments checking reveled an enormous ‘other’ file. I’ve no idea how it got there while I slept.

To fix this:
Don’t sync the iPhone before your morning coffee. (j/k)

I didn’t want to lose any app or personal info so in iTunes I unchecked everything that wasn’t an app or on the info page. Then sync’d again. This removed the huge other file.

Then I resync’d all the previous items; music, photos, podcasts etc and everything is fine.

I’m not sure what the other file was, some people claim to have found huge photo caches, some large app caches, neither of those make sense in my case. But it’s fixed and the fix was reasonably painless so I’m good with that.

Geocaching

Linda MacPhee-Cobb — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 14:45:45 +0000

One of the fun things we first did when GPS hit our WM phones was to Geocache. Geocaching is a game in which people leave small items semi hidden with gps coordinates for you to find. An excellent starting place is Geocaching.com.

I signed up for an account and found at least 50 caches with in a bike ride of my home. I spent much of last summer locating and tagging the caches I located. It’s a nice way to break up a bike ride or walk.

The TUAW has an article on how you can use your 3G iPhone to join the WM mobile users in Geocaching.

If you have an iPhone it’s just as easy. Open Google Maps and type the lat and long into the search box [ N 30.234 W 90.234 ] and it’ll bring up your cache location.

If your mp4 from your phone won’t play on your OSX computer try this

Linda MacPhee-Cobb — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 11:00:49 +0000

Try changing the file extension to .3gp ( 3rd generation mobile video ).

Mp4 s copied from cell phones to OSX often give ‘An invalid sample description was found in the movie. ‘ Changing from .mp4 to .3gp allows OSX to play the movie.

This supposedly works on Windows as well but several people were unable to successfully change the file extension in Windows. If that doesn’t work try changing the extension to .3g2.

3gp is a stripped down version of mp4. In addition it contains information about the size ( height and width) of your video and the bandwidth speed of your phone. Supposedly QuickTime and RealPlayer play them, but good luck getting that to work.

See discussion:
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