Luckily the trick I used last time served me well once again. It’s pretty much a problem that will plague anyone who’s moved from one country to another while taking their Xbox with them.

If you’ve read my previous post you’ll pretty much be able to figure out how I managed to get the application.

So first you log in with a US Silver account and once you get to the music section you’ll be able to download the Last.fm application. No need to connect it here, although when I first downloaded it allowed 180 minutes or 3hrs worth of trial listening on a Silver account.

Just sign back out of the silver US account and sign back in with the Gold Canadian account and via the Quicklaunch you should be able to see the last.fm either in the all downloads as well as the “recent” tab.

Log in to your last.fm account from there and you’re set to stream your favorite music through your tv or sound system. Hope that helps someone out there.

I was upgrading from the Blackberry Curve 8320 and had decided to switch devices by using the *surprise* *surprise* Switch Device Wizard that is part of the Blackberry Desktop Manager.  Unfortunately I’m on a Mac and the relatively newly released OSX version of the desktop manager program doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of the Windows version.

So I ended up having to drop into Windows and run the desktop manager from there.  Luckily you don’t have to go through a full sync process, you can pretty much use the Device Switch Wizard from any Windows Desktop Manager installation.  In fact I think this is pretty much what they’ll do for you if you got your phone in a T-Mobile store.

Anyways, you’ll want to plug in your original device and what it’ll do is essentially back everything up and then it’ll prompt you to plug in your new berry.  After it finishes loading everything onto your new device it’ll give you the option to wipe all your info from the old.

That part was easy enough.  However after doing the switch my data services weren’t quite working properly. It’s a quick and easy fix which can be done by logging into the T-Mobile BIS site and resending the service books.

For the less jargon savvy, just log into your account on t-mobile.com and click on “Blackberry Internet E-Mail” link. It’ll only be on there if you have a Blackberry plan in existence.  From that screen you should see a link on the left that says “Service Books” that’s where you can request that they be resent. It’ll get your data going.

The other issue I had was my Facebook app no longer worked. It would constantly say something like “A connection could not be established to the Facebook servers” or something to that effect.  Apparently some people were also having issues being able to use certain data services like Blackberry Messenger, Google Talk, AIM, but not others.

After some scouring I discovered that the fix was changing the APN setting.  You see some of the newer smart phone devices are set to use the APN: epc.tmobile.com by using one of the other APNs either: wap.voicestream.com or internet2.voicestream.com it seemed to give the Facebook app access to connect to the servers again.

From what I’ve read epc.tmobile.com is the newer access point name that should be used, but until it starts working with all my apps I’ll make due with one of the others.

There are people who report internet2.voicestream.com or epc.voicestream.com are faster than wap.voicestream.com that’s something I’ll leave up to you to decide.  Apparently the way epc.voicestream.com proxies images makes it appear faster?

Anyways hope this info helps someone.

To set the APN go to:

Settings > Options > Advanced Options > TCP/IP

From there you should see the APN specified. Hope that helps anyone else out there with issues getting Facebook, UberTwitter or any other random app working properly on their new Blackberry 9700.

I suppose the following amazingly cool dog feats I’ve found are probably due to their natural survival instinct, it is extremely contrasting to what we are used to seeing in our domesticated evironments.

Take a look at this dog saving another dog that’s been hit by a car!

Then there’s these smart Russian dogs that take the subway into the city every day in search of food from humans.  How they go about adapting to their environments is amazing!

Check them out at English Russia.

If you’re like me and are looking at keeping your account but still want to do what you can with the US options then it’s certainly frustrating.

While fooling around I found a way to get Netflix to stream through my Xbox on my Canadian account and here’s how I did it.

First I logged in with my Silver US Xbox Live account and downloaded the Netflix application. I went through the various actions to link it to my Netflix account and voila I was ready to go. It’ll complain that you need a Gold membership and will then allow you to switch over to your Canadian Gold account.

From there you’re still within the Netflix app can begin streaming anything you have queued up.  This process has to be repeated each time you watch movies. There is a way to save you from the trouble sof having to sign in and out of various accounts. If you just hit your Xbox button and select “Quick Launch” then swap over to the tab with “All” it will list all your applications and games. You can select Netflix and resume watching movies without having to do the switcheroo.

Hope this helps others.

Check it out, email provider specific instructions on ensuring you’ll receive properly delivery of their emails.  Most people that use email regularly are already pretty familiar with checking junk/spam folders in their email clients if they don’t receive what they’re expecting.  However, it is always nice when you’re given specific instructions on how to prevent this.

Here’s a screenshot, specific to Gmail.  I’m sure they only have instructions for the most popular providers eg. Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc

So there’s my disclaimer, you can now proceed and form your own judgment based on my impressions of this player.

I’ve been a little slow with posting about this particular player as I wanted to get a real thorough run through of this player. Since I received this slightly before it became commercially available I decided to see wait to see what it would be priced at as well.

Like most gadget fiends these days, I’ve found something that I like and it’s going to take something that I find more impressive and useful that will really move me to replace what I’ve got. So with that said, there were a few things I think that might unfairly affect my impression of the Samsung T10 player.

1. I received this player along with an accessory. I very wicked one. The Samsung SBH170 Stereo Bluetooth headset (which I can’t locate on the Samsung Canada site or at any of the local big box electronic retailers)
2. I absolutely love my cheap robust and perfectly weighted Sandisk Sansa E280 8GB player that I would invariably compare this player to.
3. I have a friend who works deep within Samsung who has had negative things to say about their players, so I’m a bit skeptical.

Here’s some generic pics of the player and head set I received, seeing as you probably don’t really care about the craptastic photos I have of them that I captured with my busted camera (If any marketing companies want to send me a camera you’re more than welcome to contact me *grin*).

If you do want to see “real” pics you can always peep the ones over on Rebecca’s Blog. Where she has taken some much better photos.

One thing that has always been impressive is Samsung’s displays. Like many others, my first exposure to the company was through their computer monitors. Absolutely some of the best bang for buck deals is with Samsung. Unsurprisingly, the T10 gets a very pleasant to look at display.

Here’s a quick run down of what I liked and disliked.

The player itself is an ambitious one, cramming a ton of features into it.  There’s the bluetooth (2.0), fm radio, video, photos, mp3s, voice recorder, and text file viewing.  Unfortunately with all these features 2 GB is simply too little storage space, I would probably not purchase this version of it as a result.

It boasts a “comfortable grip” on the Samsung web site which to me I found to be not that comfortable. Maybe for smaller hands? The top and bottom of the player is angled which I found rather annoying when you hold it horizontal to view videos.  In fact I found it would often cause it to slip/squirt out of my grip, I would much preferred it if it were just a squared edge.  As well it’s a very feather weighted device, which makes it feel like you really have to baby the device.  I like that balance of small size with a weighty feel to my gadgets suggesting that it won’t break if i drop it.

The nice thing about the GUI is it is fairly customizable so you can really have it display things the way you want.  According to the Samsung site you’re also able to make/receive calls on your bluetooth cell phone directly from the T10.  I haven’t been able to figure this one out and scouring the PDF manual that you can download (it only comes with the quick start guide out of the box), returned no results for me.

The sound quality out of this little player is better than my Sansa, however the earbuds that come with the player make it really sound tinny. You’ll definitely want to upgrade to better ear/head phones.  Paired with this bluetooth stereo headset however, this player is definitely a great experience.

I’m very impressed with the headset especially with how seamlessly it switches between playing music off my T10 to picking up call off my Blackberry Curve, to resuming music afterwards.

I think I would only consider giving up my Sansa player though if the player were a minimum of 8GB of storage.  Especially if you’re like me where I like to have entire albums on my player.  If you’re the type to just have mp3s of songs you like then it’s perfectly fine and there’s enough room to have the occasional photos and short videos.

All in all, it’s a great player.  The touch sensitive buttons work great and everything is just perfect but they might as well just have a 4gb model as their lowest capacity since anything less really doesn’t let you fully utilize the capabilities.

Who needs a manual to function a microwave? I mean they’ve pretty much worked the same for the past 20 years. Punch in a time and punch in start.  Who out there actually uses those extra fancy buttons? I don’t know a soul that uses any of those buttons. The auto defrost, popcorn popper and reheat buttons rarely ever work. Unless it’s a crazy expensive one that has all those fancy sensors to automatically cook things.

Well what I did surprisingly learn from the manual was how to tell if dishes are safe for use in a microwave.

Here’s how you test your dishes.  Essentially you want to make sure your dishes don’t heat up.  Obviously your dish will get hot because of the *content* getting hot, yet at the same time it’s not good for your microwave if you’ve got it going with no food content inside.  So how is this addressed? The smart people at GE put in their manual instructions on just how to do this.

The manual for this GE microwave I had suggested you fill a measuring cup with 1 cup of water which you then place inside or on the bowl / plate you’re testing.  Turn the microwave on for no more than 1 minute.  If the plate/bowl without the water in it gets hot then it’s NOT safe for use in the microwave.

Anyways as usual I just found this cool, it’s most likely trust worthy being in this manual but again I take no responsibility for how you use this info or if you mess up your microwave, dishes or your face.

Well I think I found the solution to obtaining free wifi.

I’ve found that most airports the lounge for pilots/flight attendants as well as for frequent flyers tend to provide their patrons free wifi. If you happen to be at a gate that is close enough you can snag a signal without having to pay the ridiculous charges for 15 minutes of access otherwise provided by the local wifi providers.

For awhile I was using alpha/beta versions of Swift browser which is based on the same rendering engine (webkit) as Safari. However after this announcement I wonder if they’ll continue development. Yay for Apple.

Anyways all so called solutions for this svchost problem don’t seem to be fixing it for me. I’ve tried manually re-registering all windows update related DLL files. I’ve tried safemode, I’ve tried just about everything you can find in a search online about, including installing the standalone update agent mean to deploy mass updates to a network. I’m on the brink of trashing Windows and restarting again.

Microsoft is fully aware of the issue as outlined by this Knowledge Base article. Which then directs me to download this so-called hotfix which did absolutely nothing for me in terms of resolving the issue. I hate you Microsoft. I’d almost blame the PC. However I know these issues don’t happen with my Linux machine. Unfortunately certain software I use can only run on Windows. GAHH!