My eldest son Henry won a disposable camera at a Somerset House family day last summer, and I finally got the pictures back from Boots. I think they’re great, it’s interesting to see the world through the eyes of a four-to-five-year-old.
Henry’s school book bag.
Cousin Dominic and brother William having a sleepover at Nanny’s house.
Mummy.
Paul next door.
Paula next door.
Sleepover Sweets!
The words of Douglas Adams, and they just about sum up my feelings about the Asian earthquake and tsunami.
We’ve been collecting improbably named Americans at work, so my eyes lit up when I saw a certain Waverly Person, director of the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Earthquake Information Center, being interviewed about the tsuami on CNN. The following evening I heard him being interviewed by Roger Hearing on The World Tonight on Radio 4. The interview was extraordinary – Roger pressed him on why no-one called any governments in the region to warn them a tsunami might be on the way, and Waverly said “who would you call?”. Roger suggested looking them up in the phone book. He could also have suggested calling their US embassies, using the internet – or maybe even just calling CNN.
Now, a lot of harsh words have been thrown at Waverly – at least in my office, any way. I think this is a bit harsh. Waverly looks like a nice man, he’s getting on a bit. He’s also based in Denver which is (a) the dullest city I’ve ever visited, and (b) a long way from the sea, so tsumanis are not only not his area of expertise, they’re probably not on on his mind. Well, they probably are now.
Cringely comes up trumps again this week. He says a tsunami warning system could be set up, not over ten years costing millions of dollars – but within a year using some smart software, data already available on the internet, running on low-end PCs with a dial-up internet connection. Let’s hope he’s right and that some smart programmers make his idea a reality.
Imagine my surprise when I finally got my hands on the proper Motorola Mobile Phone Tools, only to discover that it won’t let you change ringtones or wallpaper on a C350 phone, even though the C350 has a colour screen and comes pre-loaded with some very sucky yucky images and tones.
Anyhoo, I found a friend with a WindowsXP machine and – with some trepidation – loaded P2KMan. And it worked! Well, ringtones seem to be a bit of a pain and I haven’t got them working yet, but I managed to get some of my own wallpaper uploaded. You do need to be very careful with P2KMan, though, as it’s possible to damage your phone by deleting essential files.
Images for wallpaper or screensavers should be GIFs, preferably 96×65 pixels. Animated screensavers can be animated GIFs. You can find rather more info than you’re ever likely to need about creating images and ringtones for the C350 here (PDF file).
I’ve also knocked up some simple guide images – a transparent GIF and a Photoshop / Elements layered image that show the safe areas for your wallpaper, so you can see which bits will be obscured by the battery icon, time, netwok ident etc:
right-click here to download template.psd
Plus a few wallpaper images that I made:
A while ago I needed a new mobile phone in a hurry, and I ended up buying a Motorola C350.
I wouldn’t recommend this phone (it’s horribly scuffed and scratched after only a few months’ use) but if you have already got one, this might be useful.
I bought it as it’s listed on Apple’s web site as being iSync-compatible. I hooked it up using a mini-to-normal USB cable I had lying around, but iSync refused to see the phone, even though I could see the phone in OS X’s network preferences. I was using MacOS 10.2, and I can’t recall which version of iSync.
A quick Google suggested that I might need to use Motorola’s own cable – luckily before I spent �20 plus on one, a work colleague suggested I look at the iSync preference file for my phone – you can do this from the Terminal and Emacs, or do as I did and log in as root and find it in BBEdit… and I discovered the Product ID in the plist file for the C350 (14338) didn’t match the Product ID listed for my phone in OS X’s System Profiler (22530). Once I’d changed this, bingo! iSync could see my phone and happily sync using the cheap USB cable I got with a keyring camera!
So perhaps the Motorola C350 phone has a new product ID or a different one in Europe or the UK?
Here’s one way of editing the preference file from the Terminal using Emacs:
% cd /System/Library/SyncServices/
MotorolaConduit.bundle
% cd Contents/Resources
% sudo emacs USBDevice.plist
And this is an extract from the file – the number after ‘idProduct’ is the one I needed to change:
<key>C350_GSM</key>
<dict>
<key>idProduct</key>
<integer>22530</integer>
<key>idVendor</key>
<integer>8888</integer>
</dict>
Despite having a dead iMac under my roof, I’m still addicted to reading books about Apple Computer, Inc.
Here’s a great addition – the story behind Graphing Calculator, a bit of software bundled with all Macs since the PowerPC was introduced. I’ve no interest in Graphing Calculator itself, I’ve never used it, but this story is great.
