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One of the first things I wanted to activate on my new 6700 was the bluetooth dialup networking. This is not enabled by default like it is on the xv6600. However, Google showed me these instructions at pdaphonehome.com

I am archiving the instructions here for my own use. I have already tried tethering to my laptop in Windows XP and it worked great. Got 120ish K per second.

1. Go to the PHONE application
2. ##3328873
3. enter code 000000
4. Select BT DUN
5. Click Edit
6. Choose enable
7. Select WMODEM
8. Click Edit
9. Choose enable
10. Push Save / OK
11. Push Ok
12. follow the prompt to restart your device

Set up bluetooth on your XV6700 to be discoverable, discover services from your laptop, you should see the bluetooth DUN available.

Verizon finally figured out that the XV6600 can’t be fixed. No matter how many of them they send me, I am going to keep calling them and complaining. So after the last call they agreed to send me a XV6700. What a difference!

First off the phone is smaller. I can actually fit it in my pocket! No need to constantly wear it on my side, proclaiming to the world “look at me, I must be important because I carry one of those big phones”. I hated the size of the XV6600 ever since I got it. The XV6700 is a much more realistic size.

The screen is smaller, but on the upside, it seems like it is sharper, and brighter. I actually like the XV6700 with the smaller screen more.

The keyboard is actually usable! Unlike the XV6600 that you either need to have the worlds smallest fingers to use, or type with your fingernails, the XV6700 contains a full qwerty keyboard that slides out the full length of the phone. But keys are huge (well at least compared to the XV6600). It is very easy to “thumb type” with it. I can’t type nearly as fast as I can on a real keybaord, but I don’t feel myself trying to come up with the shortest email response possible because is it so frustrating to type.

Overall, I would say it seems like the team reponsible for building the XV6700 actually thought about what they were building, unlike the guys that put the xv6600 together.

I have only had it for 3 days now, so the jury is still out on whether or not this one will have the same freezing problems that my other phone did.  If it does, I think I will be very happy with the XV6700.

I have a friend that recently started a new ecommerce website selling zebra lables and ribbons. Now these aren’t labels and ribbons that you would use to create name tags for your herd of zebras (although you if you do have that need you might give them a call, they can probably help). These are supplies for zebra brand printers. I figured a link was the least I could do after all the Mountain Dew they have bought me.

I had a run in with Outlook’s preview pane today.  A new mail message arrived, and for whatever reason, every time preview pane tried to load it, Outlook started going crazy.  It would use 98% of the CPU endlessly.  The problem was since this was the most recent message in my inbox, Outlook would automatically try and open it in the preview pane when I loaded Outlook.  So I was stuck.  I knew the best bet would be to disable the preview pane, load Outlook, delete the offending message, and re-enable preview pane.  But since on launch outlook would busy itself tryiing to do something with this message it wouldn’t let me into the settings to disable the preview pane.

I set out to find out what registry key I could set to disable the preview pane, and found out if you launch outlook with the /nopreview option it will do this for you.  I added this to my outlook shortcut, launched outlook, deleted the message, closed outlook, removed the /nopreview option and launch outlook again.  Problem solved.

So last night I was driving by a bank with my wife in the car and I came up with my best ever “Get Rich Quick Scheme”. Buy an ATM! BTW, you can by them on Ebay. Anyway, this would hook me up with a limitless line of cash, which I think is a very good thing. My wife works for a large national bank, and one of her jobs is to take care of the ATM. So she of course chimed in and said there was a problem with my plan. You know I love her to death, but sometimes she can just be too practical. She said it wasn’t a good plan because you can only take out $300 a day with most cards. I told her that was easy, I would just buy a lot of cards.

So ATM’s go for between $1500 and $2500 bucks on ebay. These are mostly the kind that are stand-alone, not mounted into the wall. I really would prefer the wall mounted kind.

Well I have finally decided to start a diet, and I kicked it off at dinner tonight. I was eating a pan pizza at Taco Bell (I refuse to call it Pizza Hut because it doesn’t have the red and white checked table cloth) when I started thinking “this meal really isn’t all that healthy, I really should eat better and loose a few pounds”. Then I took a drink of my Mountain Dew, not the new Diet Mountain Dew with its great new “tuned up taste”, the fully loaded kind. As the sugar and caffeine surged through my blood stream and into my brain it hit me…..press the “Diet” button on the lid. So I did, and felt a lot better about my meal and I think my pants are fitting a little better now.

For some time I have beeing looking for a better streaming technology. I had a project come up, taking some movies from VHS and making them available on the web for my church. I really don’t like the three main encoding types of Windows Media, Quicktime, or Real. Windows Media is OK, but with the announcment that Microsoft won’t continue making Windows Media Player for the Mac, I am concerned that my video won’t be accessible by Mac users in the future.

Quicktime is a decent technology. With Darwin Streaming Server you can put together a good streaming system for not a lot of money. But the thing I don’t like about quicktime is that you need the player. Many PC users don’t seem to have it. While they can download it, that takes time, and it annoyingly places itself in your task tray unless you go through more steps to disable it.

Real just stinks all around in my opinion. Plus the player puts itself in your task tray and goes one step worse than Quicktime by displaying ads.

I had begun to notice a new streaming technology at use on some websites I had visited. It was FLV based in Flash. Flash has a very light player, is installed on most machines whether PC or Mac, and if it isnt’ installed, can be installed in like a minute. It doesn’t show up in the task tray, and it doesn’t show ads. Plus it embeds VERY well into web pages via flash. You create a flash that has the movie player in it, and publish it to your website just like a normal flash movie. Macromedia has included some very well done default player skins, or if you want to get fancy you can do all your own play/buffer/seek/volume/etc buttons. Very cool. On the streaming side, it is some of the best quality with a small file size I have ever seen. It was half the file size of a quicktime movie of the same video size, with a very small quality difference.

The only thing I was unhappy with was how long it was taking the Macromedia Video Encoder to produce an FLV from an quicktime or MPEG file. A 30 minute video was going to take 4 hours to encode! So I contacted my friend Brandon who runs PureOnline.com. They do a lot of online streaming with FLV. He recommended Sorenson Squeeze, which I of course tried. It was able to produce the FLV in about an hour to an hour and half (I was running on a 1.2GHZ Mac Mini with 256 MB of RAM, not exactly a power horse).

I have been considering a video blog, and I might just use this FLV format. I like that it can begin streaming almost immediately, with great quality, and small file size. It will be hard to beat. I made this test video, which is a promotional video for Setting Captives Free, while I was playing with FLV.  It is a good example of the quality/speed.

I have upgraded to Wordpress 2.0 and have enabled permalinks on the site so that search engines can continue to find my great content that falls off the first page as I continue to add even greater content to the site. This has had the effect of breaking a few links in my posts, I will fix them as I find them, but there is a handy search box over to the right if you get lost.