all things me

Via Nokia Nseries blog I found the theme “Pearl Black” which is a step in the right direction (that is, it isn’t BLUE!).

It’s a black version of the default theme I was using at the very beginning. The background is a little silly but it’ll do. Check out the music player:

I also tested out a theme by Babi, Only Black v2, but it is very black (looked really good,though).

I’ve seen a really cool purple theme on N95. I wonder if it’s available somewhere…

Update: And the search goes on…

Kooky Phone is quite nice, too. It won the theme competition at e61life. There’s a full and light version. I installed the light version because it uses the default icons. A bit of blue there, but very refreshing nevertheless:

A few links that may interest you if you’re looking for themes

• Mobile Themes (requires registering to download)
• 4urMobilePhone (requires registering to download)
• Mobile9 (no registering but limited download)

Grandma always remembers when the first snow comes each year because she notes it down in her calendar — I never remember (barely remember what I’ve eaten a day before), so I thought this time I’d record it: Last Tuesday (Nov 1st) it snowed for the first time this winter (in my opinion) but it turned to horrible slush by the end of the day. The next day it showed again and that time it stuck. Today we had a wonderful blizzard so I took the above photo through the train window.

Thank you il Filosofo! Now I can blog from my mobile the way I want: not via email (a haven for spam), not through a WAP page (I want to make the most of this amazing screen) and definitely not through an external service. The fancy WP admin interface prevented me from posting an image as I learned the last time, but while I was doing research on various ways to moblog I stumbled across Old-Style Upload plugin. Now I can upload images directly from the phone!

Now, if only I knew how to copy the image path from the browser…

Coffee makes you giddy…

After getting the 2 Gb memory card, I’ve put the N73’s music player to proper use. Here are some of my observations and thoughts.

Volume

I couldn’t even think about listening to radio on my old Nokia 6101 because I couldn’t find a way to turn the volume down. N73 is a bit better, but I am listening to the music at 10%-20% volume and it’s a bit too loud still! It shouldn’t be only because of the earphones I have (HS-20/HS-21) that go in the ear because I tried it on my normal Sony earphones and it was just as loud. The Sony earphones have so big earplugs that they are barely holding on. I haven’t yet tested it with headphones (with the speakers on the ear instead of in the ear canal).

Oddly, Eseries phones apparently suffer from a low volume.

Crash Boom Bang

I’m not sure if this is a feature or a bug, but when the player plays on background (that is, active idle) and I press stop (on AD-41’s “remote control”) the program closes. When I press pause, the track pauses normally but I can’t start playing it again (that is a bug).

The player works better on foreground (naturally) but if the screen has gone black (power saving mode), pause/play button pauses the track but won’t start playing it. Oddly, next track and previous track buttons work normally in power saving mode.

Music library

I love the music library! On my mp3 player the process of beginning to listen to a select album required skipping to a song on the preferred album (I had the songs in folders by album) and then setting the playback as “shuffle album”. On the phone I can go to Music Library > Albums > preferred album, and start playing any song there. All assuming that the ID3/M4A tags are in order. Luckily the program I use to convert my CDs, makes the tags automatically (I think).

I just registered at S60.com and in the My Exclusives I found the S60 Theme – White for several different phones. I downloaded the one for Nokia N92, Nokia N71, Nokia N80, Nokia E60, Nokia E61, Nokia E70, Nokia N91 Nokia 3250 because those are 3rd edition phones. To my delight, it worked!

It looks kinda nice, although a bit too pink…

The obvious pro compared to the nice S60 Theme – Grey is that White uses default icons.

I’m still hoping that someone uploads a really nice theme at the Mobile Themes forum. I’ve tried to use the Carbide.ui S60 Theme Edition 3.1 but it’s confusing.

I installed a theme which wasn’t nice, I uninstalled it but that didn’t seem to go well. The theme did disappear from the Application Manager list but not the themes list (and it still worked). Luckily I found a solution at the Mobile Themes Forums.

I plugged the cable and chose “mass memory” (Data Transfer in English, apparently) instead of PC Suite mode. Now I was able to browse to the hidden ‘private’ folder where I found the theme. Luckily, the file names were recognisable…

I’m quite happy with the S60 White theme at the moment, although I found this on the CD that was in the sales package (duh, I had forgotten all about the themes on the CD):

Still, too red, not plum enough.

(I promise the next post won’t be about themes… or my mobile phone.)

The other day (Nov 10th) while I was away from my computer for a while, I saw my boss sit there and do something. After thinking “gasp, did I lock the computer” (just instinct, no security issue if he saw what I was working on) I went to look what he was doing. Well, take a look:

The bottom Post-It has, I was told, dog treats (I had to ask what on earth were those) and it reads “yum!”.

(Hmm… I was missing my favourite pen this week, those are maybe written with it. I’ll have to go get it back.)

On Wednesday I was voted employee of the year (thankyouthankyou) — it was a tie, though, and I had eventually won in a paper clip draw. Luckily I won because the other one got a bottle of wine. I got a whopping gift certificate to a fancy restaurant chain so I’m taking my sister, Grandma, and an aunt/godmother to eat. It should be fun but the restaurants are so fancy (everything has mushroom and/or alcohol) that I don’t know if I, let alone my sister, find anything to eat.

Now that I can take a photo any time with my phone I’ve started noticing the times when I can’t. Then I see something and think “aw, I would’ve wanted to take a photo of that.”

I don’t take the phone with me when I’m walking the dog but maybe I should. A couple of weeks ago in the morning there was a really wonderful full moon, the sky was clear and very dark. That would’ve made a wonderful photo. I thought, “it’ll be there when I leave for work”. Well, it wasn’t, a cloud had drifted over it. The next morning the moon and the whole setting was back — I didn’t have my phone. When it was time to leave for work, the sky had lightened too much.

Today I saw an interesting spray painting on the asphalt — and I didn’t have my phone. I’ll have to try and remember to take it with me tomorrow.

Hurraah! Babi released a purple variation of the default Nokia theme. I have to try it out.