Tech and Fruits

This is so funny, it needs an entry here.

The title of this video is
My Blackberry Is Not Working! - The One Ronnie, Preview - BBC One

Kookaburra Close Up.

There are a lot of wild birds at this house of ours but in the 10+ years I have been staying here,  I have never seen a Kookaburra sit on the kitchen window ledge like this before.

That is one brave kookaburra!  When I put my finger close to the glass it tried to eat my finger.

How to insert Euro sign in OpenOffice.

Alt + 0128

Numbers must be typed in on the number pad of the keyboard.

It also works here! €


UPDATE: 11 Dec 2010
I have just discovered the above is an old way of inserting symbols and is not unicode.
To be able to add unicode symbols easily for Windows XP SP3:

1. In the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Input Method
   Look for a value named EnableHexNumpad
   If the value does not exist create a String value with that name.
2. Set the value of EnableHexNumpad to 1.
3. Reboot the PC.
4. Now in OpenOffice, to get the Euro symbol, hold down Alt, press + on the numpad, followed by the hexcode for Euro, then release the Alt.
   Alt + 20ac.  It works here too €

Now I can insert THB really easily too.  Unfortunately Chrome won't let me use this method.
Alt + e3f.

For more currency codes see xe.com.

BlackBerry Torch 9800 SMSs Going Astray

The Short
I could phone my contact but I could not SMS my contact.  The Torch would say SMS sent,  but my contact would NEVER receive the SMS.

It looked like Smart Dialing was prefixing the wrong country code to my contact's number when sending SMS.  Disable that, perform a reset by pulling the battery out and putting back in and it all worked fine.

Alternatively,  entering phone numbers for Smart Dialing and setting up Smart Dialing correctly may also fix this problem.


Strange that Smart Dialing was working on sending SMS but NOT on making phone calls.




The Long
Having completed field testing the 9800,  it is now a fully operational unit.  Everything has been great so far, until I tried to SMS a few contacts.  A lack of reply made me suspicious.  Contacting these contacts through other means revealed that they did not receive any of my SMSs.  They then sent SMSs to me as a test which the 9800 received successfully,  but all replies sent from the 9800 failed to reach their destination.

When I phoned them, the calls connected fine, but further SMSs just failed to reach them.

So, time to search the wonderful Internet for an answer and start messing around with the 1001 settings that the Torch has.  Nothing worked, so I swapped the SIM into my recently decommissioned Pocket PC.  The SMS sent from the Pocket PC all fine and well.  Moved the SIM back to the Blackberry, same problem.  During this testing I was constantly checking my phone credit balance and it was steadily decreasing,  so I knew that the SMSs were being sent,  but still had no idea why they were not reaching their destination.

I decided to check my phone account's detailed transactions and lo and behold!  All the SMS numbers had the wrong country code prefixed to the front of them.  I did not realise this earlier because the Torch never displayed the number of the contact.  It always displayed the contact's name.  When I figured out how to display the actual number of the recipient,  it showed the incorrect phone number.  This incorrect phone number matched the number displayed on my detailed phone account transaction.

It is confirmed.  My Torch 9800 was sending SMSs to someone in another country.  To whoever that received all my weird test messages,  I apologise for the spam.

Why was my Torch 9800 prefixing a strange country code to all SMSs sent out?  I found the Smart Dialing setting for the phone and saw it was set to the country code that was being prefixed to the SMS numbers.  I set the Smart Dialing country to Unknown and tried sending a SMS again.  It was still failing.

When composing a SMS with the 9800,  I noticed that everytime I typed in a phone number,  it would replace the number with the contact name.  I proceeded to delete the number from my contact, but the phone would STILL replace the number with the contact and proceed to put the wrong country code prefix in.  Somewhere in memory the phone kept remembering the number belonged to the contact even though I removed all links between contact and the number.  It also looked like Smart Dialing was continuing prefixing the country code to the contact even though I set it to Unknown.  Time to pull out the battery.

I am glad to say pulling out and putting back the battery fixed the remembering number thing and I could send a SMS successfully by typing the phone number in manually.  Further more,  sending a SMS to a contact in my phone also worked.  It looked like the phone needed a good reboot(battery out and in) before the Smart Dialing would deactivate.

Web Browsing With Wi-Fi on BlackBerry Torch 9800

The Short
First you must turn on Wi-Fi on the Torch 9800 and set it up to connect to your Wi-Fi router.

Then you must go to the Mobile Network Options to turn on Data Services.  Yes, you must turn on Data Services for Mobile Network to use Wi-Fi, even if you do not have a BlackBerry data plan.  Then the 9800 will actually use the Wi-Fi and you can use the browser to browse the web.


The Long
I was field testing my BB Torch 9800 and I had already connected it to my wireless router and successfully browsed the web with it.  At a later stage I wanted to check something with the browser and it just kept giving me an error saying "Unable to connect to the Internet, please try again later".

It took me five hours of searching the Internet and messing around with the 9800 until I accidentally discovered that you must turn on Data Services for Wi-Fi to work.  The Wi-Fi section of the "BlackBerry Torch 9800 Smartphone User Guide" says nothing about turning on Data Services for Mobile Network.  It just never occurred to me that they were related since my previous Pocket PC was quite happy to use Wi-Fi without any Data Services.

I have not tested whether if I had a data service AND Wi-Fi whether it would connect via data over the Wi-Fi.

This might also apply to other BlackBerry devices.  I do not know because this is my first BlackBerry device.

Tiger Temple

Tiger Temple (a.k.a Wat Pa Luangta Bua Yannasampanno Forest Monastery) in Kanchanaburi, Thailand.

This is what you get to see:

and then there are these:

And finally I found some video worth shooting in full HD with the Powershot SX1.

You also get to pet the tigers.

Find more info at tigertemple.org.
It is a nice place to visit.

Strange Marks On A CD-R

I back up a lot of photos on CD-Rs. Recently while viewing some photos, I got some CRC errors. I looked at the underside of the CD and saw this!

I do not know what this is or what caused it, but it looked like some sort of stress pattern.  It cannot be wiped off.  Maybe it is due to the months of storage in a cardboard box in hot and humid weather.  Plain and simply I have no idea.

Checking through all my other photo CD-Rs,  there was only one other disc that looked like it was at the beginning stages of forming this pattern.  Both discs were TDK Inkjet Printable CD-R80.  The second disc still worked perfectly though.  I have other TDK CD-Rs that look fine and work fine too.

NOTE:  Even though other brands of CD-Rs have not shown this pattern,  some of them still die.  I have made it a point to have duplicates of everything.  I am seriously considering buying several external  hard disks for long term storage though.


Update: 31/05/2010
I needed to burn some stuff onto a CD.  So I opened up a new jewel cased TDK CD-R.  It had the same marks as well.  I proceeded to open ALL my TDK CD-Rs and ALL of them have the same marks.  Either I got a bad batch or TDK makes very bad inkjet printable CD-Rs. 

Look! A Three Headed Elephant!

A famous and very lucky pirate once said "Look behind you, a three headed monkey!". 

I have yet to see the three headed monkey that Guybrush was talking about.

But I was fortunate enough to go to a place called Erawan in Bangkok(at least I think it is still in Bangkok), where there is a big statue of a three headed elephant.  I am unsure whether Erawan is the name of the elephant or just the name of the place, but it was an impressive statue.

There is a museum inside the elephant itself but we did not have the time this time to visit inside.  Apart from being a tourist attraction it is also a place where people go to pray.

Being a big statue and very high up,  I just had to see what 20x zoom can do.

The statue is quite close to the main road as this shot shows.