The HTC Desire S (running Android), and similar models of smartphone from this vendor, has a persistent and annoying bug for all users of its integrated SMS messaging application. Upon receiving a text from a person already existing in the phone book, the initial preview of the message displays the contact’s name (and contact icon image if there is one), but if you tap the message to see the conversation history, the app WILL NOT show any phone book details, and displays just the phone number as if the contact does not exist in your phone book.
Sound familiar? HTC must be aware of this bug that has existed for well over 18 months (it doesn’t take much user testing to discover it, and it’s entirely replicable), but after some fiddling I can give you a workaround fix.
Solution: The basic bug is a simple glitch in the way the application internally syncs with your phone book. Upon a clean boot of the phone, no SMS messages (again, previews work fine) are associated with the phone book, and will not be until you make any kind of change to the phone book itself. Whatever this does nudges something that makes the full SMS view sync properly.
In other words, to make it work, make an arbitrary edit to ANY contact in your phone book, and save the modified contact. Your SMS’ should now display properly.
If you have any feedback on this fix, or more information, please comment below.
The only thing more disturbing than a mad-man killing over 90 people in a well-planned and terrifying attack, is the fact that within seconds of the media reporting the identity of the killer, some opportunistic person is falling over their keyboard in a frantic attempt to buy the domain names.
Specifically, AndersBehringBreivik.com, and its variants. At the time of writing, here is what you will find on these macabre sites (I will not create hyperlinks for any of them).
AndersBehringBreivik.com – A blog that purports to have the latest updates about the story. Just some good-natured person looking to keep the world updated? That might be credible were the site not filled with adverts. Just another form of grim profiteering, with the deaths of tens of people as the hook that draws you in. Horrible.
AndersBehringBreivik.net – A standard ‘related links’ spam page.
AndersBehringBreivik.org – A different standard ‘related links’ spam page.
AndersBreivik.com – A similar attempt to the other .com, except the spamblog hasn’t been set up properly yet – it just contains a default WordPress theme and post.
AndersBreivik.net – A blank site with a ‘no index file’ error page.
AndersBreivik.org – An incredibly spam-tastic GoDaddy ad-holding page.
What compels a person to think registering these is a good idea? How can they not think ‘Whatever reasons I might have, this can only been seen as horribly insensitive to those who have died’? All thought of humane sensitivity is displaced at the prospect of making more money than it cost to register the domain name. A cheap, pathetic little payday for someone cashing in on the horrors of the world.
There should be some very high level directive at ICANN that allows for the deactivation or reversal of registration for those names which are news-topical and sensitive.
These aren’t the only sites that have sprung up as a result of this tragedy. A whole mini-industry of domain names bursts into life around such events. Take the registration of NorwayMassacre.com as yet another example – this once again redirects to another ‘news’ site filled with adverts. I can’t think how many other possible permutations there might be. I genuinely hope that Google has the good sense to zero pagerank and ban the crawling of such sites, because they don’t deserve the tiniest fragment of attention. It’s gross, and sickening, and a terrible indictment of the kind of world that spawns this kind of ‘entrepreneurial’ innovation.
Recently I tried in vain to find a good arrangement of the MacGyver theme by Randy Edelman for Piano. The only one I found was a scanned png image, faded, and too small to read. This is not the same as the ones you can buy online, and I find their note arrangements to be just plain WRONG anyway. 🙂
Desperate to practice this awesome tune, I painstakingly recreated the tiny version I found into a nice, full-szed and fully marked up PDF version which you can download here. MacGyver Theme Piano PDF.
Much will already have been said about the excellent little Les Paul Google Guitar on the Google homepage logo today, but what you might enjoy are a few simple guitar tabs.
Instructions:
Put the guitar into ‘keyboard’ mode (click the button on the logo), and use your keyboard (not the numpad) to tap out the following tunes:
My Bonnies Lies Over the Ocean (Classic Folk Tune)
As I type this my view of Facebook is slowly mutating into pictures of 80s cartoon characters. There’s nothing wrong with that in principle, because I as much as anyone regard 80s kids TV as the pinnacle of creative genius never to be seen again.
But when the 5th or 6th person changed their profile picture, I had to ask, what the hell is going on?
It turns out that a ‘campaign from the NSPCC’ is encouraging people to change their profile pictures between the 4th and 6th of December 2010 to ‘raise awareness’ for the charity.
I have 2 immediate problems with this:
1) This is not an official NSPCC campaign, it wasn’t hard to check. 2) Just how does changing your profile picture to a cartoon character accomplish anything at all?
Now I won’t do down the work of the charity, which, like most charities, is very laudable, necessary, and worthy of support. The NSPCC is however a very large, national charity and it’s not a reach to assume that vast majority are aware of its existence. A campaign which makes you vaguely aware of their continued presence in the world doesn’t seem very worthy. So what is going on?
Around the World with Willy Fogg was the best anyway
It’s not hard to work out. Facebook is chock-full of needless ‘groups’ that are the social networking equivalent of the old emails which said ‘FORWARD THIS EMAIL TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW OR A KITTEN WILL DIE’, and similar. Those emails were also annoying, full of inaccurate information (if purporting to be about a real thing) and invariably a waste of time. Such emails, some from 10 years ago, occasionally re-circulate when some impressionable person sends it off to hundreds of people, who then send it on in the same manner, and so on.
Facebook groups are equally pointless. Their sole intent is to get a critical mass of people who ‘Like’ the group, and there are millions of such groups where people state their support of things such as ‘NO TUITION FEES’ or ‘CHARLIE BROOKER FOR PM’ and even ’10 MILLION PEOPLE AGAINST THE NEW FACEBOOK LAYOUT’.
All such groups are meaningless. Very often once they’ve acquired a huge number of people pointlessly ‘Liking’ the group, and thus becoming susceptible to updates from that group in their news feeds, it’ll start sending out massive spamming adverts to those hundreds of thousands of people, and no doubt making a tidy profit in the process. The original intent of the group is long gone, even if it genuinely existed in the first place.
What frustrates me more is the general susceptibility of the average person, who both assumes the initiative is genuine (for no reason other than a charity’s name is attached), and then believes that following the instructions in some way does that charity some good. If you really want to help a charity the best thing you can actually do when you come across some kind of garbled nonsense like this is to donate some money to them. They will find it much more effective than the questionable ‘awareness raising’ your cartoon picture is doing. If you were looking for a way to satisfy your need to feel like you’re doing some selfless good, reaching into your pocket is a great deal more meaningful.
Don’t be a sheep and mindlessly pass these things on. Do a little research, ascertain the credibility of something you’re being asked to repeat, and consider whether it’s actually a worthwhile thing to do. Don’t get caught up in yet another viral hoax that is nothing but self-serving to its creator. Come on people, none of this is even hard.
