Tips & Tricks – Jane Talks Tech!

Update on Nokia/Ovi Maps on my Nokia E71x

The visits to my posts about installing Nokia Maps 3.0 on the Nokia E71x phone have been nothing short of amazing! Hopefully, I’ll get some return visitors and we can have a great conversation going on this little blog. I have a couple of comments on the Ovi Maps (.sis file) service and things/quirks I have noticed from my usage. Before all of that, here are some things that might help in getting the best out of Nokia/Ovi Maps on your device:

Make sure you have the latest version of the Nokia PC suite software, Nokia maps updater, and the map uploader software.
If for whatever reason, you can’t get the maps to download via the Map loader software, check out this site which has links that point directly at the maps files on Nokia’s servers here: http://diabo.freehostia.com/symbian/indexmaps.htm As always, caveat emptor when downloading links from external sites posted here. 🙂
Also, you might want to consider uninstalling the Maps Updater and Maps Loader software entirely and re-installing them if you run into issues about the Maps initialization failure, etc. It appears to have worked for the guy in this thread.

On to the rest of the post, if you downloaded the Ovi Maps software hoping for free Drive Navigation, you are wrong as I found out. Now, I don’t blame them as they have to make money somehow. However, you can get drive navigation on your device by purchasing a license from Nokia. Thankfully, the purchasing process is painless i.e. either online or at designated retail locations. For buying the license(s) online (a.k.a. on your device), all you need to do is: (i) Have your credit/debit card ready (ii) Fire up your Nokia maps application and go online if it asks you. (iii) Select “Options” and select “shop & licenses”. It should then automatically update with the latest offerings that Nokia has to offer. (iv) Follow the prompts and tada! I opted to purchase drive navigation and it cost $64.05 including taxes. Be aware that it actually charges your card in foreign currency so you will be hit with transaction charges by your bank. Thankfully, we’re talking about less than $1 with my bank, Wachovia (acquired by) Wells-Fargo so double-check with your bank. I have found the Drive Navigation to be pretty accurate and I actually prefer it to the Garmin XT software I had previously used with my Palm Treo 750 device! As always, configure the options to suit you such as making it take the shortest route (mileage-wise) versus the fastest route which might result in your taking random roads/alleys, etc. 🙂

The second purchase I opted to make was for the City Explorer which is supposed to act like someone giving you directions using landmarks in the city you are in and is tailored for someone who is … walking and not driving. 🙂 I haven’t had a chance to use it much, but I will update this post when I do. The third license I decided to try out was Traffic info and I can honestly say that this doesn’t do much, but tell me when I’m going over the speed limit. I live in an area where traffic congestion is not a huge issue. Thankfully (yet again), the license cost less than $12 for a year of service and I don’t intend to renew. If you have a data plan, it might make sense for you to be constantly updated on live traffic and it also allows re-routing of your trip to avoid traffic jams. If you only get online via WiFi, you will lose out on this useful feature for jampacked areas like San Francisco, etc. Guides is exactly like it sounds, but I’d advise you to only get this is you are sight-seeing in a new town, etc. It’s just another way to get more money out of you. 😀 Lastly, pricing for these items is also available on the <a href=”http://europe.nokia.com/explore-services/maps/prices_and_coverage/pricing-tables-navigable”>Nokia website</a>.

Enjoy!! If you’ve liked this post, donate to help pay for my hosting needs! My hosting provider is Dreamhost so if I inspire you to start your own blog, let them know I referred you! 😀

Return to Vista-land, part 1

*sigh* As much as I’m reveling in the familiarity of the Windows operating system, I have to say that I miss Ubuntu and the blazing fast start up times I experienced. With the Ubuntu OS, it was actually easier to shutdown and restart the PC versus hibernating. Whereas, it was ridiculously painful to do either (shutdown/hibernate) with Vista. Now that I’ve reinstalled Windows Vista, I’m taking great pains to avoid installing craplets that serve no purpose. However, I’m sad to report that I am still experiencing issues that seem little, but are starting to drive the O.C.D. part of me nuts!

For instance, the icons for installed programs ‘disappear’. What do I mean? See for yourself. In the picture below, the icon for the Cyberlink Youcam program has been changed to a default Vista icon which typically indicates that something is wrong with a program. In this case, the program starts up fine. It’s just driving me nuts that I can’t have the pretty icon that depicts the Cyberlink Youcam program.

Thankfully, this is truly a non-issue i.e. not a dealbreaker. I was able to resolve the matter by tinkering the Cyberlink Youcam entry’s properties on the Start Menu. It’s simple: (i) You right click on the entry that lacks a custom icon and click “Properties”. (ii) You select “Change Icon” and voila!. Please note that this change may not occur right away for some strange reason and seeing as I’m rather impatient, this led to much gnashing of teeth. Cheers!

Getting spammed at my computer

I receive upwards of 10 and more spam email daily at all of my email addresses. I’m very cautious about what services I sign up for and I constantly nag tell my husband to be very aware of sites that offer free items in return for your email address. Finally, he learned the hard way that my paranoia has some basis in fact: his Yahoo! email account was hijacked and used to send a spam e-mail to all his contacts. Thankfully, his address book on Yahoo has less than 20 entries so it wasn’t a massive spam launch. However, the scary part of this hijack was the fact that it was as if the intruder was beside us as the email was sent while we were both online. I won’t even pretend to understand how this happened, but I talked with him and explained that certain behaviours that he had unconsciously practiced could have led to the hijack. In short, here’s a short list of what he has been doing wrong, IMHO.

He never logs out of his email account. Rather, he just closes the browser window. This is a huge no-no especially when you are on a public computer. Our computing setup is thus: a home desktop running Windows XP SP3 Professional. I’ve installed Firefox as the default browser, but Internet Explorer is readily accessible. On Firefox, I’ve set all cookies to be cleared once I close the browser and we have Norton Internet Security 2009 installed & updated. He does browse on public computers and if his browsing habits at home (i.e. closing the browser window vs. logging out) mimic his public internet browsing habits, his cookies could have been hijacked by a malicious website.
He is a very good guitar player and I have found him downloading guitar tab tools from sites he finds via Google or visiting link-riddled websites. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that virus, trojans, etc could be introduced by free and unvetted programs. If he provided his email address, there’s no telling what these free sites would do with that information.

In any case, trying to track down the hacker will be futile when all I have are the email headers. I’m currently running a full system scan on the PC (HijackThis turns up nothing suspicious) and I will defragment the computer also & rid the computer of obsolete programs. I’m sorely tempted to wipe Windows off and install Ubuntu or some other distro (Linux Mint comes to mind, thanks Judith!) so that the aging hardware can be put to good use. It’s only 4 yrs old and I’d hate to have to upgrade because Windows keeps getting tons of huge updates. End of rant. lol

In other news, I’m happy to report that my experience with the Bitdefender Antivirus Scanner for Unices (by the way, Unix is singular and Unices is plural) is very positive. My system has been virus-free thus far and I hope to keep it that way. I run chkrootkit and rkhunter fairly regularly. However, there is a small issue that hopefully will be resolved soon. I’ve scanned my entire file system with the Bitdefender Antivirus Scanner for Unices before so I was surprised to have another full system scan get aborted yesterday. I copied the output and pasted it into a text file. I sent it off to the Bitdefender Support and they narrowed the problem down to this item which causes the scan to abort:

bdscan “/opt/picasa/wine/drive_c/Program Files/Picasa2/Uninstall.exe”

Hopefully, an update will be issued that will correct whatever is causing this.