all things me

On the right side of the keypad there is a special key, the so-called Multimedia key where you can add four more shortcuts. Unfortunately it makes an awful noise when pressed which is why I never use it.

I’ve tried silencing it: I’ve looked for a sound file to delete (no luck), I’ve tried making the settings the same as in Beep or Silence mode where the Multimedia key is silent (no luck). Well, now I swapped my own profile with the Beep profile and I finally get a silent Multimedia key!

Is there really no other way to get the key to SHUT UP except for this “hack”?

[Edit Jan 20th] Boy, do I feel stupid now. Thanks to Antony for commenting and pointing out that there is a simple option for turning the sounds off:

Shh, can you hear that? Neither can I! Oh sweet silence. I go hide in my n00b hole now…

I’m waiting for an email from the library so I changed the address in my library information to my mobile email. I also set up the phone to check mail every hour (not in the middle of the night). I use the Finnish user interface and this, not surprisingly, caught my eye:

First of all, it’s funny how it says “30 minuutin väl.” instead of “30 minuutin välein” even though there’s quite a bit of empty space… (This isn’t by far the worst case I’ve seen. I’ll show you a bad one if you’re interested ) but the 4th item makes you miss a few heartbeats (no? Is it just me?). How did that happen? When you look at the English options, they are nice and consistent:

I envy you who use the English UI! (I know I could use it too, but Finnish feels somewhat more comfortable — despite things like these.)

[Edit: Dec 6th]
By popular demand Here’s the Swedish UI

S60.com has opened a Wishlist for all our great or crazy dreams about S60 applications. I added my humble wish for an Advanced photo sequence. I haven’t received any ratings yet but I hope people won’t find my wish completely idiotic.

I have been trying to figure out the logic behind the calendar on active idle screen.

The screen will fit 6 calendar items — Meetings, Memos, Anniversaries, and To-Do’s. To-Do has a separate, static place at the bottom of the screen. Other applications such as the radio and music player take up space on the active idle screen as well.

To-do functions as a separate item on the screen, that is you can scroll to the calendar entries and it’ll select all the Memos, Anniversaries and Meetings. If you click them, it’ll go to Calendar. You can also scroll to the To-do list and view all to-do items by clicking on the To-do list on active idle.

To-do is always visible if there are unfinished tasks. The priority or importance of the other calendar entries seems to be:

1. Meetings
2. Memos
3. Anniversaries

That is, if there isn’t enough space for all items the Anniversaries will disappear first. If there are no anniversaries showing and there isn’t enough space for all Meetings, Memo items start disappearing.

There is no indication if there are calendar entries hiding, which is a shame.

Memos and Anniversaries aren’t shown on any other day than the day they are set to. Only one Meeting for the following days will show, but I don’t know how far in the future the meeting can be. I’ll have to try it out some day when I don’t have any Meetings for about a week (and when would that be?).

First I instinctively used To-Do lists for things I need to remember to do. Well, that doesn’t work so well because it only shows one To-Do item with text; 2+ items will show up as “n to-do notes not done”. After doing this little experiment, I realised Memo is the more logical way to write down things to remember. And, I noticed, it works the way it should because you see several Memos for one day.

Hurraah! Babi released a purple variation of the default Nokia theme. I have to try it out.

Now that I can take a photo any time with my phone I’ve started noticing the times when I can’t. Then I see something and think “aw, I would’ve wanted to take a photo of that.”

I don’t take the phone with me when I’m walking the dog but maybe I should. A couple of weeks ago in the morning there was a really wonderful full moon, the sky was clear and very dark. That would’ve made a wonderful photo. I thought, “it’ll be there when I leave for work”. Well, it wasn’t, a cloud had drifted over it. The next morning the moon and the whole setting was back — I didn’t have my phone. When it was time to leave for work, the sky had lightened too much.

Today I saw an interesting spray painting on the asphalt — and I didn’t have my phone. I’ll have to try and remember to take it with me tomorrow.

I installed a theme which wasn’t nice, I uninstalled it but that didn’t seem to go well. The theme did disappear from the Application Manager list but not the themes list (and it still worked). Luckily I found a solution at the Mobile Themes Forums.

I plugged the cable and chose “mass memory” (Data Transfer in English, apparently) instead of PC Suite mode. Now I was able to browse to the hidden ‘private’ folder where I found the theme. Luckily, the file names were recognisable…

I’m quite happy with the S60 White theme at the moment, although I found this on the CD that was in the sales package (duh, I had forgotten all about the themes on the CD):

Still, too red, not plum enough.

(I promise the next post won’t be about themes… or my mobile phone.)

I just registered at S60.com and in the My Exclusives I found the S60 Theme – White for several different phones. I downloaded the one for Nokia N92, Nokia N71, Nokia N80, Nokia E60, Nokia E61, Nokia E70, Nokia N91 Nokia 3250 because those are 3rd edition phones. To my delight, it worked!

It looks kinda nice, although a bit too pink…

The obvious pro compared to the nice S60 Theme – Grey is that White uses default icons.

I’m still hoping that someone uploads a really nice theme at the Mobile Themes forum. I’ve tried to use the Carbide.ui S60 Theme Edition 3.1 but it’s confusing.

After getting the 2 Gb memory card, I’ve put the N73’s music player to proper use. Here are some of my observations and thoughts.

Volume

I couldn’t even think about listening to radio on my old Nokia 6101 because I couldn’t find a way to turn the volume down. N73 is a bit better, but I am listening to the music at 10%-20% volume and it’s a bit too loud still! It shouldn’t be only because of the earphones I have (HS-20/HS-21) that go in the ear because I tried it on my normal Sony earphones and it was just as loud. The Sony earphones have so big earplugs that they are barely holding on. I haven’t yet tested it with headphones (with the speakers on the ear instead of in the ear canal).

Oddly, Eseries phones apparently suffer from a low volume.

Crash Boom Bang

I’m not sure if this is a feature or a bug, but when the player plays on background (that is, active idle) and I press stop (on AD-41’s “remote control”) the program closes. When I press pause, the track pauses normally but I can’t start playing it again (that is a bug).

The player works better on foreground (naturally) but if the screen has gone black (power saving mode), pause/play button pauses the track but won’t start playing it. Oddly, next track and previous track buttons work normally in power saving mode.

Music library

I love the music library! On my mp3 player the process of beginning to listen to a select album required skipping to a song on the preferred album (I had the songs in folders by album) and then setting the playback as “shuffle album”. On the phone I can go to Music Library > Albums > preferred album, and start playing any song there. All assuming that the ID3/M4A tags are in order. Luckily the program I use to convert my CDs, makes the tags automatically (I think).

Thank you il Filosofo! Now I can blog from my mobile the way I want: not via email (a haven for spam), not through a WAP page (I want to make the most of this amazing screen) and definitely not through an external service. The fancy WP admin interface prevented me from posting an image as I learned the last time, but while I was doing research on various ways to moblog I stumbled across Old-Style Upload plugin. Now I can upload images directly from the phone!

Now, if only I knew how to copy the image path from the browser…