That’s quite the fuck-up…

Seventeen people, including a child left in a critical condition, were injured when soldiers fired live bullets instead of blanks during an open day display in Carcassone, France, regional officials said.

What is it with the French?

Customising the Treo 500v

This has taken me some time to figure out, mostly because there doesn’t seem to be very much interest (at least in the internet vocal enthusiast crowd) about this phone. In fact, the net is so quiet about this that it’s almost as if someone is actively deleting anything that has to do with this phone. Anyway, here’s what I’ve done to customise my phone to suit how I like to use it.

(EDIT AT YOUR OWN RISK!)

The “carousel” menu

I like this menu, but I don’t like that you can’t change the programs that it displays. From the “Recent Applications” screen you can click on the right softkey to go into the “Main Menu”, but that’s time wasted waiting for the carousel to load and go away. The name of the carousel menu app is “Hotlist.exe”, and to change the program that is launched when you press the “Start” key, go to:

\ HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Microsoft \ Shell \ Rai \:MSHotlist\ 1

…and change the value to a different launcher. I used the app that shows the “Main Menu”, which is called “Gridview.exe”.

The side hardware button

The Treo 500v ships with the side hardware button (not the volume buttons, the one below those) not linked to any program on a click, but will launch Pocket IE when held down for a time. There doesn’t seem to be any reason for this except that either Vodafone or Palm forgot about it when then were setting up the phone. You can change it so that when you press down on the button it will launch one program, but when you press and hold down it will launch another. To do the former you have to change these two keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Apps \ KeyAssignment \ Click \ 195
“Open” = “\ Program Files \ YourProgram.exe”
“Remap” = dword: 00000000

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Apps \ KeyAssignment \ Default \ Click \ 195
“Open” = “\ Program Files \ YourProgram.exe”
“Remap” = dword: 00000000

…and to change the latter:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Apps \ KeyAssignment \ PressAndHold \ 195
“Open” = “\ Program Files \ YourProgram.exe”
“Remap” = dword: 00000000

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Apps \ KeyAssignment \ Default \ PressAndHold \ 195
“Open” = “\ Program Files \ YourProgram.exe”
“Remap” = dword: 00000000

I’ve changed my phone so that it launches the “carousel” menu on a click, and the camera on press and hold:

Click — Open: “\Windows\Hotlist.exe”
PressAndHold — Open: “\Windows\Camera.lnk”

The Vodafone Live! softkey

I bought my phone unlocked from eBay, and I don’t use Vodafone, so it’s pretty pointless to have a button devoted to a link I can’t use. I do, however, lean pretty heavily on my tasks program, so I changed it to launch Tasks instead:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ software \ microsoft \ home \ key \ 113
“Default” = “Whatever the label should be”
“Open” = “\ Program Files \ YourProgram.exe”

You should be able to change the icon as well with the “IconResDll” and “IconResID” keys, but I’m not sure where the icon for the Tasks program is, and it’s not that important for me anyway.

Start Menu icon order

The last thing I did was to put all the apps that are useful but aren’t used too often (like the calculator, voice notes etc) in a folder in the Start Menu. But folders are placed low in the list, with Windows prioritising application icons. To change the order, and to “pin” my “Quicklist” folder to the top of the menu:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Shell \ StartMenu \ Order

…and edit the “Order” key by adding (or removing) a line from the list.

That’s all the changes I’ve made to my phone so far, and it’s working pretty well for me. I’m no expert though, so you make these changes AT YOUR OWN RISK. I also had a fair bit of help to find these myself, the solution for the “Start” button I found here, the left hardware button here and the Start Menu order here.

Hope this works as well for you as it does for me.

A brief rundown on what I think of my Treo 500v

The battery life is horrible. Admittedly I push mine very hard, I have the data connection on most of the day for push email (more on that later), and I like to read the news, and occasionally listen to music on it. I’d struggle to make it last much more than 24hrs, especially if I throw in a little Google Maps use.

There is almost no user-generated information about this phone online, which tells me: people who are likely to write about this stuff isn’t interested in this phone, or it’s not selling very well. Which is a shame, it’s actually a pretty good phone.

The microphone is very loud, and has excellent noise cancellation. I’ve been asked to speak softer by a few people on the other end of the line even in noisy places.

The keyboard is very good, I’d say as good as a Blackberry Curve. It is a tiny bit stiff, but the keys are well spaced and I can almost touch type on it. The only thing I didn’t like is the spacebar, there are two separate buttons on each end, and when you press it feels a bit inaccurate.

The “carousel” menu, which is only on the Vodafone version, is very good — if you’ve never used a smartphone before. It provides no customisation options, it’s hardwired to show only the programs that the phone ships with, so if you prefer Opera to Pocket IE, you have to navigate deeper into the menu structure into the basic Windows Mobile menus to find it. On the other hand, the menu is very clever, displaying favourite contacts, messages (email and sms/mms), recent programs, upcoming appointments and the like in a slick interface.

There are very few user customisable features at all, although this may be because this is the Standard edition of Windows Mobile. It is rather annoying that Microsoft ripped out all the bits that would be too hard to navigate without a touch screen, rather than spending a bit of time solving the UI problems.

(If you are comfortable with digging through the registry, I’ve found a few of the keys that can be edited to customise the phone. More in a later post.)

The UI itself suffers from all the general Windows Mobile problems, but the smartphone verison isn’t as fiddly as the touchscreen version, and can quite easily be used one-handed. One thing it does fall down hard on is you can’t quickly switch from one active program to another, the way that you can on a Symbian phone (which uses a special hardware key to do it). It’s pretty dumb, given that you can’t actually exit most applications from inside the application, you have to dig through a billion menus to find the Task Manager program to close applications. But, overall, it’s not too bad, and it’s snappy enough most of the time.

Push email and Activesync in general is awesome. This is my first exposure to Microsoft’s Exchange/Activesync/Outlook triangle, and I have to say that I am very impressed. I can definitely see why this is so popular for businesses, and why Apple licensed Activesync. That’s not to say that I haven’t had problems, though the problems seem to be network related rather than phone/server related. Combined with Mobipush, a free push email service, I now get push email straight from Gmail, with HTML, without having to pay Blackberry tax.

The camera, in good light, is exceptional — for a phone. In bad light? Forget it.

Bwahahaha!

A Practical Guide for Asian Men, Redux

So, quite some time ago, I wrote about a book by Adam Quan called How to Date White Women: A Practical Guide for Asian Men. An influx of comment spam reminded me of that post, and I thought I’d go check out any new comments about the book on Amazon… and I found this one:

GREAT!!, December 17, 2006 Personally, I am an Asian man. And by Asian, I mean Asian. When I got this book, I realized the error of my white-woman-hunting-ways. Now that I’ve seen the light, I can lure them in like moths to the fire. THANKS Adam Quan! My love life is more bubbly than a 100 degree pot in high altitude.

I’m not sure what he means by “Asian”. But at high altitude water boils at lower than 100 degrees due to lower atmospheric pressure, so a 100 degree pot in high altitude would mostly consist of hot gas… which is a pretty clever piss-take comment.

Now we wait for the Guvernator to save all our arses

The Brits have just finished launching a series of satelites that give their military worldwide control over autonomous military assets. The name of said satelite system? Skynet.

No shit.

Best quote ever

From Gizmodo, about the USAF Cyber Command’s, uhm, options:

“It depends on our target; it depends on our rules of engagement—are we conducting open warfare with an adversary? If that’s the case, then we don’t really need to be discreet about it. When we drop a JDAM [Joint DIrect Attack Munition aka "big mofo guided bomb"] and leave a big smoking hole, that’s not very discreet.”

Indeed.

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I applaud Microsoft’s effort to encourage people to upgrade their browsers (because IE 6 and lower is, in a word, fucking-awful), but didn’t they even google browser detection (or Live search) when they built that part of Hotmail?