The Artesea

The lead story today on the news is that employees of T-Mobile have been selling on customer information to a third party who are then using the information to try and get the customers to upgrade.

Now whilst I don’t have the full information, my first point will be DON’T PANIC.

The information these third parties want are your name, number, contract expiry date and possibly your address (although not essentially needed). Bank account and account security information shouldn’t have been passed on.

It’s the same scam that has been running for years. You get a call from your Network about a month before your contract expires. They offer you an upgrade, however for some reason you can’t keep your current mobile number.

What actually is happening is that a dealer is try to get to commission from the mobile phone companies for providing them with a new customer. They lie claiming to be from the mobile company you are on, hoping you won’t notice until it’s too late and a new contact has been signed.
The way the scam worked in the past was that when you signed a new contact your details were added to a Phone Book of mobiles. Companies would store the data, wait 11 months, then call you. As the first 5 digits belonged to each network you could tell who you needed to pretend to be calling from.
However since then several things have changed. Contracts are no longer 12 months, but instead 18, 24 or in some cases 36. At which point should the cold calls be made? Now numbers are ported around as people move between networks getting the best deal on each upgrade, it’s getting harder to tell which network to customer was on last.

I remember several years ago, a colleague at work received a call from Orange advising that his phone was available for upgrade. He asked them who they really were, the response was that they were calling from Orange, he asked them again and they repeated that they were from Orange. He called them liars (rather loudly) and asked why if they were from Orange would they be calling him 3 months in to his contract with Vodafone, of whom he is an employee. The call ended pretty quick.

Remember, networks are pretty lazy at getting you to upgrade. The more months you spend with them using your old mobile, the more money they can make as they don’t need to subsides a handset.
If you do ever receive one of these calls, never commit to upgrading. Ask for a name and a number to call back on after you have had a chance to shop around. If it was your real network when you call the customer services number on your bill and speaking to an adviser, there should be notes explaining what was offered. If there isn’t anything, then it’s going to be a third party (or a very lazy member of staff).
Of course if this third party is offering a great deal on an upgrade you might want to consider taking up the offer, but remember you are dealing with people who blatantly lied to you, and could do again.

My full time job is working for Vodafone, at no point have I ever passed on customers details, nor have I ever worked for any company “offering” upgrades. Everything I have written in this post is from my experiences of speaking to these companies when trying to be upgraded and do not reflect the views of my employees.

…or how to block adverts like AdBlockPlus does except on your Windows Mobile phone whilst using Opera Mobile.

Having used both AdBlock+ and Greasemonkey on Firefox, one of the things I noticed missing on Google Chrome was the ability to hide the adverts.
Chrome by default doesn’t support any plugins, so I went googling around for a solution and found AdSweep. Turns out that it is possible to have User Scripts in Chrome (the same thing really as Greasemonkey) and after some tweaks and a simple javascript file download the adverts were gone.
Then yesterday I noticed a post on PocketNow.com about using a JavaScript hack to resize the text input box in Opera Mobile.
The trick was using User Javascript (again Greasemonkey), so I wondered if it was possible to use the AdSweep Opera js file on my phone.
The answer is yes

Simple steps to enabling:

1. Download the Opera AdSweep.js file from AdSweep.org (I suggest on a computer instead of your phone).
2. Using which ever filemanager you prefer (I like Total Commander) create a userjs folder in your Opera directory. On my phone using Opera Mobile 9.7 it was \Program Files\Opera Mobile\profile
3. Copy AdSweep.js from your computer in to your userjs folder on the phone.
4. In Opera Mobile, type opera:config (no http) in the address bar.
5. Under User Prefs you should find the following three options:
   • Always Load User Javascript: Tick
   • User Javascript: Tick
   • User Javascript File: \Program Files\Opera Mobile\profile\userjs\ (this is the location on my phone, make sure it matches the path you used above).

   Make sure you press Save at the end

6. Close Opera (if you have Widgets running and even if you don’t you may prefer a soft reset).

Next time you open Opera you should find adverts start to disappear.

When I was a councillor on Lincoln City a total of three applications for phone masts came in front of the Planning Committee.
Due to a prejudicial interest I never took part in the discussion however I was pleased to see that the councillors understood the laws around the applications. Two of the applications were accepted without much fuss.
The third was from O2 at the Birchwood shopping centre. It was a retrospective for a 13 metre poll with 3g aerials on top. They had already got consent (via appeal) for a 13 metre poll with 2g on top, but put up a 3g mast instead (only real difference was an extra 10cm in diameter of the bit at the top). It was felt by the committee that the overall shape of the structure was detrimental to the visual amenity of the area, however the planning inspectorate appeal again overturned the committee.

Thanks to the Elders of the Internet I can now bring you a video of the internet. (sorry no audio)

Wow, my second blog post in as many days.

On Friday night the David, Estelle the misses and me went to watch the Zutons at the Lincoln Engine Shed.
Whilst at best I recognised around 7 of their songs (really should have listened to their albums before going), it was a great night.

The highlight was the encore where they just jammed for around 10 minutes including a great drum solo.

If you get the chance they are great live, and if you live near Lincoln and haven’t been to the Engine Shed you should. It’s one of the best venues I’ve been to.

7/10

Edit: 11/12/2008 The BBC have annouced that the X1 is now supported, however it won’t run over Vodafone at the mo.

Since the BBC launched the iPlayer for the N96 I knew it wouldn’t be too long until it would be available for other phones. However I can’t wait, so spent today looking for methods in getting my X1 to stream the shows.
I managed to extract the RTSP stream of Buzzcocks and successfully got that working on my phone. My next step was to find a way that didn’t involve me using my PC opening a collection of random XML files in order, to then email a link to my phone.

Several hours of coding and I managed to strip out the opening the files on the PC to a simple web script, however I still needed the 8 letter/number code for the episode to be parsed to the page.
Then when looking at the BBC source I noticed something. They now support the Samsung I900 a Windows Mobile device.
The method for checking if your phone is a Samsung, a simple User-Agent check.

Knowing how to modify the User-Agent in Opera on my X1 I placed the code need to pass the check and BINGO my phone now loads the BBC page and plays the shows.

These are the steps for an X1i Vodafone UK Branded
Run Opera
In the address bar enter opera:config (no http://)
Scroll down to User Prefs and click
Scroll down to Custom User-Agent and at the end of the pre-filled text add sgh-i900
Scroll down some more and press Save. You will get a prompt which suggests you may need to reset the phone, but for this you don’t.

Now point your browser to http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/iplayer/ and enjoy.

If on your phone the Custom User-Agent is blank, try visiting something like whatsmyuseragent.com copying the User-Agent which your phone is currently displaying and then add sgh-i900 to the end.

WARNING: Please only use whilst on WIFI. I accept no responsibility for you running up HUGE bills due to large data downloads. Even if you have an “unlimited” add-on, check with your network for their Fair Usage (Vodafone’s is 500mb) as you can quickly exceed it watching TV on your mobile!

The quality isn’t exactly great on a WVGA screen as it’s been built for the Nokia N96. According to beebhack these are the specs.

Access Method: RTSP streaming
Video Codec: H.264
Video Resolution: 320 x 176
Video Bitrate: 128 kbps
Audio Codec: AAC
Audio Bitrate: 64 kbps
Overall Bitrate: 192 kbps

ps if you get a BBC 502 error, don’t worry. Looks like they are playing about with the site themselves. Just try again later.

…sort of. The BBC have launched Sideloading in which you can now download programmes from the iPlayer in a lower res format to copy across to your phone or video playing handheld device.
The current restrictions are that your mobile must play DRM Windows Media files and that the downloads take place on a Windows PC.
This looks like another great bit of progress for the iPlayer project, just need to get myself a new phone which will play the files now.

Ever since I started watching DIVX / XVID versions of my favourite TV shows from the States I’ve always wanted to run them through my TV, instead of watching them on my PC.
Media Centre PC’s have been available for some time, plus streaming set-top boxes that read the files from over the Wifi. However these require extra money.

I had noticed that my DVD player would play DIVX files from disc, however only from a CD and not a DVD which meant only 2 episodes per disc, and I had no choice over which one it picked first.

However today I’ve installed some stuff on my Wii which allows me to watch files from either a USB stick in the back, or on the SD card.
The software also makes it possible to stream files over Wifi, however at the moment it’s just running a bit too slow, and it doesn’t have a browser for this option, all files names need to be hard written into a config file.

So what do you need to start watching the files:

• A Nintendo Wii
• A copy of Zelda, Twilight Princess (you can borrow from a mate or rental store for a day)
• An SD card (2gb max for some reason)
• A PC to download files
• A memory card reader to put files onto the memory card via your PC

Now once you have the above, visit this site to download all the Wii Homebrew Software.
The boxes you need to tick are:

• Homebrew Channel
• Twilight Hack (correct for your region)
• MPlayerWii (a newer version although can be found here)

You may have noticed some emulators, I’m not talking about those here, but feel free to tick the boxes to download them as well.
Once you’ve ticked all the boxes you want, hit the Create my custom pack button.

You will now have a ZIP file on your PC. You will need to extract this to the ROOT of your SD card.

Now pop Zelda and the SD card into your Wii. If you have never played Zelda on this Wii, start it up, and exit as soon as possible.
Have a watch of this video to see how you install the HomeBrew channel on to your Wii.

Once installed you no longer need Zelda, so put it back on the shelf or return it to whoever was kind enough to lend it to you.

Now open up the HomeBrew channel, run the MPlayerWii app and you should be able to select the SD Card or the USB Stick.

Look at the bottom right of this picture at the purse theif.

I’ve just managed to test mobiPad with a W960. The software allows button presses on the Wiimote to be sent to the phone via Bluetooth.
Having it run in the background with Picodrive allows me to play Micro Machines. The quality of the emulator is brilliant and the response time from the wiimote is fast.
Just need to look at some of the other emu’s now.