pseudoberries

Recently I wrote about how iPhone ringtones annoyed me. Adding custom ringtones “the Apple way” costs money. Well, guess what: Yesterday I discovered this article over at iSmashPhone.com:

How to Get Free iPhone Ringtones in Under One Minute

The article introduced me to a wonderful service called audiko. It’s basically a website which allows you to upload your favorite song and convert (parts of) it to a ringtone. One you can open with iTunes and transfer to your iPhone! All for free! No jailbreaking required

The site also archives the ringtones people create and lets you browse through a plethora of popular ones!

I wonder how long it takes before Apple / RIAA brings the site down though :-/ I wonder if their Terms of Use holds…

Today I spent some time hacking on my irssi notification script - Talk To Me. Up until now it has relied on irssi running on your local computer for the notifications to work. For me that’s a problem - I run irssi in a screen session on a remote server. Launching the notification commands on the remote machine would have no effect at all. Then I found this blog post.

It describes how you can set up ssh to forward connections to a port on the remote machine to a port on your local host. This connection is then used to transfer notification messages from irssi to a local daemon which listens on the specified port, and launches notify-send to display them. Neat

So I decided to incorporate this feature into Talk To Me! Go have a look!

Custom ringtones. One would think that using a song from iTunes as a ringtone would be a breeze on this sophisticated phone. I doubt there even exists a mobile phone on the market which doesn’t support this. But not on the iPhone.

No, there tou have to pay Apple $2 to “convert” an mp3 to a ringtone. Like they’re not the same thing. A previous version of iTunes revealed that the only difference between a music file and a ringtone was the file extension - the extension for ringtones is “m4r”. That’s right - Apple expects you to pay them $2 for renaming a file!

You got too greedy on this one, Apple…

Seems the talented guys at NetCom forgot to do what I asked them - twice.

So I tried connecting the phone to iTunes again today - same result.

I call NetCom and complain and I accidentally mention that I tried entering my phone number and IMEI at their unlocking site and got an error message saying the IMEI isn’t registered at that phone number. The phone call continued something like this:

NetCom: “Oh, can you give me your IMEI number?”

Me: “It’s xxxxblahmeh.”

NetCom: “Ok, I’m registering it now.”

Me: “Eh, isn’t that the same thing you’ve already done twice for me earlier?”

NetCom: “Nah, we didn’t have any IMEI registered”

OH MY GOD. Is it possible to be so stupid? I mean, I already gave them my IMEI number in the previous call. SIGH!

I try their unlock site again and this time I get a message that it works! I connect to iTunes - great success! Hooooray! Finally!

Picked up my brand new iPhone 3G at the post office today - oh my it’s shiny! However…

Called NetCom (the carrier with iPhone-monopoly here in Norway) and told them I’d like to cancel my subscription to their over-priced “iTalk” subscription. $80/month for 100MB of data traffic? I don’t think so.

The conversation went something like this:

Me: “Hi, I’d like to cancel my subscription please.”

NetCom: “Awww, okay. Why?”

Me: “It stinks, that’s why.”

NetCom: “We know Ok, just a moment. Dum-de-duu… Okey dokey, you should be able to use your iPhone with any carrier shortly. Just connect the phone to iTunes and click Restore. Oh, and expect a $500 bill in your mailbox shortly! Bye!”

Sounds easy enough, I thought. So I connect the iPhone with the SIM card I’d like to use, but iTunes tells me to shove a certain SIM card up a certain place: “the SIM card is unsupported, sucker”. I guess it just takes a couple of minutes before it’s unlocked, I thought. I try again an hour later, the same. Another hour, the same. What’s taking so long, Apple?

When I connect without a SIM card, however, I’m able to restore the phone. Can this be it? Come on! But no, my SIM card still doesn’t work. Meh.

Called them again:

Me: “Hey, it doesn’t work, what gives?”

NetCom: “Yeah, it might take a couple of days to take effect. What’s your IMEI number?”

Me: “It’s <long number>”

NetCom: “Ok, I’ll send apple another request. You just have to wait.”

Me: “Meh, sharsly?”

NetCom: “Sharsly.”

Tried again now (00:22), still the same. It’s been 12 hours since I asked them to unlock it. Expensive paperweight.

I managed to step on my expensive Oakley sunglasses which I’d bought in the US. This happened while we were out sunbathing on an island in Sweden, near our new cabin at Raftön. When I noticed that I was stepping on them, I twitched and managed to drop my cellphone into a pool of sea water. All happened during one second.

The result: completely broken sun glasses and cell phone. Crap.

Bought new sun glasses of the exact same model the day after and have now ordered an iPhone (expensive). My wallet hates me.

I’ve finished going through all my 900+ photos from Iceland and uploaded the best to Flickr!

Go have a look!

I’ll probably add some more comments to them later, but now I’m off to our new cabin in Sweden. Back in 2 weeks or so

Remember Ask Jeeves, the old human-friendly search engine? Well, it’s successor is finally here: Ask random! It’s THE leader in random decision making!

Got a tough decision to make? Just ask random! It’s 101% random, guaranteed!

• Unsure about whether to hire that guy? Ask random!
• The red or the blue tie? Ask random!
• Need a name for your daughter or son? Ask random!
• Can’t find your trousers? Ask random!

You won’t regret! Ask now!

Back from a week long vacation to Iceland with my family (tue-tue). What a great trip! Pictures coming up soon at Flickr. I just have to go through all of the 946 photos and select the good ones!

Still vacation for me Will be nice to catch up with old friends again.

For months I’ve struggled with connecting an external monitor to my laptop (ThinkPad X61). The external monitor supports resolutions up to 1280×1024, but xrandr -q reports a maximum resolution of only 1024×768! This is the same resolution as the main laptop screen. To get this to work I’ve previously had to issue the following commands:

xrandr --newmode "1280x1024_60.00"  108.88 1280 1360 1496 1712  1024 1025 1028 1060  -HSync +Vsync
xrandr --addmode VGA "1280x1024_60.00"
xrandr --output VGA --mode "1280x1024_60.00" --right-of LVDS

No more! Read on…

After a quick chat with the guys at #xorg @ freenode, they soon figured out my problem: In my Monitor section in xorg.conf there was specified a HorizSync and VertRefresh which were too low for X to operate on a resolution higher than 1024×768! After removing those lines and restarting X, xrandr reported the correct resolutions! Hooray!