On my recent 3 weeks vacation I bought an Ipod Camera Connector and used it with my Sony DSC-P150. After coming home I read elsewhere that this combination does not work stable – I had it working stable with a small change of settings and will explain how to do it the hope that other can make it work to.
How to make it work
DSC-P150 is uses the “normal” usb-mode by default, for some weird reason this is unstable with the Camera connector, but if the camera is set to use “PTP” instead it all seems to work stable.
PTP USB mode is activated by setting the wheel to setup, and select “Setup 2″ and “USB Connect”.
The real world test
When I used the connector at first, in the default “Normal” user mode, it was unstable and crashed the Ipod with out getting all of the pictures, and I had no success in several tries. With the “PTP” USB mode I have transferred all the contents of an almost filled 512 mb stick 6 times without any problems at all. If any other have problems I would like to know.
The Camera connector however still suffer from the vulnerability others have pointed out, that it could be faster and is heavy on the battery, but it is a nice solution to a common problem.
Opera has for quite some time been a player in the browser market, and especially their mobile browser has been getting attention. I tried this browser out on the Nokia 6610i.
Installation is pretty easy, I just had to find the version compatible with the cell phone. Once got used to it, I definetely prefer Opera to the builtin browser on the phone, it looks better, I find it easier to use and Gmail mobile works. I could however not detect any difference in speed in these first tryouts, but it could still be there.
I’ve just noticed, that Google has opened for mobile access to Gmail. This means that by pointing any cell phone browser at http://m.gmail.com it should be possible to check any Gmail account. This provides a nice alternative for the email applications for cell phones I’ve posted on ealier.
After trying it out I had some positive and negative experience. First of all I could not make it work on my Nokia 6610i but it seemed to work fine with the Samsung E330. Secondly it seemed to take just a little longer, and be a little more difficult to check mail than using my current favourite, Flurrymail. On the positive side it did a very nice overview of the complete mailbox and had the familiar Gmail-look.
A network drive integrated in Windows can be a very usefull alternative to USB keys.
Box.net have for some time been offering 1 gb of free space (files size max. 10 mb) on the net. They have a very nice web-interface, but with Asen Kovachev’s tutorial it is very easy to have the one gb almost completely integrated in Windows without installing software.
A week ago I discussed the possible ways one could sync the cell phone with an external calendar. Here I will show more specific how syncML can be used to synchronize a standard cell phone calendar with Outlook. The advantage by this is that that once it is up and running it is much easier (or at least on the phones I’ve tried) than using infrared or bluetooth, thus giving the user a calendar which is always close by, and backed up on a remote server if the phone should be lost, or your Dell laptop should explode.
In order to achieve this, a few thing are required:
A syncML compatible cell phone (most newer phones, and a lot of the older is)
A working WAP connection (GPRS, 3G or similar)
Outlook (this is possible with other applications too, but this guide is about Outlook).
From here on there are two ways to go, this can either be done for free but with a little more hassle in the setup. Or this can cost a bit of money and then have an easier setup.
The free solution
The only way I could make this work for free, is by using Funambols free syncML plugin for Outlook. Since this is the only free syncML plugin I could find. It seems that this plugin has some issues since I could only make it work with Scheduleworld.com. I would have preferred to use it with zyb.com, since I prefer them to scheduleworld, but I could not make the connection.
The first thing to be done is to make the synchronization between Scheduleworld and the cell phone work. In order to do that one need to start by going to Scheduleworlds website and set up an account. Then the phone needs to be set up (this is very different from phone to phone) with the following values, I can take some time to make it work.
Server url: http://sync.scheduleworld.com/sync4j/sync
User name: (this the costumer number which can be seen by logging in on the website and select preferences)
password: (the same password as selected for the website)
Application URI (often called a variety of things):
calendar:cal
contacs:card
When the synchronization is working between the phone and Scheduleworlds syncML server, it is time to focus on Outlook. The first thing which needs to be done is the installation of Funambols free syncML plugin for Outlook. The next time Outlook is started it will have on more menu called sync4j. In this menu configuration is selected and communications settings, synchronizations settings and Remote settings are set up as shown. With the “xxx..” in the username being the same user number as used when setting up the phone.
The problem with cyb.com’s server with Funambols plugin, was that the plugin crashed every time I tried to sync. If someone else can make that work I would like to know. The paid way
The first thing needed is to setup an account at cyb.com, and get the synchronization connection between the phone and the cyb server. This was actually easier done than said for me, all I had to do is go to zyb.com, and they helped me identify the phone and sent me the settings for the phone by text message.
The next thing to be done is to install and configure a plugin for Outlook. Since the funambol kept crashing, I’ve downloaded a 15 days trial version Nexthause’s Outlook plugin, the full version costs 29 dollars.
Like with cyb things a just a little smoother with this plugin. The first time Outlook is started after installing this plugin, a wizard is started.
At the dialog, shown above, the server is url is set. After that the password and username hs to be set.
In the third dialogue box I choose to test the server setting. When this is choosen the server found the remaining settings itself like shown below.
After pressing “Finish” Outlook starts normally with a synchronize icon appears in the toolbar.
No matter which of the paths has been chosen, at this point one can now get Outlook and the cell phone in sync very fast. Just remember that it is an ecternal server, meaning that if you have made some changes on the cell phone since you last used Outlook you have to start by syncing aswell as end by doing it, and vice versa so that the external server is always up to date.
I’ve had the urge to start something on the internet for quite some time, and last Sunday I started this blog. Now it has been a week since the first post, and I think it is time to review the first week.
The first worry was what content to put in the blog, and what to call it. As I am shy I decided to base the content on my experience with making things work, since that is what interests me, that be anything from a broken down toaster to a weblog.
After looking in to the free offers from Blogger and Wordpress, I decided that I wanted to do this right and own the domain myself instead of settling with a subdomain. The domain was registered at Godaddy and a hosting account was acquired from Dreamhost (not completely rational I know, if I had thought it trough from the start I had bought it all from one provider).
With Dreamhosts on-click-install I had Wordpress up and running pretty fast, I installed the Blix-theme, but plan to make my own later.
The effort to increase the knowledge of the blog, and increase traffic started Monday, immediately after I published the first post about syncing cell phone calendars. By default Wordpress sends out a ping to a lot of blog directories, besides that I signed op at Technorati and submitted the blog to Yahoo, Gooogle and MSN. The effort to advertise the continued Wednesday when I found a list blog-directories and rss-submission sites, I was just to much in a hurry, resulting in descriptions with errors and that I don’t remember which sites I’ve submitted to an which not.
As I wanted it all, I signed up for Google adwords, in order to get ads on the site to. It took a couple of days for them to approve my application, but Thursday that was up and running to. In the above graph I’ve illustrated the development in the traffic or reffering. This shows that the Blogging-sites gave the initial traffic, and that the traffic from Google seems to be increasing, while the other search engines has not yet provided any traffic.
All in all I’ve had about 250 unique users (not counting bots), I don’t know if that is good or bad after one week, but it is the goal to improve that. When looking at these users I saw that they were from all over the world. Since Firefox users where a vast majority I think it is safe to say, that my blog thus fare has attracted the more geeky part of the internet population. But maybe this ratio will change if I start getting some traffic from MSN and Yahoo?
The big question is; what now?
It’s been good fun, so I’ve decided to keep the Blog for now. I’m not going do a lot to please the search engines. However I will try to improve the content and maybe get a better idea of a target audience. I will keep adding content (although at a slower pace) for the next week or so, and then go on my summer holiday for three weeks. After the summer holiday I will try my first Pay-Per-Click campaign to really increase traffic. But I will probably make a post about that when I get that far.
In the above graph I’ve illustrated the development in the traffic or reffering. This shows that the Blogging-sites gave the initial traffic, and that the traffic from Google seems to be increasing, while the other search engines has not yet provided any traffic.