Archive for July, 2005

Sony Ericsson K700i

Wednesday, July 27th, 2005

So I finally bit the dust and got myself a new phone. Goodbye, monophonic world of cameraless outdatedness!

Anyway, I’m very happy with this phone. It suits my geekiness very nicely. First, it has a lot of useless features that people like me tend to like, such as an FM radio, an MP3 player, a camera (capable of both stills and movie clips), a themable desktop (whee), bluetooth, IRDA, the works. Tres chiq. And I recently discovered that the “layout” (theme) files are actually tar files with a bunch of PNG and JPEG files, all tied together with an XML description file. Even cuter. And it supports VCards, and Multisync for contact / calendar event syncronization, which Evolution apparently also supports. That last bit is untested for now, though. Man, I love open standards. :)

(Getting gnome-bluetooth up and running went less than smoothly, though, but it finally came around(ish), despite GTK screaming some profanities during the device scan. But at least I can send and receive files, so I guess I can’t complain.)

Posted in general, k700i | No Comments »

SMAF-to/from-wav converter

Friday, July 15th, 2005

The last few days have been spent scratching my head over the “mmf” files that Linda’s phone (a Samsung X640) seems to be so fond of. They’re ring tone files in Yamaha SMAF format, which you apparently have to sell your soul to get the specs to.

Specs or not, with a little bit of reverse engineering, I managed to concoct a small utility to convert to and from (some of) these SMAF files. Take a look at mmftool.

Posted in tech | 1 Comment »

Quirky connection blues

Monday, July 4th, 2005

Following the trend of general breakage, my ADSL-connection flatlined on me this morning. You really don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, I tell you. Oh, the withdrawals!

Anyway, I phoned my provider’s support hotline, and got through within 15 seconds. (Honestly, I love these guys’ service. :) No immediate resolution presented itself, but the techie promised to look into the matter. Some 15 minutes later, the line came up-ish, but with about 55% packet loss. After waiting a bit, I called them back to inform them of the new status, and the techie could see a lot of line noise, which would explain the symptoms. After having convinced me to check all my cables (which I knew were OK, but I had this odd feeling he could tell if I only pretended to unplug and check them), he marked the line as faulty, and I was told to expect a call from a local techie within today or tomorrow. Nice and prompt.

What’s even nicer, though, is that the connection seems to have healed itself some time this afternoon, and all appears to be peachy again. Whee!

This is actually the first time I’ve had problems with my feed, in several years. OK, I’ve had some minor glitches before, but those hardly count. And every time I’ve talked to them, the Catch techies know what to do. And you gotta love a company whose first-line support staff all seem to know what an ARP packet is!

Posted in rants | No Comments »

sufficient-slavish