Posts tagged ‘Blackberry’

Still got love for the cordless home phone / cell phone !

This will be short – I’m still very happy with the Vtech cordless phone with Bluetooth support.

OK, so it won’t be that short …

The Vtech is working just as expected. I can place and receive calls from any of the cordless handsets on any of the three phone numbers (home phone, work cell, and personal cell). The only little inconvenience is that the base station does not always automatically re-connect over Bluetooth to one of the cell phones when it comes back. The nice part is that any of the cordless handsets can request the re-connect and that takes care of things. It’s also handy the the display on the handsets tells you which line(s) are connected.

If you are looking for this type of setup, do a little shopping around the 3 and 4 handset bundles are going on and off sale frequently. I paid $56 (including shipping) but I’ve seen it as high as $123. A little effort and a week or two of patience will be rewarded.

Is your cellphone only useful outdoors ?

I need to use my cell phone more – since it has those free mobile-to-mobile minutes. The problem is that the phone only gets a good signal outdoors or near a window. I finally solved it (and not with one of those signal booster gizmos). I just replaced my old home cordless phone with a Vtech DS6321 unit that connects to both a traditional land-line and pairs with a Bluetooth enabled cell phone.

It doesn’t actually need the traditional phone line. It can be used with just the cell phone service. It can also support two different Bluetooth cell phones at once in additional to the land-line.

Now, when I get home from a trip, I take my business cell phone, plug it in, and stick it on the window sill. The Vtech cordless phone automatically connects to it and I can place or take calls using any of the handsets. It also rings differently if it is the home phone line or the cell phone. It’s really like having both a home line and a business line in one phone !

The setup was painless. I plugged in and it worked like a home phone. The Bluetooth pairing process is done with the Vtech being the "slave" and the cell phone performing the "search". Once paired, the next step is to load the VTech with the address book from the cell phone. Given my blackberry had 500+ entries, it took a little while but was very simple as well.

So, if you work with me, call my blackberry; if you are part of my "friends and family" call my iPhone, if you know my GV number, that works too. Otherwise, good luck tracking me down :-)

Out with the Blackberry, in with the iPhone

For me, a “mobile device” is much more than corporate email and a cell phone. I interact with social media sites, read news, manage multiple blogs, get weather, check the status of computer servers, watch wildlife (via remote IP cameras), read books, enjoy a game or two, take pictures, record data, go shopping, yada, yada, yada.

My Blackberry(s) served me well and I’ve had many over the past 10 years. It is a great corporate email solution. But I need so much more than corporate email and a phone call.

Along comes Lotus Traveler and overnight, iPhones and Android phones become great corporate email devices. Plus, these “mobile devices” are a lot more. They easily do all the social, business, and fun things I do.

So which to choose ? That was easy. iPhone. Why ? For the same reason companies everywhere establish “standards” – it cut’s down on support. I have an iPhone iPod Touch, my mother has an iPhone, my niece has an iPhone, many of my friends have iPhones. Having an iPhone means I can provide suggestions, recommend applications, and be the family “tech support”.

Using WordPress with WPTouch and WP-HashCash

If you use WordPress you should definitely install the WPTouch plugin and give your readers a great experience for their mobile device (iPhone, Blackberry, Android, etc.) Additionally, I am fond of the WP-Hashcash anti-spam plugin since it works well and does not require posters to read one of those CAPTHA images.

Unfortunately, out of the box, things do not play well together. The symptom is that comments that come through the WPTouch experience, will be flagged by WP-Hashcash as potential spam because it did not get a value generated key. There are a lot of background that is not important. There are two ways to make things play well. One has minimal changes but does not support AJAX comments. The other is more invasive but retains all the functions of both plugins.

 

Minimalist Solution:

WP_Hashcash requires two things in the theme – some JavaScript to be inserted in the header and a hidden field inserted into the comment form. The plugin uses hooks for each of these so the theme only needs to conform to the following.

WP Hashcash relies on the presence of two hooks in your theme, wp_head and comment_form. If your theme doesn’t include these actions, you will need to add them immediately before the </head> and </form> tags respectively.

source: Elliot Back, author of WP-Hashcash

Things are a bit spread out. If you have already enabled your normal theme for WP-Hashcash, then the wp_head() change is already done since WPTouch adds to your normal header. However, WPTouch provides its own comments page so you will need to edit that. It’s location is:

  /public_html/wp-content/plugins/wptouch/themes/default/comments.php 

Just add the following before the closing </form> tag:

  <?php do_action('comment_form', $post->ID); ?> 

There is one more thing. In the plugin settings page for WPTouch, you will need to turn off AJAX comments.

 

Full Function Solution:

You make the changes described above but you do not need to turn off AJAX comments. You then need to make some code changes to both WPTouch and WP-Hashcash.

Back in the same directory as WPTouch’s "comments.php" there is the partner file called "comments-ajax.php". Edit this file in two places – adding one line (seen below in bold green) and appending to another (seen below in bold blue).

  $comment_author = trim($_GET['author']); 
  $comment_author_email = trim($_GET['email']);  
  $comment_author_url = trim($_GET['url']); 
  $comment_content = trim($_GET['comment']); 
  $wphc_value = trim($_GET['wphc_value']); 
  ... 
  $commentdata = compact('comment_post_ID', 'comment_author', 'comment_author_email', 'comment_author_url', 'comment_content', 'comment_type', 'user_ID', 'wphc_value'); 

Now edit the "wp-hashcash.php" file which should be in the root of your plugins directory. Near the very bottom of the file, there is a comment, "Check the wphc values against the last five keys". There are actually two instances of this comment and you will make changes for the one in the "wphc_check_hidden_tag()" function. The code only looks for the "wphc_value" field in the _POSTS data. If you are using WPTouch AJAX comments, the changes above have added this field to the compacted "comment data". Now you need to check both locations as follows:</P?

  $hash_value = $_POST["wphc_value"]; 
  if (!$hash_value) 
    $hash_value = $comment['wphc_value']; 
  $spam = !in_array($hash_value, $options['key']); 
   
  if($options['logging'] && $spam) 
    $comment['comment_content'] .= "\n\n[WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The poster sent us '".($hash_value)."' which is not a hashcash value."; 

Mobile-fy the web

IMG_0161

I’ve become one of those "smoker bigots" – you know the kind … they quit smoking and *THEN* start preaching all the bad things that smoking does. My conversion was not that I was a smoker; it was the "mobile browser".

I am blogger and user of the web but until about 6 months ago I was mostly on my computer. I now read blogs, feeds, news, and more using my iPod and/or my Blackberry. I use if for Facebook, the weather, Twitter (a little), and most of my personal email. I realized my blog was not as friendly to these mobile devices as it could / should / and eventually would be.

So, I set about to add support for mobile devices and mobile users. It was easy for my blog since it uses WordPress and there is the WPTouch plug-in that makes it nearly automatic. It added support for the devcies I use most often and I even added support for the Androids of the world. (If you have a mobile device and it is not working with my blog, add a comment and I’ll do my best).

So, now I grumble whenever I hit a website that *does not* have special support for mobile devices. I realize I am being zealous but that has not stopped me from small internal unseen spurts of frustration. Oh well. I guess I could seek counseling.

theSalmonFarm blog adds iPhone, Android, and Blackberry support

Just a quit note to those readers with mobile devices. I’ve added the WPtouch plugin for iPhone support. Ive tested with an iPod Touch and a Blackberry Bold.

If you have issues with the mobile experience, please let me know.