Google Sync on Blackberry

If only they were plug and play ...

I've had my blackberry for the past 5 months. The most usage I get out of it is to Berry my aunt, for my bosses to contact me or tell me to get to his floor NOW for a conference call.

Then I discovered the GMail app for blackberry. That was plug-play! There was no problem with the installation at all nor did I have to go through the whole turn-off-device-take-off-the-battery debacle. (Note: There's gotta be a better way for the OS to reset!)

Two days ago, I discovered that Google has a tool to sync GCal to the berry. Oh happy day! Until I installed it. And un-installed it. And installed it. And un-installed it . For the third time, I've installed it again but it's still not working.

Login failed, due to network problems, please check your settings.

Being the berry idiot that I am, I have no clue whatsoever on what settings they might be talking about. Nowhere is it stated on google's site what sort of settings I should be looking for.

If anyone knows how to get this working, please leave me a note. In the meantime, I'd be terrorizing the CS at Maxis again. ;)

Getting MyDVD to Work (Part 2) ... almost!

I was going to write the second part of my attempt to get MyDVD to work. When I posted Part 1, I had already got MyDVD to work ... finally! ... OR SO I THOUGHT!

What I didn't know was that images in the burnt DVDs came up upside down. Yup! Image and subtitles all upside down. I was thinking of just flipping the TV upside down but it's flipped image and the subs are going from right-to-left. Unfortunately, the subs in English and not Arabic/Jawi, so it makes no sense.

So that's eight pieces of DVDs headed for the bin.

Note to self: Check the first disk after burning!

Here are my earlier notes that I've made for this post. I don't think I'm going to rewrite this. I'm not sure if I will be tinkering with MyDVD anymore to try and get it working. It's too much hassle and I've got my Vista recently. So everything will be wiped. I heard that there is a DVD burning software that comes with Vista. I will have to find out more on that.

Notes:

- Needed the latest XviD 1.1.2 decoder
- Downloaded ... not working
- Uninstalled DJBCP installed in Part 1

XviD Mpge-4 video decoder

Able to view in WMP
- thumbnail reappears in MyDVD

Direct Sound Device
Support decoding of Generic MPEG-4 video

GSpot

divxdec.ax
xvid.ax

RegSvr32 /u DivXDec.ax

Installed Dump Direct Show Filter from latest DJBCP

No problem with MyDVD LE ... subtitles not showing.

Reinstalled VobSub ... still not working

Installed DirectVobSub (VSFilter) 2.37

Works!

GSpot check - using VSFilter.dll

Getting MyDVD LE to work (Part 1)

Finally managed to get MyDVD LE (I have version 6.1.6) which came with the DELL laptop to work.

My first attempt at burning DVD came quickly to a stop with the following error:

Could not make a thumbnail. Make sure you have the appropriate decoder installed. -47010

After much searching through various forums, including Roxio's own forums, the decoder(s) that got it to successfully add a file to the project was the DJBCP Codec Pack 2.1 Light.

During installation, I believe I have only installed the following:
* Decoder 5.1,
* XviD-1.0.1 Final,
* DivX 3.11 Alpha, and
* AC3 Filter 0.7b.

After many successful disks, I also installed the VobSub 2.3 to enable burning (hardsub) and viewing of subtitles.

A whole series later ... it stopped working.

Outlook unable to connect to Ms Exchange Server

The connection to the Microsoft Exchange Server is unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete this action.

There is a simple solution for XP Pro users who encounter this message when trying to add their Ms Exchange mailbox to their Outlook. When configuring the mailbox for Outlook, after entering the server name, User Name and clicking on Check Name, Outlook will automatically replace the server name with it's fully qualified name. This is what causes the problem. Just set it back to your server name and you should be able to access your Exchange mailbox.

According to blurred_vision, XP Home users can connect to the server using the fully qualified name. I have not tried this as I'm not on XP Home at the office.

But then, I'm not actually using XP Pro either; I'm on Windows SBS.

A little change of steps

In my previous post, I've mentioned what a hassle it was to rename a label with blogger beta. I've discovered a way to kinda change/rename all posts with a particular label to another label. Instead of following the steps given by blogger, skip Step #3 until after Step #5. So instead of the following ...

1. Click the "Books" label link on the left side of the page.
2. Click the "Select All" link at the top of the list of posts.
3. From the "Label Actions..." menu, choose "Remove label > Books."
4. From the "Label Actions..." menu, choose "Apply label > New Label..."
5. Enter "Reading" as your new label. (If you already have some posts with the label "Reading," you can simply apply that label, without making a new label.)

You do this instead ...

1. Click the "Books" label link on the left side of the page.
2. Click the "Select All" link at the top of the list of posts.
3. From the "Label Actions..." menu, choose "Apply label > New Label..."
4. Enter "Reading" as your new label. (If you already have some posts with the label "Reading," you can simply apply that label, without making a new label.)
5. From the "Label Actions..." menu, choose "Remove label > Books."

This was just something that popped into my head and tested with low amount of posts. Further testing might be required. Wonder if 'Select All' would select all if there were hundreds of posts.

Adding labels in blogger beta

I'll need to build a new customized template with beta's capability to add Labels now. Either that or I figure out how to add that to my old template. I think it's time for a change though.

Anyways, regarding the labels. I was trying to figure out how to rename the labels but apparently there is no way of doing that. The best I could find were the following steps provided by blogger help.

1. Click the "Books" label link on the left side of the page.
2. Click the "Select All" link at the top of the list of posts.
3. From the "Label Actions..." menu, choose "Remove label > Books."
4. From the "Label Actions..." menu, choose "Apply label > New Label..."
5. Enter "Reading" as your new label. (If you already have some posts with the label "Reading," you can simply apply that label, without making a new label.)

Alrighty, sounds simple enough.

I followed the steps up to #3. After I've removed the label, the list of posts dissappears. Which means I'll have to go back to ALL posts, reselect the posts which were previously labelled Books and the continue with Step #4. This is fine with the label I was playing with but what if I've been using the labels for the past 3 years and have hundreds of posts with that label? How would I possibly remember all the posts to reselect and re-label?

When reading the steps, I had the impression that the posts labelled Books will still be listed so that I would be able to easily follow up with step #4. Was that a crazy assumption?

I do think that they should create the function to rename the labels, this run around method of doing it is error-prone and tedious for mass postings of the same labels.

If nobody else has this problem, please tell me where I went wrong with the ste

gmail & celcom email sms

Does anyone know if it's possible to email sms to a celcom number from Gmail? Cause I'm getting a failure notification email when I tried.

From the email, I'm gathering that gmail is sending emails as multipart contents

Subject: xxxxx
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----=_Part_909_4480553.1121765928693"

------=_Part_909_4480553.1121765928693
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Disposition: inline



------=_Part_909_4480553.1121765928693
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Disposition: inline

While the Celcom sms email server is anticipating text/plain content.

(Email-SMS) Please check the following:
1. Typing error on Celcom GSM phone number.
2. The content-type of the mail must be text/plain *only*.
3. The mail is excessively long.

Does anyone know if I can get gmail to send mails as text/plain?

Windows XP search tweak

This is more for me than anything. I keep forgetting how to do it. Maybe it could be useful to you as well.

Ever tried searching for files via the specifying the 'A word of a phrase in the file'?
Then never seem to get any results even though you can bet both your arms and legs that some results show be returned and yet still get absolutely no files found?

Well, I get this a lot and I don't know why. Must have missed a class or two in the Windows XP Search 101 class.

I'm not sure if there is a better more legal way of getting the search they way I think it should be but here's the one I found in many many many places online. They are all the same and it involves changing one value in the registry.

Namely ->
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ContentIndex]
"FilterFilesWithUnknownExtensions"=dword:00000001

That's it! Simple huh? But the question remains, why doesn't the default settings of the search work?

Your favourite sites

I need some sites to test a product. And since I hardly browse sites except for phlogs (my own term for photoblogs), my friend's blogs, emails, amazon (which I wish they'd have a Malaysian branch!) and google, I'm looking for other sites that people visit frequently.

So, I need some help. What sites do you guys visit frequently? Preferably sites that are not blogs and search portals and of course, not gmail, yahoo nor msn.