Pikarde

New Content coming In October 2019!

2019-09-27T14:50:00.000-04:00

Hi! This blog shall be resurrected! Stay tuned for updates next month! To mention just a few: -PostSharp -GlobalStar -DotNet Core 3.0 and others

Black Friday 2013

2013-11-29T00:13:00.001-05:00

Here we go again...
Sale here, promotions there. Yet you often just get what you pay for.
$199 laptop such a great deal? If you don't care to get $199 worth of a laptop. What does that mean? A corvette with 4 cylinder and a 5 gal tank. Yea you can afford it, but still a good deal?
Biggest scam: big LCD TVs.
If you have bad eye sight and you don't care about 720p, go for it. But it's not true full HD.
Anything good in these sales?
Sure, clothes, appliances, household items.

Android, iOS, win8 mobile... What are YOU missing??

2013-01-07T22:27:00.001-05:00

Ok, everyone of us is surely using one of those operating systems mentioned above.
You are a power user? So, you know what you want. You got all tweaked and setup the way you want and it is a great tool to enrich your work or life experience?
You are a casual user? You got your device to play angry birds and check your Facebook?
After a while the newness wears off and you come to the realization, that you wished your device could do one thing that the competitor can do. Or your favorite app is simply not available for your device (hello win7/8 mobile users).
Frustrating. Isn't it
No matter what kind of user you are, and of course I have not exhausted all types of users and profiles, don't you wish someone could just read your mind and write the app you want?
Maybe your wish is so specific that it really doesn't benefit anyone but yourself or a small group of people and no developer is going to take on the work? Maybe a simple tool that saves a lot of steps? Something for a non profit or school and the funds for outsourcing are not there?

Well, I want to take a shot at it.
Send me your specific app idea. It might be your lucky day and I may just find your app idea interesting enough to just create it.
What's in it for me? The experience. Advertising and expanding my portfolio. Maybe a few bucks in sales. I retain the rights to the app.
What's in it for you? Your app idea realized, no charge to you. Maintenance and upgrades. You are basically the beta tester. You are listed in the app credits.

Reply to this post and tell me what YOU are missing!
I want to put my knowledge and equipment to good use.

The pictures are here to serve as inspiration... Hehehe

Beware of Apple repair

2012-10-25T19:34:00.001-04:00

#apple #iphone4 WD phone was quoted $150 for outofwarranty replacement. Sent it in. Was slammed with $605+tax. Seriously??? BEWARE
It costs $450 new. So after wasted $150+tax+shipping and repair I would have spent more than what an iPhone 5 costs new for a refurbished IPhone 4 ?

Riviera for Skype

2011-11-23T20:16:00.001-05:00

I recently tried out the trial version of Riviera for Skype by Jiteco.com. It's a nice tool, simple to use and it works. I think people who have family oversees, especially those in the service, may appreciate it. When at times you go for days not hearing from the other person you could record messages for family and children to listen to.

Start using Mint.com to manage your money today!

2010-09-30T10:22:00.001-04:00

With Mint, you can:

* Get set up in minutes
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* Set and track your budgets & achieve your goals
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View >>

iPad Keyboard

2010-05-15T22:22:00.000-04:00

I purchased the Logmein Ignition software from the App store so I can remote control my computers from my iPad. It had a hefty price tag of $29.00, but it is well worth it. Pinchzoom and full keyboard support are great.
I wanted to be a little more productive then just remote connect and move windows around and click around. I wanted to write code remotely.
Since there are no native .net development apps on the iPad, I am using logmein ignition. I went to Best Buy today and purchased the Apple wireless bluetooth keyboard (the short one without the number section). It was $69. It works great. I'm using it right now to write this article.
Set up was easy and took less than a minute.
The on screen keyboard no longer shows up, so you can see the whole screen. I guess you can say it is liberating to have your cake and eat it too ;-)
One of the things that I noticed that I do not like are for one when you lock the screen and click any button it will automatically unlock it. So if you place your ipad and keyboard in a bag and the keyboard is still on, chances are your bag starts playing music by itself...hahaha...happened to me.
When remote connected through logmein and then connecting to another machine via RDP, you will have limited functionality. For example, I cant send the shift key, it gets lost somewhere between ipad, logmein and rdp to the destination.
Little things I can live with, I just have to change my password to be just all lower case then ;-)
I haven't had a chance to see how the constant bluetooth usage reduces the available run time on battery. I will do some testing and post a performance report.
The highest legible resolution I found to be 1280x800. of course the less the better.

I'm getting off the subject here. The keyboard is very thin and elegant. It does feel a little fragile. It can be used with other bluetooth capable apple devices, such as laptops and desktops. And since it has windows specific function keys, an overlaid alt key (on the option key), it should be safe to assume that it would work on a windows pc too.
Since I do have a small usb bluetooth receiver for my laptop I might as well try it out.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Old Middleburg Rd,Jacksonville,United States

Rooting G1 android phone

2010-04-28T00:30:00.000-04:00

I found a good tutorial on how to root a t-mobile android phone.
Why do I need to root it?
Bought the wifi only version of the iPad and didn't want to wait or spend the extra money for the 3G version.
I knew I could turn a rooted android phone into a wifi hotspot...
Bought phone off bay. Rooted. Installed wifi tether. Everything works greatly.
Battery lasts about 3 hours during intense usage. Not bad considering the sprint mifi offers only 4 hours and we know how we can trust manufacturers specs on battery life...
I get an average of 500kbps downstream and 90kbps upstream.
For fun I connected my laptop to the wifi ad-hoc connection and ran utorrent. I actually reached 1mbit down and up to 150kbps up.
The phone does sure get hot fast during use.
I successfully ran logmein ignition on iPad without any noticeable delay. Softphone/voip client worked without hiccups.
I run it just for regular use and rarely get over 30mb per day.

Cost:
$172.00 for G1 phone
$0.00 custom roms
$0.00 wifi tether app
$30.00/month android web service, no contract, cancel any time pro-rated.

Ok, yes you can just get the 3G service from AT&T itself for the 3G version,but you couldn't share with your laptop or iPod touch. This way you can show off your hacking and innovation skills.

Can't have your cake and eat it too.

If you are interested in my sources for the procedure stated above, leave me a comment.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Gregory Dr,Jacksonville,United States

2010-02-13T22:04:00.001-05:00

Google Wave Invitations

I have about 35 google wave invitations and about 5 Google Voice invitations available. If you are interested, send me a message.

2010-02-11T21:03:00.002-05:00

Grandstream GXP 2000 Firmware upgrade

I finally upgraded my outdated my old firmware in my GXP2000 to 1.2.2.26. I figured I'd upload the firmware files on my website for other GXP2000 users who do not have hosting or an ftp server to upgrade their phones. Login to your phones web interface and change the Firmware Server Path to: pikarde.com/gxp2000/1.2.2.26/ .

The phone will then automatically load the bin files and reboot.

Leave me a comment or feedback if this was helpful to you.

Thanks

Cliq Update 1.3.8

2010-01-28T16:14:00.001-05:00

Just got the update today that is supposed to help with some of the unresponsivenes issues. It did.
I also noticed that the wifi snafu is fixed. It correctly reconnects to the wifi in range and outside connects to 3G (where available). I can't wait for the 2.1 update.

Connected by MOTOBLUR™ on T-Mobile

Cliq

2010-01-25T16:19:00.001-05:00

Now that I complained about having hardly any 3G, I get it now often but wifi fails to connect, stay connected or reconnect 9 out of 10 times. Very annoying. Restart helps. It happens at home and work. So I have just Edge in buildings. I hope they hurry with the 2.1 upgarde...

Connected by MOTOBLUR™ on T-Mobile

2010-01-04T00:28:00.005-05:00

We are creatures of habit and I stayed true to my habit.

:-) I bought a new gadget: T-Mobile CLIQ with MotoBLUR. I've had it for 3 weeks now and I think I have a pretty good picture of the INs and OUTs, it's advantaged and flukes. Ok, let's cut to the chase. I don't like talking around the bush too much.

Here is what you need to know about this phone. As of today Jan 4th, 2010: It has Android OS version 1.5. Considering the G1 is almost a year old and is version 1.6, the Droid is version 2.0. Considering all this, it is disappointing that the Cliq comes with version 1.5, which will prevent you from downloading some cool apps in the Android Market, for example like Google Goggles. Motorola has declined any comments on an update. Disappointing to let us guess if they are going to forget about the Cliq owners and declare us dummies who bought an phone that was outdated when it came out of the box.

You can't upgrade the phone yourself, since you do not have root access. I'm sure there will be some tutorials soon on how to break that, but that is of no interest to me and to this blog.

Well, what is so difficult to release a new version you may ask? I don't know exactly, but based on some basic research, I have an idea: The motoBlur features handles and unifies communication across different account, such as emails, gmail, sms, mms, twitter, facebook, myspace. It has been said that the Android OS had been heavily modified to make it work. That is probably the main reason it is not a quick fix to upgrade it to OS Version 1.6 or 2.0. I'm sure they do not want to create in-house competition for their new battleship, the Droid. Maybe after all the hype about the Droid is over, they will upgrade us Cliq users.

I had called T-Mobile a couple of times to complain and see if it make them tell me if an update is on the horizon, but to no avail. They don't care if you threaten them to return the phone if they do not upgrade it. They do have a point when they say, that the phone is not defective. You can run a few more apps, but other than that, the other android phones do not have the blur feature, which I came to love.

It is really a nice pda that will make heads turn and make people jealous that you have instant access to the famous social networking sites and POP3/IMAP emails. The Android market is awesome ! Thousands of apps and most of them free! A lot of useless apps, but there are some good apps.

I use outlook a lot for work and I noticed that there is no real good integration/sync program for it !? That's strange. People tell me to put the stuff in my gmail account for the phone to sync it. I don't want to go through a gmail account. I don't use gmail. And who else wants to blindly trust all his corporate info into gmail ? Blackberry has that sync feature in the desktop manager.

So, I have decided to create a app myself that bridges this gap and enables true mobile syncing without USB cable. It will be in the android market soon. If there are people out there that are interested in this feature, please contact me, I'd like to improve the app before release.

Next topic: WIFI. Webbrowsing over wifi is very fast and nice. Doing some experiments, I did notice some things, that may not be that important, but I thought are worthwhile: You cannot upload data faster than 1MBit/s, downstream maxed out at about 3.5-4MBit/s. It does not support UMA. You cannot make free calls if you have Hotspot@Home plan add-on. SMS and MMS are therefore not carried over WIFI. I wish they were, it could save your whenever minutes from being wasted for hour-long chatter. As far as I know, the Android OS does not have UMA capabilities. However, I am not sure if this is something that can come in in form of an app or if for security reasons it would have to be part of the OS.

There is a workaround that will allow you to make WIFI calls and not use your whenever minutes.

Download a SIP client (VOIP soft phone software) and get an account to use with it. Set it up to use WIFI (and 3G if you want to). Now you can make calls over the SIP client over WIFI. Only downfall is, that if you leave the WIFI zone, your call WILL drop, because it doesn't do a handover to the GSM network. If you work in an office all day with sufficient wifi coverage, that would not be an issue for you. If you need more info getting an account to use with a SIP client, contact me. I've recently started selling internet phone service that will work for this purpose.

One more thing about the WIFI. If you, like me come home from work and it takes you a few minutes to get your stuff from the car before you go inside and the phone already sensed the home WIFI but couldn't connect because it was too weak, it will not re-connect automatically. You have to go to wireless settings and click in connect. Very annoying, they need to fix this. Let it reconnect every 5 or 10minutes, that's not going to drain the battery that bad.

This phone does 3G. So it says. A friend of mine has a G1 and when he has 3G, I get E (edge). Rarely do I get 3G and guaranteed not inside my house although signal is 4 out of 5 bars. When I restart the phone it does seem to connect to 3G more reliably. Again: very annoying. I paid for 3G, I want 3G.

Ok, so we know now it has WIFI and 3G. It also has Bluetooth, which I did not test, because the headsets annoy me and people say they can't hear me or I sound muffled. I don't feel like screaming with a bluetooth headset. I'm sure it is because I used the cheap junk.Please share your experience. If they do pass a law about driving with a handsfree only, I will sync it up to my TomTom GPS that supports bluetooth handsfree. At least that works like a charm for phone calls.

A few more things I want to share about the phone is the touchscreen and the keylock.

You cannot calibrate the touchscreen. Don't waste your time looking for that feature. I have to admit that the touchscreen is very accurate per se. Here is a tip for those who misspell often with the on-screen keyboard: If you are using the on screen keyboard and you hit the wrong letter, keep your finger on the screen and move it over until you see the right key show up. I showed that to the sales lady at RadioShack where I got my phone from and she was amazed. She has the HTC without the keyboard.

I usually don't shop at RadioShack, but let me tell you why I got my Cliq from there.

It was $79.99 and I had 30 days to return it if I didn't want it.

Walmart offers the phone for $99.99 and the standard 14 days return policy.

T-Mobile sells the phone for $199 and standard 14 days return policy. Neither T-Mobile nor Walmart were willing to match the RadioShack price.

So why would I get the phone from anywhere else but RadioShack??! Hello !!?

So, what about the keylock? Well, when the screen is off, pressing any key will light up the screen and display the key/screen-lock. you have to press the "Menu" button to unlock. It happened several times that when i had my phone in my pocket and i accidentally pushed the Menu twice the phone was unlocked and started dialing numbers. No big deal, just have to learn to keep my fingers off of it when it's in my pocket.

I noticed that the battery can get hot when it's charging and when it is heavily used with data apps, gps, etc. Some people complained about that, but they got a refurbished phone and it didn't fix the problem. I'm not sending in my 3 weeks old new phone for a refurbished phone. This is a stupid practice that the carriers do. If we are given refurbished phones, we need to get a discount from T-Mobile for trading a new phone with a problem for an obviously used phone. Ha! what a waste of money insurance is that we pay on every month. We buy a phone for $200 just to pay them ANOTHER $50-$100 to claim insurance and get a used phone.(That is in case you do not have a manufacturer warranty with no out of pocket expenses any more). Anyone with me on that?

I wrote so much, I don't know what else to say without repeating myself...Oh yea, the web-browser! it is by far the best browser I have seen in a mobile device based on my experience with Nokia and Blackberry PDAs. I haven't had an IPhone, but I think it is similar to it. I didn't bother downloading Opera-Browser, because the built-in browser worked great for everything I accessed. It also has multi-window browsing. That's like tabbed browsing in Opera. The browser does not support flash animations at this time. Adobe had announced that it will be available soon. Luckily there is a youtube app already on the device ;-)

All in all, I am happy with the Cliq and I can live with OS version 1.5. It does everything I need it to do, except outlook syncing at this time...

Again, if you have any feature suggestion for my outlook sync app or a different kind of app, please let me know. I am eager to make apps for this great phone.

2009-04-30T12:35:00.000-04:00

I was playing around with my Elastix server and installed a firewall. Shortly after that I encountered this strange message. The Linux BSOD (Black screen of death)...

2009-02-06T00:24:00.000-05:00

Google Latitude

It sounded interesting enough that I wanted to try it out.
Add me to your list so we can give this a try ! pikarde822@gmail.com
I'm using a blackberry Pearl 8220 Flip. Does not have GPS. It uses the cell tower info for location information.

2008-12-29T21:50:00.000-05:00

*Update* on Samsung T339
Ok, I have had the Samsungs now for about a month. Never regretted in replacing the Nokia 6086. Yes, I can confirm that battery life seems a little short. I charge my phones all night and don't use it much in the office. After total of 10 hours on standby in wifi, 2 hours of talk in wifi, I had sometimes 1 or 2 bars left. None of them overheat or get hot when charging. I also have a Blackberry Pearl 8220 (hotspot capable). It's awesome. I carry both phones. One primarily for data and the other for voice. I don't understand how they could just omit GPS capability.

2008-12-07T02:20:00.000-05:00

I found a new addiction....my new Blackberry Pearl Flip 8220.

Anyone want to be a PIN Pal ?

My pin: 25776F9D

Hit me up.

2008-12-03T20:31:00.001-05:00

*Update* on Nokia 6086 connection error issue. / Samsung T339

The phones came in today. Hip hip hurray. If I had the opportunity to compare the Nokia and the Samsung back when I bought the Nokia, I would have gotten the Samsung phone. The display is so much nicer and clearer. It seems to respond faster than the Nokia.
So now to the important part:

I placed my sim in it, turned it on, connected to my home wifi network. Everything good so far.

I left to the store, as expected, it switched to the GSM towers.

Coming back home it automatically reconnected to the home wifi ! Finally a working phone.

I manually turned the wifi off and back on and it works as expected. No problems, no errors.

Definately a satisfactory solution.

A few days ago on Sunday, I had bought a Blackberry 8220 hotspot flip phone. It had worked flawlessly too. I hope they send an OTA to fix the issues with the Nokia. Poor people that have to constantly power cycle it.

I hope this blog helps someone else with their Nokia 6086 dilemma.

2008-11-28T13:47:00.000-05:00

*Update* Nokia 6086.
I went to the T-Mobile store after my writing my previous post. 5 mins later I had a new sim card. Still the same problem. I played with the APN settings and set all the settings to internet3.voicestream.com. That didn't help either. So much for my APN theory in my previous post.
Being out of options, I called T-Mobile again. The technician said, he was sorry, he can send otu another replacement phone. I told him, what good would that do? The two phones I bought have the same problem, at the same time. The replacement phone has the same problem. I changed sim cards, no effect. I told him I googled the problem and nobody had a solution posted. I told him I wanted a different phone, like the Samsung T339. He said he was not authorized to make this change, he told me to hold on a moment while he spoke to a supervisor. Then suddenly someone else got on the phone and asked who I was holding for. I thought "Great. He lost the call and some other technician answered the call and I have to start over". It was someone else from customer loyalty department (as far as I remember). He told me he can grant me the wish of getting the Samsung phones IF I agree to replace my current contract with a new 2 year contract. I agreed, because I really wanted the Wifi phones as I don't have reception with any other carrier at my office and because of the free T-mobile to T-mobile we have to keep in touch with family.
I can't wait for the phones to come and post another update...

2008-11-26T15:20:00.000-05:00

Nokia 6086. T-Mobile Wifi/Hotspot@Home phone.

I bought two of these phone in April 2008. I have the family share plan, 1000mins with $9.99/month unlimited wifi-calling enabled. I bought their router, free after $50.00 mail-in rebate.
At first, everything worked fine. Lately, about a month ago I noticed i'm having problems reconnecting to wifi and wrote it off as weak reception.
I have to power-cycle the phone to reconnect to wifi. I get error "W006.1 ISP or T-Mobile Network error".
This is really aggravating and ridiclious. I called T-mobile support last week and was told I need a replacement phone. It came in yesterday. Same thing, same problem. The CSR said to enable "Wireless router handovers" in my saved networks screen, I did, but it didn't affect anything.
I was googling for days regarding this problem and found that there are quiet a few people having the same problem, yet nobody had a solution.
It may be worthwhile mentioning that I requested for data packet service to be enabled on my phone which allowed me to utilize my phone as a bluetooth modem. I had it on for a few days then cancelled that service as it was slower than regular dial-up and I wasnt willing to spend $19.99/month for crappy speeds like that. Someone had posted that he requested the CSR to disable T-Zones over Wifi and it fixed his problem, however all the CSR and techs I talked to had no idea what i was talking about. They just suggested factory resets, replacement devices, power-cycling, different routers, the basic bla bla bla.
I called the T-Mobile store where I purchased the phones from and they said they would exchange the sim cards for free to see if that would help. They said they cannot let me test a different wifi phone as their corporate wifi is secured and they dont have the key for it. As soon as I try it out, i will post an update on here.
I was curious what was different in the wifi-connection attempt of a power-cycled nokia and one logging back in. So, I got my 2nd router out, connected the internet port of the router to the ethernetport of my laptop. My laptop was connected to the 1st router via wifi. I activated internet connection sharing. The objective was to sniff traffic and try to see a pattern. I know the packets are encrypted, but I wanted to see if the phone did indeed try to reconnect at all or just shooting blanks. I used wireshark to sniff the packets. I saw the connection handshake between phone and t-mobile servers and in both cases it looked similar. I haven't had a chance to go in detail in packet type and such. If I have time this weekend, i will post screen shots.

While I was playing with the connectivity settings i noticed the T-Mobile VPN apn is internet3.voicestream.com and the T-Mobile internet is internet2.voicestream.com. I'm just wondering if it is possible that the Nokia resets to the internet2 apn (which is the first in the list of APNs) after leaving initial wifi connectivity? It could explain that when it tries to reconnect the connection to the t-mobile hotspot servers fails, without the VPN. I can't verify this, as I have no access to check and see what APN is being used by the cell phone.

2008-08-14T15:21:00.000-04:00

I recently purchased a solar charger

from www.Tradestead.com
Portable Solar Charger, 1350mAh,Fits for Mobile Phone, Digital Camera and PDA[Model #: PSC-010-MX]. Link: http://www.tradestead.com/wholesale/solar-charger/portable-solar-charger-p-1939.html

Well, I was excited at first. It was compact, wide and long as a regular cell phone. It came with USB adapters for the most common cell phones.
It didnt take long to get initially charged up (it has a built-in battery). Once charged however, it could barely deliver 10mins worth of charing time for a cell phone. My Ipod wouldnt even charge at all. And once the initial charge was used up, you would think the solar panel can continue delivering some power to keep going. Wrong ! The solar panel charges the internal battery within 10-14 hours. Thats a long time for minimum benefit.

Pro: Good idea. Useful in emergency situation. Cheap($8 + $10 shipping from HongKong)

Con: Doesn't deliver charge worth mentioning.

My advice is: Stay away from these cheap solar panels.
If you want a charge worth your while, get the big ones that people use on their boats.