Confessions Of A Berson Mind

This post will be all about cell phones:

Decided to write a post about my MMS issues with the combination of TMobile, my HTC Touch Pro 2, Windows Phone 6.5.x, and Manila (Sense) 2.5.  For every ROM I’ve installed with these settings, I haven’t been able to send picture messages straight away.  Found a fix at: http://thewingster.com/mmsfixm25.aspx — that works great, but I also make a few alterations to ensure success.  Here’s my tutorial.

1.) Flash a clean custom ROM.
2.) Install the fix found on that link immediately after a soft reset. If you wait until after you’ve opened a few text messages or done some other things, you may run into a permissions problem during the install.  Soft reset, then install.
3.) At this point, your picture messages may already work — mine do not.  The next step I undertake is to go to the Messages tab in Manila, and hit the All Messages softkey.  Next, Menu -> Settings -> Options.  In this window, I flick to the bottom, and change the photo resolution to Original, and choose whatever size I like for the camera (currently XGA).  I do this to ensure my photos won’t be sent in micro.
4.) Click done.
5.) Repeat the Menu -> Settings -> Options step, but this time, hit the menu button in this new window, and select MMS Server.  Make sure the SampleMMSC is selected, and click on it (that’s two steps). Here, I change the “Connect via” option to TMobile MMS.  If yours already says this, congratulations.
5a.) I also set the Send limit to 300KB.  One, because I once read that TMobile doesn’t permit messages larger than that (doubt this), and two, because my mobile data is slow enough as is — I don’t need to spend 4 minutes every time I send a pic.  Click Done, and get back to your home screen.
6.) Last tricky step: click the Start Menu -> and Settings. Then Connections -> Connections. In this window, go to the “Advanced” tab, and hit “Select Networks.”  You should see a dropdown that has Tmobile Data already selected — hit the dropdown and select Tmobile MMS. Then, click Edit. In this window, hit the edit softkey, click Next, and change the Access point name to “wap.voicestream.com” (no quotes).  Click Next and then Finish. Click OK and you should be back at the Network Management screen.  BEFORE you leave here, hit the dropdown again, and RESELECT Tmobile Data.
7.) A soft reset isn’t probably necessary, but not a bad idea.

After all these steps, my MMS works great — I send receive no problems, the pictures send and receive at the proper sizes…these steps work for my phone across a multitude of ROMS, and it’s not that tricky.

Hope this helps.

Yes, it has to be the easiest thing in the computer world to succumb to the powers of Big D.  For those of you who do not understand my crypticism, thing computer company, and thing BIG.  Anyway, if you want a cheap computer that the majority of the world respects…you watch there commercials, you hop on the website, and three weeks later you have a box at your doorstep.  Simple.

Well, not quite.  Here’s my latest laundry list of why you SHOULDN’T shop at the Big D:

1) Inferior equipment.  They’d never admit this to you, but the parts they use are junk.  They’re acquired cheaply…VERY cheaply…and may contain serious issues that span the entire lot that the company purchases.  Example: The Dimension 3000.  This is the only computer that I know of that seems to have an actual expiration date!  Tons of users have experienced the exact same problem with motherboard chipset failures that result in choppy audio, choppy video, computer slow-down (which is inexcusable), and then total failure.  The biggest problem?  Most of these issues occur just after the one-year warranty expires…literally at, 13, 14 months.

2) Driver support.  If you love to be on the bleeding edge, and keep your computer up-to-date with the latest and greatest virus definitions, spyware defs, and drivers for all of your beloved parts, then the Big D should be avoided.  Certainly, the first two are not issues for any computer…but when it comes to updated driver support, the big company falls flat.  How?  Submitted for your perusal (is that a phrase?   well, it is now): Say you buy the biggest and baddest laptop the company has to offer.  To make sure you can continue to play all the latest games and such, you must continue to go to THEIR website to download drivers as the drivers that are submitted by the actual part manufacturers are not approved for YOUR machine.  Kinda sucks, but who cares, right?  You’re still getting the latest stuff from Big D, so no worries.  Right?  Well, 1-2 years down the road, there are worries as Big D realizes that continue to produce updated drivers for your once amazing machine is costing them money.  And each and every time a new driver is released from the original manufacturer, it requires more training for their tech support.  So…they stop updating drivers.  This would be a non-issue if you could go straight to the source and update at say…nVidia’s website or even ATi.  But you can’t.  You just have to hope and pray that Big D will send a crumb of a driver your way.

What’s my solution?  Shop around!  Pick up a Maximum PC or Computer Shopper magazine and look to see what other companies are out there.  Look for a company that seems to have a great reputation online and don’t just settle for the bottom dollar machine.  Or, you could just skip all that and buy a Berson3 PC by emailing ME.  Heck, even if you don’t want a Berson, feel free to email me a couple of PCs that you’re trying to decide between and I’ll offer my honest opinion.  Why?  Because everyone deserves the best PC for their dollar.

~CR3

What I’ve been working on most here of late has been on incorporating PHP code into my normal HTML text on this website.  However, I’m pretty much still a novice at it myself, so offering tips on this sort of thing may be pretty hard.  What I can say is, is that when working with PHP and MySQL, it seems to be more important to understand MySQL then anything else.  The active content on our front page is PHP code that calls up our database…with SQL queries.  The trickiest part of the whole code segment was trying to figure out what query I needed to produce the exact results I desired.  Example:

For the front page, I wanted the last 6 posts from my blog, along with the time created, and a link taking you to that blog entry’s own page.  This requires a query that selected the name, date, and ID of each post from the proper table.  Then, I needed to have that list of results sorted by descending order…but only limited to six.

Select name, date, Id
From posts
Order by dsc
Limit 6

Now, granted, the PHP surrounding this query isn’t the easiest thing to pick up on, but the meat of what is actually happening on the front page is this simple MySQL query.  So, the tip of the day is….if you’re going to be working with PHP/MySQL…learn SQL first!  It makes the whole learning process a lot simpler.

Today’s tip has to deal with optimization of services.

Microsoft Windows XP comes preloaded with individualized portions of its software called services.  The logic behind the dissection of the interface is two-fold…1) If a particular service crashes, the entire OS does not crash (part of the NT Kernel logic) and 2) Not all services need to be running at all times.  As a matter of fact, many of the services included with Windows XP do not need to be used by the home user at all.  Even better yet, with the addition of Service Pack 2, Microsoft has chosen to disable a few of its useless/trouble-making services for you.

Here are a few that you can almost definitely disable without reprocussion:

Clipbook, Error Reporting Service, IPSEC Services, Messenger, Remote Registry, Webclient

How do you disable a service?  Open the Run dialog and type: services.msc    From the Local Services window you can select the service you wish to disable, right-mouse click, and select Properties.  From this box you select Disabled from the Startup Type drop-down box.  Your services will be “off” the next time you reboot.
There are plenty of other services that can be disabled, but you should do some more extensive research before you begin to haphazardly disable random services.