One day last week, my dinosaur Blackberry was acting odd. It showed a screen with a battery with line through it. I took out the battery, left it to sit overnight, and when I put it back in the next day, it worked. So, I pretty much forgot about it.

This morning, when I powered it on, it did it again. No amount of battery pulling made any difference, it would just start and show the line-through-battery screen.

I have 5 bloody weeks left on my contract, and I will be damned if I am going to replace the phone. It doesn’t make sense to do so.

I assumed that the symbol showing on the screen was an indicator that there was no battery in the phone. Since the battery is virtually brand new (it and the trackball are the only things I have replaced in 3 years of ownership) and was holding a charge perfectly, I became concerned that something internal was wrong… maybe the OS was corrupted, or the contacts were bent. There is nothing visually wrong with the contacts, though… they are clean and in the positions they should be in. Unlike many BB users, I rarely do battery pulls, preferring instead to do the Ctrl-Alt-Del (well, Alt-RightShift-Del on the BB) to reboot it, so it isn’t like there has been a lot of wear-and-tear there. Still, I cleaned the connection areas with an eraser, made sure the contacts were up where they should be, poking them and lifting them with a toothpick.

Battery-with-a-line-through-it.

I’ve had 3 hours of sleep and had only noticed the phone problem because I woke up to pee. I’ve got a pounding migraine. I’m not firing on all cylinders – indeed, I’d call my condition substantially impaired right now. But, I turned on the computer and googled (and like an idiot, came here afterwards too).

The primary, most-recommended method to resolve this problem, according to BB forum users around the world? Read the rest of this entry »

I changed the permalink structure of this site. It has broken just about every past link to specific articles on the site through facebook, twitter or anything else.

It wasn’t a mistake, I knew this would happen. I’ve been putting off the change for some time because I didn’t want to lose all the auto-generated bit.ly links and such, but it had to be done in order to accommodate a change I would like to make to navigation someday in the future.

I tried to work out a redirect method, but I’m not with it enough today to write the little script to handle it, so for now – there’s the search function if you want to find something specific. The other option is to manually edit the old URL which has /archive/yyyy-mm-dd/postname.php and make it /yyyy/mm/postname.php.

I’m not sorry. It’s very un-Canadian of me.

Ever have trouble holding your camera still? Have a health problem that makes your hands shakier than normal?

Here’s a handy plan for making a device for supporting a dSLR camera on your chest made with PVC pipe.

Easy-to-make camera support for shaky hands.

I haven’t built one yet but it looks pretty good to me. I’ve been planning to make a stabilizer of a different type, but this might work for my purpose with a couple of modifications.

A while back, I set things up so I could publish entries on FIGJAM while mobile, from my phone. A publish-by-email function is built in to WP, but it requires you to force the blog software to check an email address you designate manually, set up an automated mail check through your web host, or write something into the site coding to make it do so. Since visiting the page that activates the email task glitched out on my BB browser, I wrote a UNIX cron job to look for email periodically so the posts I wrote while mobile would not have to wait until I got home to be published, utterly defeating the purpose of posting moble blog entries in the first place.

Problem was, I rarely wrote mobile posts because usually if I wanted to do something “on the road”, it needed to go beyond the capability of the post-by-email function. Consequently, when a few months later my webhost somehow screwed up my cron job causing it to send me error messages every few minutes, I didn’t bother to investigate why and simply deleted the automated tasks.

While window-shopping in the BlackBerry store today, though, I discovered this: WordPress for BlackBerry. It lets me sign right into my WP dashboard and write directly into my post box (or edit other pages, approve comments, and so on). AND, I can actually add html and the like for formatting, something the email-posts could never do.

In fact, this entire post was written on my BlackBerry (and it better work and not embarass me!)

Most likely I’m now going to forget that I have it and will never remember to write another entry this way… but I hope sharing this info might help someone else out.

Seems that there is a widespread problem with people and their twitter profile/background pictures. Now, I have NO idea if this will work in all cases, but I feel like it is important information to share in case it helps some people. I just spent about half an hour digging back through the “Known Issues”/reports on help.twitter.com because the reports are pushing this info far into the depths of obscurity so I could bring you the original source, as I don’t want to take credit for the fix, I just want to pass along how I got it sorted out.

If you changed your photo and it seems to keep saying “good picture” but nothing changes, try this:

[via @biggesthits]

WORKAROUND that fixed things for me. Found through a whole lot of experimentation and cursing.

1. Upload your pic
2. After it tells you ‘Nice pic’ or whatever, click on Home .
3. Now click on Settings
4. In the Account tab, change the text in any box to something else, and Save .
5. Click on Home . If you were missing a Profile pic, it should be there now. You’re done. If you were missing a Background, continue to 6.
6. Click on Design , and choose Change Background Image .
7. Click on Don’t Use Background Image .
8. The box to the left of that should now show your pic. Click on it and it will take its rightful place on your page. Save . You’re done.

I’ve tried eliminating steps in the procedure to find something shorter and simpler, but this is the only combination I’ve found that works reliably every time (for me). Your mileage may vary.

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Hopefully your picture will now show up, see if it does. If it worked, you can then go back and edit whatever you might have changed to put it back the way you wanted it.

It worked for me when I had the problem, I think it is worth a try for others now, it isn’t like any harm is going to come of it.

Good luck!