How to modify your Nokia headset to accept your favourite headphones

August 14, 2005 eirikso33 Comments

I am syncing my podcasts onto my mobile. I have found the perfect software MP3-player. The final step in my quest to make a good device for podcast listening out of my Nokia 6630. I am now modifying my Nokia Handsfree set to accept standard headphones. All I have to do is to open the little box containing the mic and mount a standard minijack connector.

By doing it that way I will keep both the mic and the button that lets you answer calls.

Note
All the pictures in this guide can be clicked to give you a closer look. And, for readers in countries with stupid legal systems I will have to mention that I do not take any responsibility for you destroying your new hansdfee while trying to apply what I have described here. That said, if you have ever laid your hands on a soldering iron, this is as easy as drinking a good dry martini.

Ericsson
This guide was inspired by this post in the HowardForums. If you have an Ericsson headset that post will help you out.

Let’s start

Use a small screwdriver to open the cover. On my headset it was tightened with a small amount of glue. It was no problem to carefully open it without destroying it.

Open it carefully. You will clearly see the mic and the switch. The interesting stuff is on the back of the board. Flip it back carefully from the top.

Now you can see where the headphones are connected. The four cables are connected to points clearly marked: L+, L-, R+ and R-.

Pick up your soldering iron and remove the old headphones.

I used an extension cable for headsets that also featured a volume control with a small clip so that I can clip the device onto my jacket. This will let the mic be placed in a useful position as well. The pin layout for a minijack is: tip=left, ring=right, sleve=ground. You can of course use any female minijack. Just make sure you know what cables is left, right and ground.

I made a hole in the plastic to be able to insert the new cable. Solder the cable connected to the tip contact point to the place on the board marked L+, the cable connected to the ring to R+ and the ground cable to one of the negative connections, left or right. Here you can see that I have used L+, R+ and only L- for the ground connection.

Depending on what kind of cable there is on your new connection you might want to throw in a drop of glue at the spot where it leaves the box. You want it to sit tight so this baby will last through all the extreme sports you do while listening to the Engadget podcast on your mobile.. You might also want to use some drops of glue on the case itself.

It will clip nicely back together, but you know – that 360 mute grab on your new pair of skis might put some strain on your equipment…

Now I can connect my Creative Travelsound to transform my Nokia into a ghettoblaster. I can connect my Sony noise cancelling earbuds and I can even borrow my wife’s PortaPro and look cool in the park. Or, how about using an FM SoundFeeder to listen to whatever I want to from my mobile in my car?

The mic still works fine, and when using the phone as a …phone, all the people I talk to sound great as well!

The increase of pages indexed by Yahoo shows on Trendmapper?

August 11, 2005 eiriksoLeave a comment

I have followed parts of the discussions around the fact that Yahoo claimed to have increased its index to include about 20 billion web pages.

A claim that several people questions. I am not in the position to have qualified theories about that, but I am running a web site that reflects that something clearly has happened to the engine over at Yahoo.

In Trendmapper nearly all the charts searching for phrases with a significant amount of hits had a big jump in its Yahoo curve earlier this month.

Actually, a search that looked useless at first have become quite useful for me. Every night Trendmapper searches for several thousand phrases and records the amount of hits. The word “the” has been added in the system, and is in itself not interesting. However, the word is so common that the charts actually reflects something about the performance of the engines themselves.

As you can see in the thumbnail here in my post, something happened to the red Yahoo curve in the beginning of August. If you click the thumbnail you are taken to the page for the chart.

To be precise, at the second of August Yahoo reported 1 978 791 943 hits on “the”. On the third of August this jumped to 9 583 745 268.

Hera are some example charts showing the Yahoo-jump:
Trendmap: “kottke”
Trendmap: “Xbox 360”
Trendmap: “DVD-Jon”

Yellow Arrows, celltracking and moblogging

August 9, 2005 eiriksoLeave a comment

Annelogue points me back to a project I read about in Wired some months ago. The disussion at her site suggests ways to place the Yellow Arrows geographically.

I just installed a small program on my Nokia 6630 mobile called CellSpotting. It works like this:

Your mobile is always connected to a mobile transmitter somewhere. These transmitters have unique ID’s and are called Cells. By reading what Cell you are connected to and do a lookup in a database on that particular cell, your location can be roughly determined (I think at a level of detail down to a couple of hundred meters).

With CellSpotting installed on your mobile you can always hit a “Go cellspotting” button. What it does is that it makes note of the cell you are connected to and do a lookup in a database on the web. If someone has spotted that cell already and submitted a description you will recieve that description. It could be anything. Info on nearby points of interest or simply a greeting. If the cell is “undiscovered” you can fill in info on the cell yourself. Anyone visiting that cell after you will get your info if they hit “Go CellSpotting” in the cellspotting application.

Now, if the people behind the CellSpotting program could enhance it with the following two features:

1. A possibility to let people snap a picture with their phone and add to the description of a cell
Would be great fun to be able to look up pictures of the surroundings where you are. Both because it would help you decide if the walk to the park described would be worth it and because having pictures from the actual spot you are, from different seasons and different points of time could be interesting in its own way.

2. A possibility to record the latitude and longitude and add it to your spot if you have a GPS connected to your phone

3. Some kind of possibility to send a mail from your phone with the cell and a link to the description in the CellSpotting database. Would be great information to add when moblogging

….anyway. CellSpotting is kind of Yellow Arrows… without the arrows.

Related post:
Odda GeoBlogged!

HighPad Media Control – PDA Remote for Windows Media Center

August 7, 2005 eirikso9 Comments

I continue my quest to find a PDA based remote solution that lets me control my music without having to pick up the stylus on the PDA. I have talked about other solutions here and now I have played around with a promising package from Germany.

Meet HighPad – another PDA-remote solution. Here is my first impression.

The approach is quite ambitious. The HighPad Media Control solution promises to do the following:

1. Give you remote control of your media libraries
2. Give you remote streaming of your media to your device
3. Give you a possibility to sync media to your PDA
4. Function as a plain remote control for MCE
5. Give you a possibility to program the PVR in MCE

The HighPad Media Control will be able to control a full Media Center Edition System or a plain Windows XP computer running Windows Media Player. The system consist of a server application running on your media box and a client application running on your PDA.
And if you are like me, you want the conclusion right away:
This is an impressive package that is very powerful already (it is in version 1.02). It packs huge amounts of features but not all of them works perfectly well. Because of the fact that the most important features works well, and the other ones have great potential this is an addition to your home media center that is very interesting. Still, you should spend some minutes on testing the Niveus Remote (for ease of use) and NetRemote (for flexibility). You can read more on those here.

The installer is one file. During installation you choose if you want to install the client, the server or both.

At this point I ran into a little trouble.
Continue reading “HighPad Media Control – PDA Remote for Windows Media Center” →

Reaching the world

August 5, 2005 eirikso1 Comment

It never stops fascinating me where I can reach using the internet. I have done lots of presentations and it is always a thrill to comunicate to many people. The biggest presentation I have done so far was in front of about 1200 people.

That is nothing compared to the amount of people I reach with my blog. And, even doing international presentations while working for the consulting company Accenture, I never reached out to the same divere audience that I do through eirikso.com

My little comic strip about Bob the Millionaire is one of my most popular posts. I have fun using Babelfish and friends mastering other languages to try to understand what people have to say about my ramblings. My comic has even been translated into French. My wife speaks French and could confirm that the translation was well done.

And, I can even use my own blog to get help when more than 10 000 users reach my blog from a Duch web site and I don’t know what they are saying…

Now, I have some problems with this one and this one. Still, it is interesting to see that people from all over the world reach my page!

My brief encounter with a Creative Zen Touch

August 5, 2005 eirikso3 Comments

I recently bought a Creative Zen Touch. My plan was to use it for podcast listening, audiobooks and music. A good price, 24 hour battery life and a nice and sturdy construction tempted me. As my regular readers may know, I run a quite advanced media system at home, built on Windows Media Center Edition. The only reason for not buying an Apple iPod was that I wanted a player that could communicate as seamless as possible with my existing media. The Zen Touch plays WMA including the files with DRM. According to all the reviews I found a firmware upgrade was due some time late 2004 to make the Creative Zen Touch fully Microsoft “plays for sure” compliant.

And, yes. I was naive. I did not do my homework…
Continue reading “My brief encounter with a Creative Zen Touch” →

Using a Nokia 6630 to listen to podcasts and MP3

August 5, 2005 eirikso8 Comments

Edit:
After I wrote this post the Viking MP3-player has been updated with a ~~bookmark~~ resume from last position feature that makes it remember the track and the exact position of the last file you where playing. This makes the Viking MP3-player my clear choise for listening to audio books and podcasts on my Nokia.

Previously I have mentioned that I use my Nokia 6630 to listen to podcasts. It plays MP3, and the memory card can be synced easily using Windows Media Player. However, I am not satisfied with the built in player in the phone. Mostly because of the poor fast forward possibilities. So I asked my friend Mr. Google and he found a couple of players. The Viking MP3Player 3.33, the UltraMP3 and MP3Go looked like the most promising so I gave them a try.

MP3Go
On my 6630 this one gave a horrible sound quality and featured a not-so-intuitive interface. So, okay – NEXT!

UltraMP3
Good sound quality, fancy interface with advanced skinning possibilities and a slightly better fast forward than the built in RealPlayer. Basically a huge amount of stuff that I don’t need and a minor improvement on the functionallity I want. NEXT!

Viking MP3Player 3.33
Good sound quality. A very nice and clean interface. Easy and intuitive. A possibility to change the background picture. Very good fast forward and rewind functionallity. The price is $18 and this one enhance my listening experience enough to justify a purchase! Now, if the Vikings could include functionallity to let the player remember where I left off for each file I play and resume at the same place we would have a very nice player for podcast listening on the 6630.

OggPlay
I just added OggPlay to the list of players that you should try. Thanks, Phil Wilson! OggPlay is free, fast, clean and gives quite good fast forward and rewind possibilities. No bookmark-functionallity to make the player remember where you left off here either. Support for advanced skins and user defineable keyboard shortcuts.

The next step is to do a mod to my headphones. Something like this, so I can use my Koss Portapro and my Sony Noise Cancelling headphones with my Nokia. I will post back here…

Edit2:
And now I have modified my headphones. You can read more about that here.

eirikso

Photo, media, technology

Month: August 2005