My mobile contract recently expired and instead of upgrading with a new mobile phone I chose the Huawei E170 T-Mobile Web 'n' Walk Stick. They seemed a bit confused at this request at first and had to 'speak to their superiors' but eventually agreed that there was no reason that I shouldn't be sent the USB Stick. This means I can add on the Web 'n' Walk Plus or Max packages as and when I need them at the discounted rates when using them as add ons.
To get the USB Stick to work with Mac OS X Leopard though you'll will need to do a few things for yourself as the Web 'n' Walk stick manager software crashed repeatedly when I tried to use it to connect. Here are the steps:
You should now be connected using your modem. Simple really! I actually noticed once connected you can open the Web 'n' Walk stick manager software to monitor the connection. Considering it's this simple I think its a bit misleading that T-Mobile say the device isn't supported on Leopard. Feel free to share your experiences below in case there are other issues.
31 Mar 08
44 COMMENTS
Tags:
mobile broadband
webnwalk
t-mobile
A little while ago it appeared that my Logitech MX Revolution had stopped charging. It didn't seem to recognize that it was placed on the charger. After almost giving up it occurred to me to check the contacts were clear on the underside of the mouse. I just scrapped them with my finger nail which seemed to shine them up a bit. It actually only seemed that the one on the right needed any cleaning, possibly something to do with it being positive or negative.
Anyway, this fixed the problem and it now charges fine. I wouldn't have considered writing about this except for the fact that a friend of mine was also complaining about a Logitech mouse not charging and this fixed the problem for him too.
Update: It looks like all the commenters below have discovered a strange alternative way to get the mouse to start charging - give it a bit of a slam! Obviously at your own risk!
Update 2: 'John M' in the comments below (14th May 2012) has found another very interesting solution if the charging issue appears to be reluctant/intermittent. Pry the stand on the charger forward slightly and wedge a bit of paper in-between the stand and the stand base/back. This presumably adjusts the pressure/angle of the mouse enough to make a stronger contact when the mouse is placed in the dock. Charging now works every time on mine.
17 Dec 07
136 COMMENTS
Tags:
logitech
mouse
mx revolution
not charging
Ok so you might have noticed we've had a bit of an overhaul. Actually, behind the scenes, the overhaul is pretty significant. I've totally rebuilt the whole thing, it now uses Smarty, a long overdue change.
Anyway, as its so different in its layout to the old site I couldn't just update the old files with new files. I'm sure this is a common problem and others must scratch their heads at least a little bit when thinking about updating their sites. I found myself wondering, if Google started crawling my site and seeing an 'under construction' message, would it hurt my page rank? And of course there's the visitors to think about, its not exactly very user friendly is it, taking all your content offline for however long it takes to update the site (Quite a while considering I have to re-upload all the panoramas from the Dartmoor Panoramic Photography page).
I considered the possibility of using some sort of temporary redirect to point to my development server while I update the live server, but didn't really want the development server address getting around. Instead it occurred to me, after some time spent seeing if anyone else had this problem, to just move the old site into one folder on my server. Then I added an htaccess RewriteRule to send all links into that folder (without changing the address shown in the browser), effectively making that folder the new public root. The line to add in the .htaccess file is this:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /TEMPOLD/$1
That takes whatever comes after the domain section and adds /TEMPOLD/ (my new temporary folder) before it.
This change can be done seamlessly without any interruption just by overwriting the root .htaccess file once all your files are in the temporary folder. Once that is working you can then delete all files (apart from the .htaccess file and your temporary folder) from the server. Now you have an almost empty server to upload your new files to, and all the while your site is carrying on as normal. Once you've uploaded your new files just delete the .htaccess file (or replace it with one for your new site) and in an instant your new site will be live and complete. To complete the transition just remove your temporary folder, you might want to back it up though.
15 Oct 07
2 COMMENTS
I am doing some testing and have installed PHP 5 on a development server. I had a site installed on the server that was working correctly, complete with quite an elaborate .htaccess file handling many redirects and rules. However, after installing PHP5 it turns out any php file I tried to view just returned a 403 Forbidden error. I began to scratch my head. Searching on Google didn't immediately bring up a solution either. However, I eventually narrowed it down to the fact that I needed to add the following to my .htaccess file.
Options +FollowSymLinks
Just a quick one but hopefully it will help others in moments of panic.
25 Sep 07
2 COMMENTS
My old rollerball mouse finally get to a point where it needed retiring. It was missing about 1 in 10 clicks which gets really frustrating! So I set off to find a new mouse. I decided to go for a \'normal\' type of mouse, partly for a change and partly because I suspect they are more accurate at high speeds than a rollerball mouse. I found myself choosing between two Logitech laser cordless mice. The one I decided to go for was the most expensive top of the range mouse, the MX Revolution. Needless to say, at the price, I had very high expectations!
I am using a Mac so this review is referring to use of the mouse with the Logitech Control Center running on Tiger. Rather disappointingly when I first downloaded the Logitech Control Center from their website as instructed in the setup guide the mouse was not recognized by the driver. I Googled around to see why this was happening and other users reported the same behavior. The problem is fixable by uninstalling and installing the older version of the driver, which can be found here. There is also an interesting article on the subject here.
The first thing you\'ll notice about the MX Revolution is it\'s style. This is what really attracted me to it in the shop. It\'s a combination of black shiny, matt and textured rubber materials highlighted with chrome effect details on the scroll wheels and the extra button on the top. The shape and feel of the mouse is perfect, although it did seem quite small after my larger rollerball mouse. In the box is a small USB dongle which provides the wireless interface, a charger cradle and the mouse itself.
The MX Revolution has one significant feature which sets it apart from other mice. It\'s scroll wheel has two, physically different, operating modes. One is a free wheeling mode where it will spin freely, and can do so for some time if you really flick it. The other is a \'ratcheted\' mode which gives more feedback when you need more precise scrolling. Out of the box this feature can be toggled on or off by clicking down the wheel. This behavior lead me to think the switch was a mechanical change triggered by pushing the wheel down. Not so. It\'s completely customizable through the software driver. You can make the wheel button behave like a normal middle button and specify which mode you\'d like the wheel to be in according to which application you are using. It\'s very rewarding to be in one app, say a text editor, and have the wheel be in it\'s ratcheted mode as you precisely scroll line by line, then flick into your web browser to instantly find the wheel is spinning freely enabling you to smoothly whiz up and down a web page.
It gets better than this too. You can actually set it up so it starts in one mode and then changes to the other according to how fast you are turning the wheel. You can set the speed that will trigger the change with a slider in the driver. I have it set up my text editor so that it starts in the ratcheted mode and when I spin it at a certain speed it enters the free spin mode, so I can jump about big documents with ease. I am very impressed by this feature!
There is another control which looks like a wheel that falls under your thumb. In fact this isn\'t a wheel but a spring loaded rotational wheel. You can push it or pull it and it bounces back to it\'s center point. The idea is that it\'s used to switch between applications. I can\'t say how well this works on Windows but on a Mac it wasn\'t very functional at all. When you push or pull it it would bring up the Application Switcher (as found with Command + Tab) and then slowly move from one icon to the next until you let it go. This is far too slow to be of any use unfortunately. Also, unfortunately, the alternative controls available for the thumb wheel are limited to Zoom or just bringing up the Application Switcher without cycling the icons. I have it set on Zoom now but it seems like a bit of a waste of quite an advanced control. The thumb wheel also acts as another button when it is pushed in.
There are two buttons above where the thumb normally lies which can be highly customized. I have these set up to toggle between tabs in most applications. The software allows you to set different controls for different applications so you can synthesize the different keyboard shortcuts needed to do something like this.
There is also another button which is just behind the top scroll wheel. Logitech\'s idea with this button is to use it to automatically search for the text that is highlighted. I didn\'t find much use for this but luckily it can be customized. I actually have this button bring up the Application Switcher so I can quickly mouse to the icon I want and then let go of the button to be dropped into that app.
Of course there are the left and right click buttons which seamlessly integrate to the surface of the mouse and provide a nice level of feedback, not to loose and not too firm.
7 Jan 07
0 COMMENTS
If you have bought a Sony BDP-S370 Blu-ray player and are wondering how to program the remote to control a non-Sony TV, you will be disappointed to find that the instruction manual contains no information on how to do this at all. Although it does contain a list of TV codes at the back.
After much googling and entering similar remote model numbers on the US Sony support website, (the UK support site doesn't recognise the remote control model number at all) I found some instructions. However, they were quite misleading as instructed to enter a tv code using the arrow buttons.
The solution is actually quite simple:
And that's it. You should now be able to control your TV with your BD player remote. It's such a pity that Sony didn't include that in the manual.