Dear Lazyweb, here is a wiring diagram, obtained at great personal dissatisfaction.

See, I wanted to use my beloved Shure i2c headphones as a headset with my computer. Here in this modern world, you'd think that shit would be standardized by now, but no. It turns out that the Shure model I have, with the microphone and 2.5mm plug, is not a "cell phone" model, but actually a "Treo" model.

So, when I went and bought a USB dingus and an adapter cable to go with it, I found that the adapter cable was wired wrong (only one channel and no mic.) Apparently the Treo wiring plan is... creative? (This also explains why the retro handset doesn't work right with the Treo: it's wired in the same "wrong" way as the above cable.)

So, I made my own cable. Which was approximately 500% harder than it should have been because, bizarrely, it turns out that 4-conductor 2.5mm jacks are near-unobtanium -- and 4-conductor 2.5mm jacks in cable rather than board-mount form factor are complete unobtainium. (Radio Schlock has 3.5mm 3-conductor male cable plugs, so at least the other side is easy to get.)

So, to do this, you need to buy one of the rare board-mount sockets (Digikey CP1-42515RS-ND) and swaddle it in electrical tape.

The money shot:

(G=ground, L=left, R=right, M=microphone)

My Treo met an untimely death when I kicked a cup of tea into it, so I upgraded. This passing made me sad, because I had just painted the Treo's case to divest myself of the cognitive polution of the logos and text that plaster it like a NASCAR racer (Krylon Fusion FTW), but it turns out that the Centro is better in every way. Well, in one way. It has almost exactly the same specs (except for somewhat worse battery life) but it's a lot smaller. Did I mention a lot smaller?

They also switched from SD to MicroSD. Have you seen these things? They're ridiculous! Nothing removable needs to be that small. It's like a joke: like the "Noisy Cricket" gun from Men in Black.

Unfortunately, even though that's an 8GB card, the Centro seems to only see 4GB of that. What year is this? What kind of pinheads are still writing device drivers that make those kinds of assumptions?

Mike Akers ported Dali Clock to the iPhone. He says, "it's now installable via Installer.app, in the Utilities section."

I don't have (and don't want) an iPhone^* so I don't know what that means, but presumably those of you who do, do.

* Hate the on-screen keyboard, find their policy of making third-party software difficult to install to be offensive.

Cell Phone Jammer

Blocking distance: 5 - 10 meters
Blocking frequency: GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz
Size: 6 x 6.8 x 2 cm
Weight: 70 g

$166.00

Dear Lazyweb, think twice before upgrading to Missing Sync 6.0.1.

I upgraded from 5.1.2 to 6.0.1 primarily because I wanted the new "SMS Log" app that archives the SMSes on your phone in a readable, searchable way.

However, they also replaced the "MemoPad" application with a new "Notes" application. Unfortunately, the new one is ( full of bugs. )

So, don't buy that upgrade. But if you do, it's possible to continue using the "MemoPad" application from version 5 with the rest of version 6: ( Like so. )

Ok, but now you might find that the "Photos" conduit doesn't work any more. ( So then... )

There, wasn't that simple?

Let that be a lesson to you: never upgrade.

Dear Lazyweb, here are two unrelated questions:

1. What's a command-line MacOS way to extract iTunes metadata from a MOV file (e.g., "Title", "Artist", "Year")? The Perl modules MP4::Info and Audio::M4P::QuickTime and AtomicParsley will extract such metadata from MP4 files, but none of them work on the QuickTime container.
   Update: 'mdls' seems to be the simplest answer to this for MOV files (but not MP4 files, for which MP4::Info works ok.)

2. I put an extension on the cable of my cellphone booster, because a better spot for the antenna was a bit farther away than the 100' piece of coax that it came with. However, this seems to have made matters worse instead of better. In my experience in the past, all coax is more-or-less created equal, but maybe that's not the case when it comes to the frequencies involved here. What kind of cable should I be using for this?
   Update: I replaced it with a single run of RG-6/U quad shield ("Belden 7916A"), and it works a lot better. So either I had a crappy cable in there, or connecting two cables together was a bad idea.

I bought one of these last week. It seems to work pretty well! The reception in the back office at DNA has always been crappy, but after running the antenna cable up to the 3rd floor, I reliably get 3+ bars instead of 1 bar or less. (There's 3 bars at the spot where the antenna is, just inside the corrugated steel roof. I really ought to punch through and put it outside, but I haven't yet.)

I wish it had more range on the other end. I wrote the manufacturer asking if it's possible to replace the base-unit antenna with a bigger one, but they haven't written back yet.

Time of day calling it quits at AT&T

Richard Frenkiel was assigned to work on the time machines when he joined Bell Labs in the early 1960s. He described the devices as large drums about 2 feet in diameter, with as many as 100 album-like audio tracks on the exterior. Whenever someone called time, the drums would start turning and a message would begin, with different tracks mixed together on the fly.

[...]

Daniels switched to her professional voice, her soft Southern accent instantly vanishing. "At the tone," she said, "the temperature is minus 12 degrees." She laughed and her accent returned. "I liked that."

No one had told her that AT&T was about to stop time.

"I think that's very sad," Daniels said. "I was told at one time that my voice would last until well into the 21st century. Now it looks like I'm about to be laid to rest."

When that day comes, Daniels said, she knows what her epitaph will be: "She knew the time."

You know what's dumb? How receiving SMS pictures works on a Sprint Treo.

Someone sends you a text message with a picture attached. You get a text message that says "You have a new PictureMail! Click here."

1. Click it.

2. That takes you to the web browser, looking at a page that says "New picture mail from xyz", with a thumbnail that's, like, 12x12 pixels. Click the image, or the text below it that says "View Media".

3. Now there's a slightly larger, but still unreadable, image, and now, for the first time, you get to see the actual text that was included in the text message. Don't click the image! Click the text below it that says "Save to Phone".

4. Oh, now we're back to the tiny thumbnail again. Click the link that says "Download to Phone".

5. Now we're out of the web browser and into a dialog box that says, "Do you want to download?" Click "Yes".

6. Oh, another dialog. Click "Save and Open".

7. Oh, another dialog. "Accept media?" Click "OK".

Now you can finally see the full sized image on your phone. Seven clicks! "Click, View, Save, Download, Yes, Open, Accept!" All with a two to five second delay between each opportunity to click.

And it's been this way for years. Don't they even try this crap before shipping it? What kind of person could ship software that behaved this way and feel ok with themselves?

I guess it's better than an iPhone, though, which can't send or receive SMS images at all.

What year is this?

Dear Lazyweb, please tell me how to use AIM.

Some time ago, I signed up with the thing on mobile.aol.com that lets you forward AIM messages to your cell phone via SMS. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but was a pain in the ass because their website is constructed entirely of Fail.

Anyway, I thought I had turned it off, but it seems to have turned itself back on again, and I can't make it go away. At random times people's messages will come to my phone as SMS even though I'm sitting right there at my desktop, logged in and non-idle.

At the time, I was under the impression that their web site A) only worked in Firefox, not Safari, and B) only worked if you gave it your handle without spaces in it (e.g., "yesthatjwz" instead of "yes that jwz"). The failure mode in most cases is that there are no controls on the damned web page because the "Mobile Dashboard" widget doesn't show up at all.

But now I can't make it ever show up.

I just want to turn this bullshit off forever and make AOL no longer know what my cell phone number is. How?

I can't find a tech support page, either.

Update: I think I finally managed to delete my phone number. I think the Mobile Dashboard only shows up in Firefox, and only shows up once per Firefox session. Want to see it again? Quit Firefox and restart. Logging out and back in to the site doesn't do it.

Or maybe the AOL site is just completely nondeterministic. Who knows.

1. I dropped my Treo last week and the SD card popped out, but I didn't notice until too late. So I bought a new card of the exact same model as the last one I had (Transcend 4GB, TS4GSD150) but while the last one worked fine, the new one makes Missing Sync lose its mind when it tries to write to it. Mounting it in a card reader and copying MP3s onto it manually works fine, though, so I have no idea what the difference is between this card and the last.
2. Nobody in SF stocks 4GB SD cards of any kind. WTF.

   Update: I bought yet another different card ("A-Data MyFlash Turbo SD 150x 4G R") and this one seems to work.

3. File under "what are they thinking": if I have headphones plugged in and am listening to music on the Treo, and a call or SMS comes in, the sound in the headphones goes silent and the ringtone comes out of the built-in speaker instead of the headphones. How is that even remotely sensible behavior?
4. When an SMS comes in, and I have headphones on, why doesn't it just read it to me in a robot voice?

   So not living in the future yet.

5. I've played with two iPhones, and now I totally don't want one. The on-screen keyboard is ridiculous. I can't type on it at all. This makes me sad, because I think it's very unlikely that Apple will say, "ok, that was a mistake" and stick a keyboard with actual physical buttons on the next version. They're going to stick with that non-tactile junk forever.

   The web browser is great, the pinch-zoom thing is great, but "not being able to type the damned text messages" is a deal breaker. Also, AT&T's coverage in SF appears to blow. Also it doesn't do Flash, WTF, and there are no games.

Dear Lazyweb,

The fax machine we have in the office is a piece of shit. Not only is it slow, but I noticed the other day that the cartridge doesn't contain toner, it contains, basically, carbon paper on which everything that the thing has ever printed is easily readable. Wow, that's secure.

There seem to be a zillion services out there that let you send and receive faxes via an email gateway. So many that they clog the googles. Are any of them any good? Do you use one?

I'm hoping for something like: sign up with a service that gives us a new telephone number such that when someone faxes something there, it shows up in my inbox as a PDF or JPEG or something. And likewise, a web page or email address that lets me attach an image that will be delivered to someone else's telephone number.

(Suggestions that involve buying modems and running software locally will be summarily ignored.)

Update: Hey, what do you know: Macs have this shit built in, and it actually just works, out of the box! You just plug the internal modem into a phone line and it'll dump incoming faxes in a folder, print them, and/or email them. And sending faxes is on the Print menu. It's almost like the future.

Dali Clock 2.24 out now for MacOS 10.4, PalmOS, and X11. This release includes a MacOS screen saver version of the clock, and there are a few minor display-glitch fixes to the PalmOS version. Also the PalmOS version has a color application icon now, ooooooh.

So, I tried to add a preference to the Mac version to let you hide the dock icon, but ( I couldn't make that work... )

FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool

The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone's microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations. [...]

The U.S. Commerce Department's security office warns that "a cellular telephone can be turned into a microphone and transmitter for the purpose of listening to conversations in the vicinity of the phone." An article in the Financial Times last year said mobile providers can "remotely install a piece of software on to any handset, without the owner's knowledge, which will activate the microphone even when its owner is not making a call."

Nextel and Samsung handsets and the Motorola Razr are especially vulnerable to software downloads that activate their microphones, said James Atkinson, a counter-surveillance consultant who has worked closely with government agencies. "They can be remotely accessed and made to transmit room audio all the time," he said. "You can do that without having physical access to the phone." [...]

Other mobile providers were reluctant to talk about this kind of surveillance. Verizon Wireless said only that it "works closely with law enforcement and public safety officials. When presented with legally authorized orders, we assist law enforcement in every way possible."

This is a good hack; I wonder what the mechanism is. Do these phones do automatic software updates? Or would it be necessary to trick the user into downloading a trojan?

I bought a no-name 4GB SD card for my Treo 700p, and it's really flaky: at somewhat random (but frequent) times, it makes the "you just ejected the card!" noise, and then I have to pop it out and back in again to get it to be recognised. I think maybe it only does this when it's not being accessed, e.g., as soon as I stop playing music and/or the device goes to sleep, it unmounts the card. I haven't had it do it while listening to music, but then as soon as I pause and the phone goes idle, blam.

The card seems to work fine when I plug it into a USB reader on my Mac. I also tried reformatting it. Some googling suggests that there are people out in the world successfully using 4GB FAT32 SD cards with the Treo 700p. Palm's site says they "have not tested" 4GB cards, though.

So is there some less sketchy 4GB card I should buy instead? Or does this trick just not work?

Update: Bought a Transcend 4GB. Works fine.

This is amazingly good! Instead of a web page using JavaScript tricks, it's a native app, so you can scroll around and all the magic popups and stuff work. And it doesn't require you to install half a gigabyte of Java VM first.

Every couple of weeks my Treo 700p gets into a state where it can't send or receive text messages; none come in, and when I send them, they appear to go out but then never arrive. If I turn the phone off and then on again, everything starts working, and all the messages I should have received in the previous day come in all at once. My outgoing messages are gone for good, however. This happens even if the sender/recipent are on the same network (Sprint). When it's in the bad state, voice calls, web browsing and email still work fine.

I've heard of other people having this problem; is there a fix? There doesn't seem to be a firmware upgrade for the 700p yet; I haven't found one anyway. (I have "1.08-SPNT").

Dear Lazyweb,

What's a good-sounding set of earbud-style stereo headphones that works with the Treo 700? Bonus points if the headphones also include a microphone. Triple word score if they're Bluetooth.

The phone came with a set, but they sound moderately crappy, and they fall out of my ears.

(Other than that, the 700 makes a pretty decent MP3 player. I set up Missing Sync to keep my card filled with an iTunes playlist of "3+ stars, by recently added". Battery usage seems reasonable, too.)

Update: Most people recommended the Etymotic ER-6 headphones, but I am sad to report that they have no bass whatsoever. They sound cleaner than the crappy headphones that came with the phone, and they don't fall out of my ears, but if I have to trade "stay in my ears" for "have any bass at all", I'll stick with the falling-out kind. Dammit. I guess I'll try the Shure i2c next.

Update 2: I got Shure i2c, and they're awesome! They block outside noise much better than the ER-6, and most importantly, actually have a low end. They also come with 3 sizes of tips in 3 styles, so they fit really well. (And they have a mic, and the right 2.5mm plug.)