Samsung Saga and Skype

Skype is a great addition for your Samsung Saga or any other Smartphone.

If you are running Windows Mobile, you can download an app from Skype for your phone. Make sure you have an account and either a plan or prepaid balance.

I found myself ij a situation where I had to make a call. The building I was in was not letttting me get phone service but I did have WIFI.

Making a call via Skype was easy...Just remember to begin the number to call with +1 in th US.

I didnt have a headset which made it harder for my son to hear me but it did work.

samsung saga power conservation

I found myself sitting in a hospital for an extended period of time. I had thrown a bunch of aa batteries and my iGo charger in my pocket. The problem was that I was burninv batteries pretty quicckly. It dawned on me that sine I didn't have phone service, I should turn off the phone and the bluetgooth. Once I did that, the battery drain wa a lot lower.


Just remember to turn gthe phone and bluetooth back one.

Joomla Backups

If you are using Joomla, you need to consider a serious backup plan. I found Joomla Pack which is a backup system for Joomla. You can find it here.

The install process is pretty straightforward.

1. Download the zip file to your pc
2. Run the extension installer from your Joomla Control Panel
3. Run your backups

There is a little more than that, but not much. First of all, the app suggested storing your backups in a folder above your HTML root. That makes a lot of sense. Creating that folder in FTP was a snap. Then you have to change the Joomlapack configuration to match that folder for backup.

The other suggestion was to change the configuration to save as a Joomlapack archive instead of a zip. Joomlapack has the capability to restore your entire Joomla site.

While you are downloading Joomlapack, you should also download Kickstart which is the tool which will allow you to restore the site.

I need to play around with this a bit more, but I do feel a lot better knowing that it is possible to easily back up your Joomla sites. I haven't tried a restore yet but will look into it.

Joomla Fix - H2 tag in the Milkyway template cuts off ys and gs

I was using the Milky Way template and an H2 heading tag. When I looked at the page in IE7, I found that lower case descending characters were cut off. (y's and g's). I played around with the CSS with no luck. I did some searching and found that there is a pretty simple fix. Simply remove the width:100% from the H2 tag (Found that here)

Anyway, that worked like a charm and the descending characters are fully formed.

Joomla as a replacement for Frontpage

I have been looking for something to replace Frontpage for a while. I have looked at Expressionweb but wasnt sold on that as a solution.

I have been working with Joomla and am convinced that it is a good replacement. Joomla is a content management system. As such it will allow clients to manage their own content once the site is up.

Norton Toolbar

I happened to be doing a Google Search where one of my sites showed up in the Search Results. I noticed that, unlike many of the other sites, it had a grey button next to it instead of the green checkmark button.

For people running a recent version of Norton Internet Security and the NIS Browser toolbar, the green checkmark means that Norton has tested the site and found it to be safe. A grey button means they haven't tested it yet and a red button means that they found security issues.

A lot of people run Norton so it seemed to be a good idea to check all of my sites. A number of them are new and have low traffic. They were all grey button sites. If you click on the grey button, you get a message that

Summary
This site has not been tested yet. It has now been scheduled for testing.

I'm not sure how long the testing process takes, but I think it was worthwhile getting all of the sites in the testing que. The question now, is to find a way to do the same thing for McAfee , AVG and any other security toolbar provider. I just thing that not having a green mark might hurt traffic a bit.

300 Bucks for a Verizon Samsung Saga THAT DOESN"T WORK

I purchased Samsung Sagas from Verizon for me and my son. Mine is working OK. His keeps going into a mode where the phone will not work. It will not send or receive calls nor will it work with data except with wifi. When you try to dial, you get a message that there is no service. IOW, I have a three hundred dollar worthless piece of junk.

When we took it back to the store, they contacted support and were told that it was a known issue. Supposedly there was a download available on the Verizon website. We could not find it. The phone seemed to work OK for a couple of days. Today my son came home and said that the data wasn't working nor was the phone. I contacted support and they supposedly reset everything. An hour later, the phone was not working again. I called support again and this tech said it was a known issue. Supposedly no patch is available yet.

Their initial response was to return the phone to the store. That was a problem for a couple of reasons (1) the timeframe on the 70 dollar rebate was running out and I could not return the phone to the store if I removed the barcodes and (2) our son will be going on a number of class trips and I want him to have a working phone.

We ended up with Verizon agreeing to ship a replacement phone directly to me. In the meantime, I still had my LG envy sitting there with a half charged battery. Verizon switched the service to the Envy so now my son at least has a working phone.

The Tech Support was patient and helpful considering I wasn't in the best of mood having paid 300 bucks for a non working phone. He said that I was the first person with a problem with the phone.

So... Now we have to wait for the replacement phone to arrive, then get the store to swap the data on the phones, then we need to ship the old phone back and hope that the replacement is not one of the phones affected by the glitch.

Windows Mobile - Emailing a URL with a Saga

I was using interent explorer on my Samsung Saga running windows mobile. I wanted to email the url of a page I was on to my wife and son. Clicking the mouse and holding it brought up the context menu and I selected 'paste'.

So far, so good. Then I opened my email account in messaging and tried to paste the URL into the body of a message that I created. The context menu would only allow a paste into the subject, not into the body of the message.

I found a fairly easy workaround. I went into MENU, MY TEXT, EDIT MY TEXT MESSAGES and replaced one of the text messages with the URL by simply pasting it in. I was then able to paste the url contained in the MY TEXT items into the body of the message.

It worked great.