Setting “My Phone Number” (MSISDN) via Android

Recently i realised that my phone number wasn’t showing up in the settings on my HTC Desire. After spending a while searching around i discovered that this was because the MSISDN number wasn’t set on my sim card. This is usually something that is set by your phone network operator but it seems like a lot of the time it doesn’t happen.

So i began hunting for a way to set this via Android. It appeared to be impossible! Everywhere i looked said “use an old phone” or “use an iphone” but i don’t have either. It does seem to be possible using the CyanogenMod rom but i didn’t fancy installing a whole new rom just to set my phone number.

Fix photos not appearing in HTC Messages app

I recently had an issue on my HTC Desire where it stopped showing photos in the messages application. I initially thought it was due to “Facebook for HTC Sense” that i had recently set up. It turns out however, that this is due an issue with Rom Manager’s “Fix Permissions”.  A post on the AndroidForums site explains what to do to resolve it.

1 – Go to the market and download a terminal emulator (there are several free ones)

2 – Open the terminal emulator and type the following:

su
chmod 666 /data/data/com.android.providers.contacts/files/*

Source

 

DLink DNS 323

I recently bought a DLink DNS 323 NAS Box as i needed somewhere to store my media files and also make them accessible when my main PC was off. I also bought 2 2TB Samsung Disks to go in it. At the time i didn’t realise that they were AFT drives and the NAS didn’t officially support them. Luckily a few days after it all arrived DLink released a beta version of the firmware and this added support for the drives.

I decided that rather than creating a RAID and mirroring the disks i would set them up as individual disks and create a snapshot of the data each night. This might sound like the same result but much more work but actually this works much better for me than RAID as the main benefit (there are several others) is redundancy against hardware failure. The likelyhood of this happening is very small as disks now last a long time. The copy also helps if i accidentally delete a file (RAID would delete both copies…).

As soon as i had explored the web interface i jumped straight into the ‘hacking’ of the NAS. This is really simple using the ffp fun_plug script. I used the tutorial here which guides you step-by-step through the ‘hack’ and once i’d completed that i used another tutorial on the same site to install a number of additional packages including a web server (apache/php etc) and rsync (used to do the snapshot).

To do the snapshot i followed yet another tutorial which explains how to set it up (it includes a number of scripts you can copy/paste) and this has worked brilliantly for a few weeks now. The first time did take a very long time but now they are down to just a few minutes (depending on how much has changed on the primary drive).

I also set up a bittorent server to allow me to download torrents (there are legal ones you know!) without having tohave a full pc turned on. That tutorial includes a number of additional tweaks which come in handy.

I’ve had the NAS for about a month now and it was a very useful purchase. Well worth the money as it now means i don’t need to turn my desktop pc on as much and can stream music/video to my phone and laptop with ease.

Twibble

Twibble is a mobile client for Twitter. It works on most (if not all) Java enabled smartphones including Nokia, Blackberry, and Sony Ericsson.

It has all of the standard features from a twitter client including:

• posting tweets via wifi, gprs, sms
• auto refresh
• send photos to twitpic (new beta version uploads to Mobypicture.com
• re-tweet (forward) of tweets

You can get the current version here and information on the beta is here here

It is (so far) the best free twitter client for my N95. There are other alternatives that are a bit more polished but they are not free, and twibble still seems to be the best. The beta version adds support for showing avatars and uses less memory (amongst other things).

Go check it out!

Backup settings on s60v3 devices

Upgrading your phone? Just need to wipe it to get rid of niggles? If so you probably want to backup the settings you have on your phone. Below is a list of what settings you can back up and where to find them. To access these you need to have hacked your phone.

Access Point Settings	C:\PRIVATE\10202be9\persists\cccccc00.cre
Profiles	C:\PRIVATE\10202be9\persists\101f8798.cre
Web cookies	C:\PRIVATE\101f8530\cookies.dat
Notes	C:\PRIVATE\100012a5\DBS_101F8878_Notepad.dat
Ngage data	C:\PRIVATE\20007b39\ – folders beginning with 200
Bluetooth	C:\PRIVATE\10202be9\persists\10204dac.cre
Bluetooth Paired devices	C:\PRIVATE\100012a5\DBS_100069CC_btregistry
Browser Bookmarks	C:\PRIVATE\100012a5\DBS_101FD685_BrowserBookmarks.db
Menu Layout	C:\PRIVATE\101F4CD2\Content\appshelldata.xml
Menu Layout (Pre FP1)	C:\PRIVATE\101F4CD2\Content\Applications.dat
Text Messages	E:\PRIVATE\1000484b\mail2

This information was found on ipmart

Change Java Permissions on a hacked S60v3 phone

Even though this is a old ‘hack’ i’ve only recently discovered how to grant permissions to java applications. Java applications must request permission to access gprs/wifi connections, use the camera, load/save user data etc. With this hack you can remove these prompts.

You can set permissions on a per application basis without hacking your phone, but the permissions available is limited (depending on the privilege). With this hack you can grant full permissions to any privilege you want (use connectivity, save data, use user data, etc.)

Now for the hack:

1. Download the following zip file:  fca00000.googlepages.com/java_permissions.zip (copy and paste on your browser to download)
2. Put the two files from the zip file into “c:\System\data\midp2\security\policy\” on your mobile phone (you may need to create the directory(s) yourself)
   
3. Download the following rar file: http://fca00000.googlepages.com/c2z.rar (copy and paste on your browser to download)
4. Extract the rar file to a folder on your computer
   
5. You now need to generate a RomPatcher patch file. To do this (instructions are included in the above .rar file) copy “z:\sys\bin\EFSrv.dll” from your phone to the directory where you extracted the rar file. Run c2z.exe from that directory and it will generate a c2z.rmp file. Copy this to “e:\patches”.
6. Download and install RomPatcher from this SymbianFreak page (skip if you already have it installed)
7. Run RomPatcher and apply the c2z patch.
8. Reboot your phone and you should be able to give the necessary permissions by opening the App Manager, finding the program you want to change and click “Open”. You can then assign the permissions as you wish.

Note: Only grant permissions to applications you know and trust. Do not grant any permissions you do not need to!

Hotmail on the N95

Recently Microsoft allowed POP3 access to all hotmail accounts (certain countries at the moment, more will follow). This means that it is now possible to check your emails with the built in email account on the n95 (and other phones).

To set it up go to your Messaging application and scroll down to the Mailbox. If you haven’t already created one it will ask you to go through the wizard. Below are the settings you need:

Incoming Mail Server: pop3.live.com

Outgoing Mail Server: smtp.live.com

And obviously a hotmail account!

Once you have completed the wizard you will need to change a couple more settings. If you go into “Email Settings” -> “Connection Settings” -> “Incoming Email” you need to make sure you have the following:

Security (ports): SSL/TLS

Port: Default

Do the same for “Outgoing Email”, and you should be able to view your emails from the main screen by going “Retrieve Email”, then selecting how many to get (New/Selected/All).

If you want to set it up to automatically check your emails you need to make sure you have entered your email address (in full) and password in the incoming and outgoing email settings (the same place as above). Be warned, this may result in a lot of GRPS/data/wifi use so don’t enable this if you are not on an unlimited tariff.

To enable automatic checking go to “Email Settings” -> “Automatic Retrieval”  and set “Email Retrieval” to Enabled. Set when and how often you want it to check and you’re all done.

I hope this helps.

Hack the N95’s News reader template!

This is actually a really old ‘hack’ but i only discovered it today so thought i’d share it. I found it on Symbian-Freak.

The default rss/feed/news viewer on the N95 is very poor as the text is too large and not very user-friendly. Some guys over at Symbian-Freak have released a template that makes it much better.

Essentially all you need to do is replace the default feeds_view_template.html found in c: on your n95 with the custom one that can be found here

Before (left) and After (right). As you can see the after is much smaller and easier to see the story without scrolling.

For a more in depth guide on how to do this, head over to symbian-freak

Fixes for N95 v30 issues

I posted recently about the new firmware for the Nokia N95. Since then i have discovered a few bugs/annoyances which i have also managed to find fixes for. I thought i would share them here so everyone else can find them easily

Menu Size bug:

This is a wierd one. When you turn the phone on, the menu icons are smaller and there is a large “Menu” at the top of the screen. This used to be a small “Menu” as can be seen in the screenshots below:

To fix this follow these steps (you will need to repeat after each reboot of your phone):

1. Go to menu
2. Click options and exit
3. At the standby screen rotate the phone to landscape
4. Enter the menu while the screen is still in landscape
5. Rotate the screen back to portrait
6. Rotate the screen back to landscape and portrait again and there you have it, a nice menu with big icons.

Sources for this fix:

• Screenshots from hardwarezone.com.sg
• Video of fix on youtube
• text description of fix Symbian-freak.com

New way to hack:

It is still possible to hack the firmware of S60v3 phones, although a slightly different method is now required. Be warned that this will invalidate your warranty and i take no responsibility for any damage or cost that hacking your phone incurs.

For those who are not aware of what the benefits of hacking your phone are, it essentially allows you to access/delete/modify and of the system files (i.e. c:\sys, c:\private etc.). By hacking your phone you can install any software you wish even if it is not Symbian signed. This is a security risk if you do not know what you are installing but allows you much better use of your phone.

Rather than describing the whole method i will just link to the page i used to hack my phone. It is a relatively quick and simple method, a complete walk through guide is on the site.

Find it here on Symbian-Freak.com

Remove items from Standby screen

My main issue with the v30 firmware is that there is yet another item on the standby screen, “Share Online”. Previously it was a very simple fix to remove this, however with the latest firmware it is slightly more complicated. I have found several ways to remove items from the standby screen:

RomPatcher

A relatively simple way is to install RomPatcher. This allows you to modify a variety of features on your phone including removing items from the standby screen and removing the camera capture sound. At the moment it is not possible to remove the “Search Online” item but it may be possible in the future. One downside to this method is that you have to disable and then re-enable the standby screen to get it to work each time you turn on your phone.

Find this method here on Symbian-Freak.com

Modified .dll file

A method which can remove the “Search Online” item is using a modified “SoActiveIdle.dll” file. I haven’t tested this on my phone but it is reported to work ok. I did attempt it before posting on his site but i have not attempted his fix after he updated it. Please post and let me know if it works or not if you attempt this way.

Find this method here on fwrnando.com

Modify the AIPluginDefinition.rsc file

This is the method that worked for me, and i also removed the Search item (which annoyingly in v30 takes up 2 lines of the standby screen).

This method involves editing a hex file to remove the items you don’t want on the standby screen. It does involve slightly more work but is a permanent fix which ‘sticks’ over a reboot. I used the xvi32 hex editor to modify the file, it can be found here.

Find this method here on Symbian-Freak.com

N95 Firmware update (30.0.0.015)

Another firmware for the N95 has been released. At the moment it is only for a few product codes but should be released to more soon. There are not any major changes in this firmware, although some features that were previously only available with 3rd party tools are now built in. One of these is that the N95 the Auto Screen Rotation feature that was available in the last update for the N95 8GB. There is also a auto-download option within the Video Centre so you don’t need to manually download any video subscription videos any more.

The changelog as reported so far:

• Nokia Maps 2.0 built-in
• Full N-Gage client
• Nokia Search 4.0 with Google plug-in
• Share online 3.0
• Enablers for Comes With Music
• Download! application updated (v 3.1.50)
• Upgrade to Music Player
• Update for Flash Lite 3 (improved viewing of sites like YouTube)
• Current consumption improvements (for e.g. WLAN scanning)
• New baseline for VoIP (with significant error corrections)

There is also a new theme, previously seen on the N81.

New N95 Theme