Marcus Hamaker is The Sleepy Geek

Of course I am writing this on my Blackberry. What kind of test would it be if I didn’t? At first glance I really don’t see anything different mainly because the UI didn’t change so I took a run over to their site and the major updates include:

• Easier sign in process
• Added support for HTTP authentication on password-protected self-hosted blogs
• Improved the app’s ability for bug reporting and feedback
• The file browser now remember the last opened folder

This doesn’t look like anything flashy but when you consider the extra steps some of us had to do when first setting up our copy then you realize that the HTTP authentication is really a nice touch. If you had trouble in the past using WP for Blackberry then I would give it another run. No longer are you required to verify your XML-RPC setup, now simply put in the web address, the user name and password.

There are also some bug fixes to note:

• issue when modifying the properties of a picture attached to a post
• start up issue on the splash screen that causing the app freezing
• issue on the Stats view when a post title contains more double quote characters

I didn’t know that WP was freezing my Blackberry but now that I think of it  I have seen it freeze on start up. Usually I assume that when loading WP it was just too much for the Blackberry to handle processor or memory wise so I didn’t give it a second thought. Nice to see that handled.

All in all, still solid. You can see their post about it here where they have a slide show featuring some of the changes.

Have fun with it. Nice to be able to write from a remote location.

Geek on!

My buddy told me today that we can sign up for beta versions of some of the internal Blackberry apps! Go here… now – https://www.blackberry.com/beta.

This site lets you install the newest beta versions of Blackberry software. Right now I am participating in the Blackberry Messenger beta program. It’s nice to have all the new features now in software but keep in mind that betas have problems at times. If you see a problem, do the right thing and report it so that it can be fixed before release. We all have a better product in the end with that strategy.

So what specifically does RIM offer in the Beta program?

(Organizations) BES v5.0.1 for Novell GroupWise

(Consumer) Twitter for BlackBerry

(Consumer) BlackBerry Feedback Tool

(Consumer) AOL Instant Messaging Service for BlackBerry smartphones 2.5 Maintenance Release

(Consumer) Google Talk for BlackBerry smartphones 2.5 Maintenance Release

(Consumer) ICQ for BlackBerry smartphones 2.5 Maintenance Release

(Consumer) Windows Live Messenger for BlackBerry smartphones 2.5 Maintenance Release

(Consumer) Yahoo! Messenger for BlackBerry smartphones 2.5 Maintenance Release

Keep in mind one thing. RIM doesn’t make it easy for you to get the program. Downloading takes a lot of hoop jumping with some verifications of address and identity which you have to do with each program you sign up for. Once you sign up they will generate a key code for you.

This will come by email and it is a manual process so don’t get too excited like I did and download the app right away. Right now I have a wonderful new BB messenger that I can’t use until I get that email … BOO!

Yesterday my buddy Jay asked me if I had rebooted my phone immediately following that up with the fact that a new icon appeared on his Bold. I hadn’t done so in the past few days but when he explained that the new icon was the MyAccount app, I gave it a try. Too bad it didn’t work for me. No magic icon appearing – nuttin’!

Rogers MyAccount Blackberry App

Today he actually had installed the app and I wanted in, hoping it was a rolling installation I gave it another shot. 5 minutes later I had a rebooted phone and still had no icon. This prompted a mission to find out how to install this thing by force.

Here is what I found:

• Go to Options
• Select Advanced Options
• Select Host Routing Table
• Click the Menu button
• Select Register Now
• Wait for the device to register (you will get an email message letting you know when complete)
• When the My Account icon appears (it should be in the main apps section, if not in your Downloads folder), click on it then and follow the prompts to install

For those of you who don’t know what you are missing, it’s a very simple little app that tells you what voice minutes you have used/left, what data you have used/left and what text messages you have used/left for the billing cycle. It also tells you your balance on the account so you can see that you are up to date financially.

This is not a very complex app but something that is very handy. I often wonder if I have met my limits during a month and to have such an easy way to check them pretty much from wherever I want it handy to say the least.

Here is the link to the page on the Rogers website – well done Rogers.

Geek on!

For the past couple of months my Blackberry has been acting less than stellar. I have had freezes, slow downs and sometimes missed calls due to those problems. It’s been pretty frustrating and probably part of the reason that I keep looking at new devices. I admit I played around with new OSs on my phone so the fact that the problems occurred in the first place are probably due to something I did. None the less the complete wipe and restart scared me a little.

I did a lot of looking around and found that JL-CMDER seems to be the tool of choice. It’s unfortunate that there are no tools (or none that I found) out there to do this on OS X but I am a Windows admin so I am fine doing it from a test box. The best how to I found was at http://www.blackberryfaq.com. They outlined step by step how to run the command. You will have to try the wipe command often. They mention that you have to plug the phone into the PC, then remove the battery, then wipe and I found this didn’t work. I had to play around with restarting the phone a few times before I could get it to actually wipe the unit.

I also found an another (actually a buddy found it for me) called “Blackberry Master Control Program”. This thing has a ton of options in it but I could never get it to perform a wipe so for this process it was useless. You may have better luck with it and it’s a Windows GUI software so a little easier to handle.

After your wipe is complete, download your desired OS version and run the Blackberry Desktop Manager. From there you can load your desired OS version.

Fresh is always better. Since doing the update I have frozen only one time and that was days ago. I am still running an OS that isn’t from my provider but it is an official OS 5.0 release.

Have fun with your BB and let me know if you run in to any trouble. I will try to help out.

Note that wiping your device could render it useless. Take caution and have a backup phone around just in case :)

Geek on!

In a blog post this afternoon on their official Blackberry Blog, RIM has announced that a version of the Blackberry Desktop Manager will be released for OS X. A welcome relief for all of us OS X users who up until now have been fighting with a Windows version (you know we all have Windows somewhere cause of these kinds of issues).

From their post they list some features:

Sync your iTunes® playlists, calendars, contacts, notes and tasks

Add/Remove applications

Update your device when new software becomes available

Backup and restore your device data with such features like automatically scheduled backups and optional encryption (security is #1 as always…:) )

Manage multiple devices

Head on over to their post and take a look at some of the screen shots of the new software that is supposed to hit the web in September.

Geek on!

It is very common today for companies to create a 1-800 sales or support phone number that includes their name or a catchy phrase. For instance the major satelite provider here in Canada (Bell ExpressVu) has 1-800-SKY-DISH as their sales/support line.

Recently I wanted to dial a number like this from my Blackberry and low and behold there are no phone letters on the Blackberry keyboard. This isn’t something that you have to do everyday but it is something that will frusstrate you when you need it. If you have enough patience and you remember that A starts on the number 2 then you might be able to figure out the corresponding numbers. Put that into a real world situation and most of us are going to be cheesed off that we need to bother with this and just won’t bother.

After some searching I have found the solution! It is so simple that it is almost embarrasing how easy it is. When you dial your number and want to enter letters simply hold down the ALT key. The phone number must start with a digit so 1-800-LETTERS would work but CALL-897 would not.

Great feature, too bad it was a hard one to locate! Happy Crackberry people!

I have been looking for a good plugin for people who access the blog from a mobile device for quite some time. It is almost mandatory today to make sure that people’s experience on their mobile device is just as good as if they were sitting at their computer.

Today I downloaded PDA Plugin For WordPress from http://imthi.com/wp-pda. The author has done a good job of updating the experience based on what mobile device you have. After the installation I immediately tested this on multiple phone types. I am lucky enough to have enough friends around me with different phone types to make this possible.

Based on my tests I like what I see so far. On a Blackberry it was nice and clean; having most of the heavy graphics removed and the site reformatted to fit the screen size. Having a Blackberry Bold myself this was good to see and it’s something that I would definitely use to view a site such as mine. Next I took a loot at the site on a Windows Mobile phone and was surprised at how well it did at making it look like the Blackberry. I have seen the Windows Mobile browser screw up so many websites that were not designed for mobile browsers, but with this plugin the site was nicely displayed. The last test for me was on an iPhone and I must say that they did a great job. Typical to a lot of sites who are making their pages specifically for the iPhone the PDA Plugin For WordPress automatically formatted it the same way. I love how the menus no longer even look like HTML, they are iPhone-esque which is what iPhone users want.

I am very happy with this plugin and hope that it brings more people over to the site. You can now take a look at a clean site from a bus, train, car (passenger of course) or where ever you might be while waiting for something.

Happy surfing!

Well I guess it’s more like “MY NEW Blackberry Bold 9000” because it’s been out for a little while :) None the less it’s new for me and deserves a review. To start, I love having a qwerty keyboard with real buttons to be able to write emails and SMS messages. That is something I was convinced I would like before the purchase because it is so much faster than a phone keypad or a touch screen and having the feeling of buttons gives it another sense to work with which is nice. The other thing that I like is the speed of the device, much faster than I am used to. I have played around with my brother’s Blackberry 7130, a friend’s Pearl, a Curve 8300 at work and none have them have amazed with their speed, but the Bold seems much faster.

I am new to the Blackberry game but not new to smart phones. Before this I had an HTC Touch which I liked a lot at first but there were some issues that really got under my skin. The first issue was that the touch screen was not perfect. It did very well but on occasion it would miss a keystroke which caused me to not trust the input and made typing much slower. The other issue was that it was just too slow to run Windows Mobile well. If you don’t want to do too many things one after the other then it isn’t too bad, but on more than one occasion I would be writing an email and then try to make a call and going from the mail app to the phone app was ‘head banging’ slow.

The Blackberry has solved both these problems for me. To be honest the only 2 real contenders for me were the Bold and the iPhone. I am really into Apple products these days for the ‘it just works’ factor and the integrated feel, but the iPhone is a touch screen. I remember having a conversation about my touch screen woes with my HTC. My buddy convinced me to check out a YouTube video about the Storm and not a minute into the video and the person made a typo because of a missed keystroke. I have seen videos on YouTube about the iPhone as well and seen similar results. For some reason I am more frustrated at the device if it misses the keystroke than if I make a typo myself.

The Bold is quite feature rich. I doesn’t have as much ‘WOW’ factor as does the iPhone but it does what it is designed to do quite well. Blackberry lists the Bold’s key features as follows:
* Camera (2.0 MP)
* Built-in GPS
* Media Player
* Video Recording
* BlackBerry® Maps
* Wireless Email
* Organizer
* Browser
* Phone
* Corporate Data Access
* SMS/MMS
* Wi-Fi® support

I have taken some pictures and I would say that they are average. They picture quality isn’t great but it is acceptable. The light helps in low light situations and is turned on automatically when needed.

The GPS doesn’t do much for me in all honesty. I have a GPS for my car where I would need it most (TomTom 720) and it would always do a better job as it is designed to work in the car.

The media player again isn’t very important to me. I have played with it a bit and it looks similar to what I had on the HTC and to what I have seen on other current phones. Most of us will use an iPod for these features.

Video recording – quality isn’t different from the still image function. The screen is pretty quick to refresh so the image is quite smooth.

Blackberry Maps ties into the GPS function. I have played with this but won’t have a use for it unless I am out of town and on foot where my TomTom wouldn’t be practical. If in that situation I would find this feature handy I am sure.

Wireless email… to me there is no question that Blackberry does this well. I am not using it with a BES server and all I needed was my email address and password (hosted my Google) and it figured out the rest. It just works -> AWESOME! The action of writing an email is all the more easy with the integrated Qwerty keyboard.

Organizer is a standard calendar. All phones have a similar problem displaying the whole week on the screen because they are too small, that’s just physics. The features are standard but it would be nice to sync with my Google calendar automatically out of the box. I ended up doing this with a 3rd part app and that made me happy :)

They have outdone themselves with the browser on the Bold. It is able to display an entire website (not mobile version) quite well and then allows you to zoom in before clicking on links so they are more readable. Using the small scroll button in the middle which works like a trackball makes it even better.

Phone… uuh yes. Easy to use and has great reception. I work in a office build in the basement (why do they always put IT there?) and not many phones work in the center of the building. The Bold worked on a conversation from one end to the other yesterday.

Corporate data access… still don’t use a BES :|

The SMS/MMS is tied into the email if you wish and that’s how I set it up. All messages come into the same single box and it makes communications seamless. The Qwerty keyboard helps here a lot as it is quick and accurate.

Wi-Fi Support is another great feature. At home and at work I set up my Wi-Fi connection so my data usage is kept to a minimum over 3G. 3G is nice to have when you need it but Wi-Fi is great due to it’s cost savings and speed. Another thing to note is the little effect is has on the battery. I noticed with my HTC that the battery would die quickly with Wi-Fi turned on. Doesn’t seem to affect the Bold all that much.

So in the end I am very happy with this new purchase. It feels more like a phone that can do a hundred other things than a unit that does 100 things one of which is make phone calls. And to top it off I think it’s a good looking unit :)

I love finding new things… well things that are new to me anyway! I have an HTC Touch mobile phone with Rogers in Canada (I know… Rogers.. boo-hoo!) I like the phone but I have never really liked the way that any phone has synchronized with my computer. For some reason it always seems to be a hassle and a complicated process.

What is funny is that up until now I have always been syncing my mobile phones with Windows and using mostly the included sync software. Now with the HTC Touch I am faced with an entirely new problem, how to sync Windows Mobile devices when running OSX.

The people at MarkSpace have all the answers! I found a program there called The Missing Sync that is built to sync between otherwise incompatible platforms. I used the trial of The Missing Sync for Windows Mobile which allows me to easily backup my phone data to my Mac.

There are a ton of features included with software, some of which include:

• Connects with Windows Mobile devices via USB and Bluetooth
• Supports devices running Windows Mobile 2002/2003/5/6
• Syncs with Address Book, iCal, Entourage 2004 and others
• Syncs Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other files
• Downloads iPhoto albums and iTunes playlists
• Imports device-side photos and video
• Encodes QuickTime video for mobile playback
• Provides drag-and-drop install of .cab-formatted applications
• Displays phone call and SMS text message logs on the Mac
• Supports two Macs and any number of Windows Mobile devices
• Universal application provides the best performance

But what they don’t really say in that list is how easy it is to use. Pretty much every tool I have used in the past to sync my phones have been touch and go ant sync time. I was always scared that I was going to delete the data in my Outlook, on the phone or possibly corrupt both. You don’t get this feeling when using The Missing Sync.

Note that you also have other options other than Windows Mobile phones including The Missing Sync for iPhones and Blackberry. I encourage you to go check out their line of software if you are looking for a new synchronization solution.