Update 2010-06-21: If you want to use custom ringtones in the first place, install Rings Extended from the Android Market, then go to Home > Settings > Sound & display > Phone ringtone.  When it asks which application you want to use, select Rings Extended, and check the checkbox so that it doesn’t ask you again.

This will work anywhere any application asks for you to pick a ringtone, assuming it asks via a standard means!

I’ve also written another article detailing how to convert your music in to Ogg Vorbis files.

Why, do I hear you cry?

Simple really, here’s the story: when I first transferred various files to my phone for use as ringtones (one each for calls, texts, e-mails…) I used MP3s.  Thanks to the Rings Extended application in the marketplace I had no trouble in using them.

But one thing struck me as odd whenever I got a call (or text etc.); lag.  If I were to get a call right now, the phone would vibrate, the screen would turn black, and then a couple of seconds later the contact details show and my ringtone starts playing.  Not ideal.

So I decided to try something.  I set one of the standard ringtones that came with the phone as the current ringtone, and tried again.  This time the phone started vibrating and played the tone at the same time.

After that I had to figure out what format they used, since I had no idea where the files could be and what format they were.  I reasoned that Ogg Vorbis would be the format they’d use — an open-source OS with open-source ringtones.  Makes sense, right?

So I tried it: I converted those same ringtones I started out with to 128kbps CBR Vorbis files.  128kbps because I thought that a higher bitrate would lag the phone out (plus you wouldn’t hear a quality difference from the speaker anyway), and CBR because I thought it would be easier for the decoder to work with, though I have no evidence to back this up.

Voilà!  Suddenly my ringtones loaded a lot quicker, and no longer did I get vibrations with no accompanying ringtone (unless it was set to vibrate only!).

I haven’t tested other settings on the Vorbis encoder (different bitrates, VBR etc.), nor have I tested other formats aside from MP3 and Ogg.

Hope this is of help to someone that actually cares about this stuff.

I cooked up a little command to help out here!  But first, we need to make sure you have the command that we’re going to need here, id3v2.  Install it from the official repositories using your distribution’s package manager.  For example, on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install id3v2

This command is used to view and manipulate ID3 tags inside of music files.  One argument in particular is of use to us, -s, which strips ID3v1 tags out of the specified file(s).

With that in mind the task is just getting a list of the files that you want to remove ID3v1 tags from.  I’ve managed to solve that and fit it all in one line — don’t forget to replace the path with the correct one:

find /path/to/music -name \*.mp3 -type f -print0 | xargs -0 id3v2 -s

That’s it! After testing I ran it on my whole music library and it appears to have survived just fine. Just be patient (and careful) if you’re stripping tags out of hundreds or thousands of files.

Let me know how it works out for you, and any improvements you may have!

But all is not lost!  Simply follow this quick guide.  This is from a Sagem ITC 62 — it may or may not be the same process for other models:

1. Press Menu on your remote control.
2. Select Installation.  You’ll be presented with a screen where you have to enter an Installation Code.
3. Press these buttons one after the other on your remote: Menu, Menu, Red button, Menu.  You should be taken to a new screen displaying User Settings and Box Settings.
4. Select User Settings.

Now what you do at this point is up to you.  You have two choices:

Disable the Installation Code

This means that you don’t have to enter or remember an installation code in future, but it might be vulnerable to inquisitive children.  If this isn’t an issue for you (or you don’t care!), follow these steps:

1. Select Locking.
2. Switch Box Locked and Channels Locked to No.

Change the Installation Code

If you still want an installation code for whatever reason, follow these steps:

1. Select Change Installation Code.
2. Enter any four digit code you like, and press OK.
3. Re-enter the same code again.  Press OK.

That’s it!  Let me know how it goes for you.

Credit to Steven Checkley for his amazing hackery.

Here’s a picture of a beast Dragonfly waving to all the passers-by in my Nan’s back garden.  You can tell it isn’t a Damselfly because this one can’t fold it wings back along its body – they have to stick out sideways.  It’s also huge.

Thus what I said.

Maybe I’m going a bit far.

Now I know what I said before about not liking taking nature photos so much, but these are the kinds of photos I like.

They’re dynamic; they capture scenes that we are unable to see with the naked eye.  These really fast exposure shots can quite often look really good in my opinion and, if you’re lucky, you can immortalise an instant forever.

I probably also enjoy taking these kinds of photos because of the difficulty involved.  In general the more difficult it is to get a shot, the more fun I have!

Is it the same with you?

To launch an elevated command prompt (i.e. a prompt with admin privileges, required to do various things if UAC is enabled on Vista), simply open the Start Menu (Windows key), type “cmd” without quotes, and press Control+Shift+Return.

This will bring up a UAC prompt asking you to elevate the process.  Select Continue (Alt+C). Done!

This does work for some other applications.  But in my experience it’s hit and miss!  Strange.

This technique may also work in Windows 7, but I haven’t been able to test it myself.

Basically, I recently got a NAS and decided that I wanted my router to save its bandwidth usage statistics on it.  That way whenever I perform an upgrade to the firmware on the router I won’t erase all the stats.  This part is easy, as the firmware has the functionality for this.  (The firmware I keep mentioning is the Tomato firmware.  I highly recommend it if you happen to have a compatible Linux router!)

Now, after I set it all up, I went on to the network shares to see if the statistics were being saved properly.  What I saw I didn’t exactly expect:

A screenshot from Directory Opus of my local network share... And some interesting modified times

Now, nothing may look wrong at first glance. But take another look at the screenshot, particularly the column titled “Modified”.

Got it yet? You have? That’s great! You haven’t? You’re probably just not as finnicky as I am, don’t worry.

Anyway, enough suspense: the thing that caught me out was that the modified time for the statistics file was “tomorrow“.

“So what?” I hear you cry!  “You probably just had the NAS set to the wrong timezone.”

Alright, I’ll give you that — I had set it to the wrong timezone.  However, that isn’t the strangest thing!

The strange part is the fact that Windows has provisions for files that have creation/modify/access times in the future.

When you have a file that you have modifed today, it says “Today”.  Nice.  If you then leave the file for 24 hours, Windows will say the file was modified “Yesterday”.  Again, a nice touch.

But now Windows, in its all-powerful, all-knowing ways, can tell me when a file will be modified, before it’s even happened!

At least, that’s the impression it gives me when I think of a developer including “tomorrow” on the list of English relative dates.

And before you complain that I wasn’t using Windows Explorer but rather a replacement called Directory Opus, here’s a screen from Explorer demonstrating the same behaviour, but slightly more hidden:

A screenshot from Windows Explorer of my local network share... With the same interesting modified times

So there you have it: Some crazy behaviour and me thoroughly confused.  With DOpus and Explorer both “predicting” the future for me, I’m beginning to wonder just how much control I have over these computers…

I happened to spy this rather odd looking insect having a rest from its fatigue (read: injury), and also that it was resting on the front of a set of scores that were being sold.

So I tried to make it look as artistic (read: stock) as possible.

What do you think?

Also the scores are copyrighted 1900.  Nice.

Turns out the solution might be simpler than you think — check your Post Tags for a tag with the same slug!

Slugs are shared between tags and categories, so if you use a particular slug with a tag, you cannot use the same one with a category, and vice versa.

Keep that in mind the next time you get all OCD about slugs!

And I was lying down.

Good one.

Take this for example.  Captured near the coast in North Devon, this rather saucy number demonstrates that creatures really will do it anywhere, even on camera.

What impressed me most is that they could fly whilst back to back like this!  Crazy.

I was looking for a way to check on my MMS settings on Android.  On just about every other phone I’ve used it’s been a submenu of the messaging application, so that’s where I went — except I couldn’t find anything pertaining to access point settings!  I mean, if one phone does it one way, all phones do it that way, right?  Right?

Wrong.  Turns out Android hides the settings in — guess what — its Settings menus!  That’s good, because it’s centralised.  It makes sense when you think about it.  Honest.

Anyway, to find these elusive settings, just follow these instructions:

1. Go to the Home screen.
2. Press Menu.
3. Select Settings.
4. Select Wireless controls.
5. Select Mobile network settings.
6. Select Access Point Names.
7. Finally, select an access point to edit, or press Menu to create a new APN or reset to the defaults that shipped with the phone.

Have fun with changing access point settings!  Mmm.

If that bee were better bee-haved I might have gotten a picture of it on the plant.  Wait, I have taken pictures of bees on plants!  I bee-lieve I’ll upload one sometime.

I’ll stop now.

Seriously!

She’s the cat of one of our neighbours, but sometimes she comes over to pose and play.  Quite the model, huh?

She always looks grumpy to me, though…

If you’re on Windows:

hold Shift and either double-click the title bar or single-click the maximise button  (The title bar is the small bar at the top that says “iTunes” in the middle.)

If you’re on Mac OS:

hold Option and click the Zoom (+) button

This’ll reset the size and position to its default for your screen resolution.  Assuming you haven’t changed screen resolution since installing it, it’ll look just as it did when you first installed it — nearly filling the entire screen, but not quite.  It’s also a very useful shortcut if you ever change your screen resolution.

Doing the operation a second time will move the iTunes window back to where it was before you started reading this article and messing with it.  Simple!

Over time I’ve played and thoroughly enjoyed the Ace Attorney series of games, from Phoenix Wright to Apollo Justice.  But for those of you familiar to the series, you’ll notice that this is the soundtrack for the third game in the series.  So why have I posted this one?

You see, this soundtrack posting has a small story behind it.  A while back a perfectionist of a soundtrack ripper called TheRedPriest ripped the soundtrack and uploaded it to his website.  He gets wound up by pops and blips in tracks — I can relate to that…

Anyway, unfortunately like so many good things on the web, the website went offline!  Luckily, a member of the forum called GUI uploaded the soundtrack and all was good within the world.

Since I hate having just one mirror for things that have had so much time and effort put into them, and because I like the soundtrack so much, I decided to host the soundtrack for myself.

Just to make it clear: I did not rip this soundtrack or have any input in its ripping!  I am but a simple mirror, wanting to preserve the great work of a video game soundtrack ripper.

Hope that everyone enjoys this as much as I do.

Download the Phoenix Wright — Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations soundtrack.

It also seems to remind me of an enemy from Metroid…  Although since I can’t remember the enemy or the real name of this plant, I’m just going to call it a Blooper for now.

Edit 2009-06-20: Boldly Growing is totally a better name.

If you try to re-associate the files with Windows Sidebar by telling to Open With… and navigating to the Sidebar executable, you’ll have found that that doesn’t help — all it does is bring the Sidebar to focus, but doesn’t install the gadget.

Fortunately, help is at hand: all you need to do is download the following archive and apply the registry entries by double-clicking the .reg file inside the archive, and saying Yes at the prompt.

Download Gadget Association registry entries.

All I did was export the corresponding keys from the registry on a Vista machine with a working Sidebar — nothing else!

Hope this helps others like it has me.

So, you have a phone with root permissions?  Finding whenever a program requests root permissions the Superuser Permissions program hangs (usually with a black screen or even a force close) at the “SU request” screen?

Fortunately there are a couple of things you can try, which I’ll detail for you.

First, make sure USB Debugging is enabled.  To do that:

1. Press the Home button.
2. Press the Menu button.
3. Select Settings > Applications > Development.
4. Make sure that USB Debugging is checked.  If not, check it.

If that fixes your problem, you are done!  If not, then you can try clearing the Superuser Permissions data.  This is just any options you have set within the app and whether or not particular apps are always allowed or blocked — you won’t lose any of your other data, and it’s easy to allow/deny stuff again.

To clear the data:

1. Press the Home button.
2. Press the Menu button.
3. Select Settings > Applications > Manage applications.
4. Find Superuser Permissions on the list.  Tap it.
5. Tap “Clear data” and “Clear cache” if they’re enabled.

This should prevent any hangs with Superuser Permissions in the future.

This works on the HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1) with the 1.5 and 1.6 firmwares, and presumably other Android devices with the Superuser Permissions app.

To unlock your Android-based device go to the Emergency Call screen and enter in the following (replace the angled brackets with the appropriate info):

**05*«PUK Code»*«Your new pin»*«Confirm your new pin»#

So for example:

**05*12345678*9090*9090#

As a side effect this should work on any SIM-containing device at a screen where you can enter phone numbers, not just devices running the Android OS.  As of writing, Android-based devices are the HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1) and HTC Magic.

And make sure you keep your PUK code secret — anyone can override your PIN with their own using it!

Thanks to theWeir for posting that solution.