The US Health System

Last night, I watched the latest Michael Moore documentary about the US Health System called Sicko. And, he does it again. For an average European, it's hard to imagine that people are left without proper medical care. It seems that the only thing that counts is making vast amounts of money, with an obvious disregard of human life. Sure, the United States is the land of opportunity, but at what cost? How can those medical insurance executives live with themselves? I guess that the millions earned are keeping them happy. There's a saying that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, but in this case it's barren rotten wasteland. Things are not as bad in Holland as we might think, so if you have any doubt about our medical system, you should watch this movie.

Click to read more ...

Mazzy Star

Last week, I watched a new episode of House M.D. It was an episode in which a patient dies (which doesn't happen a lot in House). In the final scene there was an awesome piece of music by Mazzy Star called 'Into Dust'. Yet another band with a great sound for my iTunes library. Too bad that their latest album is a over a decade old....

Click to read more ...

First Nokia E61i Annoyance

Not every device is perfect. Even the Nokia E61i has its faults. I have a Jabra BT250V Bluetooth headset with my E61i, but the reception is terrible. As long as there's a line of sight between the phone and the headset everything is fine. As soon as I move a bodypart between the two, the reception goes berserk. Even when the Nokia is in my pocket, the reception is terrible. Also, sometimes the Bluetooth connection disappears. Even when the devices lie next to each other. This didn't happen with my older phone (the Nokia 6230i). Perhaps it's the combination.. Perhaps not, but it's definitely annoying. There are/were some other annoyances; like not being able to properly configure the Nokia VPN client with a Cisco PIX firewall. I'm able to succesfully connect, but after that no bit (or byte) is transmitted through the VPN tunnel. So far I blame our corporate firewall. Also, the E61i does respond very well to bouncing on concrete pavement :-( . Or not being able to watch YouTube videos (-> Flash 9) on the phone (which uses Flash 7) .

Click to read more ...

Configure the Nokia E61i for VoIP

The Nokia E61(i) phone is capable of making Voice over IP (VoIP) phone calls. The nice part is that you don't need your cellular carrier to make phone calls. All you need is a VoIP account somewhere. The world greatest ISP (in Holland), XS4ALL, gives 2 free VoIP numbers to its customers. So, it was time to get it working on my Nokia E61i. First of all, I wasn't familiar with the VoIP terminology, so I needed a manual for dummies on this. Luckely, the dutch tweakers forum gave me some answers on the topic. After configuring the phone I got error messages about not being able to connect to the service. I did read some reports on this, and they all mentioned that some phones didn't seem to work properly... Fortunately, a colleague of mine has the same phone, and he got it working. So, it could be something else... My DSL modem for example. A quick test showed, that when I used my neighbors open WiFi, I was able to connect to the service, so I needed to look at my modem. A quick search revealed that there was a new firmware (released by my ISP). After updating the firmware everything worked fine. One drawback though. The default outgoing call type is set to cellular, so every call you make will be using the normal GSM network. There is no easy way of switching this to VoIP. This can only be done in the the Phone menu (Menu -> Tools -> Settings -> Call).

Click to read more ...

Favorite Applications on Nokia E61 Screen

The Nokia 61(i) has some default applications and tools on the screen. These applications can be opened by clicking them instead of browsing through the menu. They are probably the applications you use the most. The default applications and tools are nice, but most likely, every user wants his/hers own apps there. It took me a while before I figured out that the screen you see is called the 'standby' screen. Lame name for this screen if you ask me. Anyway, you can edit this by going to;

Menu -> Tools -> Settings -> Phone -> Standby

Click to read more ...

Transfer Large Files to the Nokia E61

A couple of day's ago, I tried to play an episode of Painkiller Jane on my Nokia E61i. The original format was in the DivX format, so I used VisualHub to convert it on my Mac to the MP4 format (320 pixels wide). This part was relatively easy. The next step was a bit harder; trying to get the 100MB file from my Mac on the Nokia. Somehow, there's no way of transferring the file from a Mac to the Nokia via USB. The USB connection works file with iSync, but this has no option of synching files. When connecting, the phone gives you the option of using the 'PC Suite' or 'Data Transfer'. The first is using iSync, and the latter gives you an error that the devices can't be recognized. Nokia does have an application for the Mac to transfer files to, and from the phone (Nokia Media Transfer). BUT, the Nokia E61 is NOT supported This means you're left with Bluetooth, or using a web server and download the file. If you don't own your own webserver you're stuck with Bluetooth (which is terribly slow b.t.w.). Both are a pain in the butt in getting large fils on the phone. I had to resume the download via the web server about 10 times before I had downloaded it, and Bluetooth... well don't get me started on that. My advice; don't use a Mac to transfer large files to the phone, but use Nokia PC Suite with the USB cable on a PC to do that. B.t.w. the Nokia E61i played the episode just fine.

Click to read more ...

Nokia E61 Dialup Networking

Tried to use my new Nokia E61i for surfing the Internet with my laptop (Windows XP), but this just wouldn't work. Errors were plenty, but no bit made it to the Internet for some reason. Strange, because my older 6230 (or whatever model it was) worked perfectly. After cursing a couple of times, I needed to make sure that this wasn't a defect in the phone, so I tried it with my Mac Book Pro (which is for sale by the way ;-) ). Obviously, this worked straight away. Just used the same settings / profile from my older phone.... Windows never keeps to amaze me (in a negative way that is).

Click to read more ...

New Mac Book Pro's

Apple started shipping new Mac Book Pro's. These new little gems are based on the new Intel Santa Rosa chipset. This means, more power, and less power consumption. They also refitted the laptops with LED backlit screens to reduce power consumption. Other features include;

• 2GB RAM (4GB max instead of 3GB)
• 802.11n WiFi
• Larger and faster hard disks (>120GB)

Boy, this makes me wanna upgrade.. Anyone fancy a first generation Mac Book Pro for a couple of bucks?

Click to read more ...

Cannot Authorize Phone

Oke, the first annoyance about the Nokia E61 is a fact. Well, actually it's about the Nokia PC Suite with which you can connect the phone to your (Windows) PC. Somehow my Nokia E61i wouldn't connect using bluetooth with the Nokia Software. It could connect to the PC itself, but the Nokia software didn't want to 'see' the phone. So I tried to remove the pairing between de two devices (which seemed to work). After that I tried to pair the two devices again... That's were the trouble started. The software did see the phone via bluetooth, but it gave an error when I wanted to connect. The error said 'Cannot Authorize Phone'. Connecting via the USB cable worked fine. I tried rebooting the PC and the phone several times, but the error persisted. Finally I removed the software from the PC and reinstalled it. Same error occured :mad: . This was the point when I seriously thought about going back to a Windows Mobile device. There was one more thing I might try, and that was going through the registry of the PC and remove EVERY reference to Nokia. I first uninstalled the software and afterwards I removed everything Nokia-related in the registry. After a reboot I reinstalled the Nokia PC Suite software, and everything worked fine. This proves that Nokia software is as buggy as Microsoft software. How hard is it for a piece of software/developer to remove all references to the software when you remove it? (rhetorical question)

Click to read more ...

Installation Root CA on Nokia E61 Made Easier

Updated on Wednesday, February 10, 2010 at 8:53 by Willem

From this day on, you can install certificates from non-trusted CA's on your Symbian-based phone (like the Nokia E61) using this page euh.. this page.

UPDATE: it seems that most other phone brands and types work as well (the S40 based devices are left out... sorry).

All you need to do is make sure that the certificate is in the DER format. The webpage doesn't verify if the certificate is in the correct format. This is up to the uploader.

I created this page, because I work a lot with digital certificates, so I don't want to be bothered with the workaround described in the earlier post. The current version is quick-and-dirty (no error messages). I'll try to make it more user friendly in the next couple of days (like having the option of sending the URL to an e-mail address). Just make sure that you obey the guidelines shown on the page, and all should go well.

Feel free to add a comment on how to improve this.

Click to read more ...