I’ve just created a separate page to hold and collect all the tips and tweaks for my Qtek 9100 (aka HTC Wizard) running Windows Mobile 5 AKU 2.0.
You can find it in the right hand panel, it’s named Qtips.
This will be easier to manage than my hodge-podge WM5 and hx2410 related entries.
I just upgraded smoothly to WP 2.0.4, which has a slew of security-related fixes.
One good side-effect of this is that my database backup plugin now works, where before it just wouldn’t. Just in case, I backed up immediately. You never know when something bad can happen.
I am the proud owner of a Qtek 9100 pda-phone now !
It’s a pda with phone capabilities that has Windows Mobile 5 phone edition, AKU2, so the latest version and is a quad-band phone that can do GSM, GPRS and EDGE.
At first I wanted to buy the new Tytn from HTC (also the makers of the Qtek, they’ve just rebranded them), but since that phone is about 200 € more expensive, I’ve decided to take last years model, which just had taken a serious price cut (589 € for the UK version instead of 699 € at the local Fnac). As I am on a dual subscription (work/home) I only use my phone for talking and texting via GSM and wireless with my PDA for everything else, so this makes sense for me.
The advantages of the new Tytn are a more powerfull cpu, video conferencing if you have the right dataphone connection, ready-made for the HSDPA protocol via firmware update, and the addition of a jog wheel to let the user more easely operate the phone one-handed.
I think the only thing I’ll be missing will be the jog-dial, and depending on the number of applications installed or used, the enhanced cpu.
The whole setup came in a nice box which included a remote headset (cable) and a belt-clipped case to put the phone in.
So far, my impressions are favourable – the phone seems stable (my biggest fear is that WM5 will crash when I desperately need to phone) and I’ve installed my normal applications (ListPro, pRSSReader, a password list) and they work just fine.
The screen is QVGA and smaller than my iPaq hx2410, but it seems the pixels are more tightly packed together, resulting in a very fine screen. Already I find the screen of my iPaq to be ‘flat’ and pixelated, while before I didn’t see this.
The slide-out keyboard takes some getting used to, but it seems to work fine if you use your thumbs, and responding to an sms is easier that way.
One thing that is hard to find is where you can download updates for your Qtek from : this is from the local Belgium importer, which I found out is Smart-Phones. You’ll need your IMEI number from your Qtek phone to login and be able to download the latest updates. I checked and it was already at the latest version (which I suspected as it had the WM5 AKU2 update).
As for Qtek forums : the one in NL (forum.qtek.nl) is at the top of the google list, but ofcourse you need to register to even see it, and since I have a Belgian IMEI, I can’t.
I will try to re-sell my iPaq on Ebay to recoup some of the investment.
Get yourself a new name : use the porn name generator !
We’ve been on a 10-day trip to Bulgaria, specifically the touristy Golden Sands area that is a bit nord of Varna.
Our hotel, the Riu Viva (***) was actually a very good hotel, although they’ve had a bit of a problem with the water supply (that was fixed) and their children’s playground consisted of one (1) slide.
Luckely it was set a bit back from the beach and adjoining ‘strip’ so we could get some relative quiet. We also had to get down 86 steps every time we went to the beach (including carrying the stroller down), but hey, you build muscle that way. No honest, the rooms were spacious, the weather was fine, we had airco in our room (extra, though) and the food was good. What more do you want ?
While the ‘strip’ there is very cosmopolitan, with typical nightlife so that you can believe you are in Tenerife or Majorca or anywhere else where a lot of European tourists come, there is one thing here that you as yet (mostly) don’t find in those other places : the ‘Flyer’ girls who try to attract tourists to come to this bar or that restaurant usually speak to you in English or German, but you could also get the Russki? question.
That’s right, the Russians come here on vacation as well (after all, Bulgaria is closer than Tenerife). There were several families in our hotel, and I am fairly certain that there were hotels that had more Russians that European tourists.
Most of the family Russians (to be honest, some could also be Bulgarian or other East-European people) seem to be very beefy to rotund guys who are almost always accompagnied by slender model-lookalike wifes and one or two children. Very glitzy.
The younger Russians proclaim their nationality loudly using a variety of combat pants and T-shirts with ‘Russia’ printed on them. Some seem more American than Americans themselves (ever see several 12-year olds clad only in his swimming trunks and a very heavy ‘silver’ chain around their necks ?).
Please don’t understand this wrongly – I write about this because this is what made the vacation different for me than, say, our vacation in Portugal, not because they misbehaved (not any more than any other tourist) or because I dislike them (I do not). And it made me realise that this is something we rich West-Europeans have taken too long for granted : it was always us rich German/English/Belgian/French/Dutch/RichEuropeanCountry that went on vacation in Europe. Sure, the Americans and Japanese come visiting Bruges or Paris, but they are/were richer than us, right ?
Until a few years ago, you wouldn’t see any Poles or Russians or Bulgarians or Portugese people take vacations in Belgium, heck, they were coming to our country to get some of that capitalist money by doing the low-paid jobs nobody else wanted. But now all this is changing. As the ‘poorer’ countries either get into the European union or move up in status (Russia is growing enormously), the vacation languages will change.
Perhaps, finally, instead of the ubiquitous German in hotels, we’ll be met with with the question : Russki ?
Update : I talked this over with some friends, and they confirm that the Russki have already reached Kreta !
Sam has been running around under his own steam for a week or two now, and he has gone on to the next thing : getting to understand speech.
It’s actually incredible how young childs get to learn new words. For weeks or months you keep repeating the same thing to them, pointing things out to them, it doesn’t make sense to them at all.
By accidently repeating what you are doing they find that you will suddenly make happy or interesting noises, and they will repeat those gestures or sounds so you will make them again.
And then suddenly, they ‘get’ it. A sound is associated to an internal image, to a sensation, and they remember it.
Sam is still not very clear as to what ‘papa’ means, but he knows it’s a person. He refers to everybody as ‘papa’. I’m hoping to refine this to the actual daddy 🙂
His soother he calls his ‘dodo’, and when somebody goes into another room and closes the door behind them, he goes to bang on the door with his little fists and plaintively calls ‘tooooo ? tooooo ?’.
And sometimes, but not always, he waves when we go away, long wild waves of his hands that go just about anywhere and are accompanied by a very loud ‘daaaaaaaaaaa’.
Yesterday he got baptised in our local church. He found the experience interesting, wandering around the front of the dais, except for the water part…Afterwards we had a big bbq for our family and friends, about 2O people (we bought waaaaay to much meat !) and had set up a tent for the children to play under. All in all a happy afternoon for everybody. Exhausting though, preparing before and cleaning up afterwards…
I’ve been a bit quiet recentely – that’s because I’ve (re)discovered Interactive Fiction, what we used to call text adventure games in them (G)olden days.
For those of us who were already running around on the world in the eighties, with zits or not, this brings back fond memories of a prompt where you typed in lots of commands in a text window, few of which were accepted, to get another sparse room description. But you could do things to a story, you could decide what you wanted to do. Instead of just reading a book, you made the book.
Granted, some adventures were crap (especially those I played early on with my ZX Spectrum – I still remember beating my head against my wall trying to find the right command to move a log to a lake). Still loved ’em though, and once you’ve tasted the Infocom games, you’re lost.
Leather Goddesses of Phobos, hmmmm.
You can still play those games (if you can find them) using a modern day interpreter like WinFrotz for windows or Spatterlight for Mac that reads the z-code, which is the code that Infocom wrote it’s game in. One common platform to write to, with an interpreter on each OS – Avant-la-lettre future design !
Even though text adventures are officially dead, Interactive Fiction is not. A small community of readers and writers keeps experimenting and writing new compilers, new adventures, new ways of experiencing things…
Inform7 is now available, and let me tell you it’s a huge change. It lets you write your own text adventures in human-readable text which Inform7 translates to code. I’ve been plowing (actually, gliding) trough the manual and muttering to myself… I’m understanding this, that is not too hard, that makes sense…
I’m getting another creativity attack.
I’ll update this post later with more links and info.
For beginners, check out the Brass Lantern – a great site to start reading up on adventures. You can read more reviews and download adventures on the Baf site.
You hope you never have to use it, but it’s damn convenient to have noted the html page when you do need it.
That secondary problem of the empty programs list is a real hard one. There are several people who have had similar problems, but there doesn’t appear to be a solution for it.
Hard Reset, then try to restore all… pffrt.
To perform a clean reset and return your HP iPAQ to factory settings:
1. Press and hold the Calendar, Power, and Messaging buttons.
2. While holding down these buttons, use the stylus to lightly press the Reset button on the bottom of the HP iPAQ until the device restarts.
3. When the HP iPAQ restarts, release all of the buttons, and then remove the stylus from the Reset button.
The HP iPAQ restarts and powers on.
Miljaar de miljaar !
I just lost all the programs that I installed under /SD Card/Program Files, just like that. Although I regularly back up my built-in flash, I only back up my SD Card every 2 or 3 months or so. It takes too long using Active Sync, so I back up whenever I use my Card Reader, which is infrequently.
On top of that I managed to crash the ‘installed programs’ list while trying to reinstall my stuff. I was first removing it from the ppc and then reinstalling them via Active Sync. When I was cancelling an install I apparently cancelled more than just the program.
I’m going to use a two-pronged approach to solve my problems:
That’ll teach me to backup my SD Card a bit more frequently…
If you are wondering what to do with your GPS setting in WM5, PocketPCThoughts has a good link that I think is worth saving for future reference : how to setup your gps on a WM5 device – straight from the horses mouth, so to speak, as it is a long msdn blog post.