microsoft launches popfly

that’s seriously cool… have a look at the alpha version of microsoft’s "popfly".
i don’t really know how to describe it, but it’s like a community/webspace/blog/sharing/etc mixup…

Microsoft Popfly

dan fernandez’s blog is holding more information as well as the popfly website.

i am really impressed … cool content made easy 🙂 make sure you have a look at the video… the examples are really impressive.

schedule DVR recordings on bluewinTV with your mobile phone

i just discovered why i had problems with accessing the MobileEPG of bluewinTV to schedule new DVR recordings with my mobile phone… and thought this is maybe useful for others as well:

  1. grant your mobile phonenumber access to bluewinTV in swisscom’s "kundencenter"
  2. from your mobile phone send "EPG" to "888" — after a minute you will recieve a SMS with the URL for the WebEPG
  3. open this URL in your phone’s browser and choose "BluewinTV"

i had now the problem that i got asked for username and passwort for every new page… in addition the site warned me about roaming costs… so it looked like it couldn’t really read my phone number.

I found out that in your GPRS connections settings on your phone you have to add swisscom’s proxy, otherwise the MobileEPG would never identify you:

  • Proxy: 192.168.210.001
  • Port:    8080

this worked fine for me at first… but after i synched my phone with Active Sync via USB it suddenly didn’t work anymore.
i checked my GPRS settings again and for whatever reason Active Sync has replaced the swisscom proxy with my local LAN proxy. after changing this back to the correct one, everything worked fine again. i quickly checked the behavior with Windows Mobile Device Center on Windows Vista and luckily WMDC doesn’t change this entry automatically.

as you can see in the screenshot from my phone above i am now finally able to easily view/change/add my DVR schedules over the phone… which is really cool if you remember suddenly that you forgot to program a recording specific show tonight 🙂

SIP softphone on windows mobile 6

after a bit of playing around i now have finally running a SIP VOIP software running on my HTC Hermes (also known as Qtek Tytn or Swisscom XPA v1605) and can use it with my bluetooth headset.

  1. download the SJphone here
  2. copy it to your phone with Active Sync or Windows Mobile Device Center
  3. open the file explorer on the phone and run the cab you just copied
  4. choose "Device" as install location
  5. use a registry editor on the phone (e.g. the one from PHM) and change
    "hklm\software\oem\voicecommand" the value of key "LaunchAPEnable" to "1"

with the last step you should be able to redirect the sound output of the SJphone to your bluetooth headset by just pressing the button on your headset.

after you did all of the above just start the SJphone and configure your SIP account in the "profiles" settings. i am using a sipgate account which is working fine.

this setup now allows me to place/recieve VOIP calls wherever i have WLAN reception with my phone

Replace the harddisk of an MSTV IPTVe STB

slowly the first mods of settopboxes running MicrosoftTV IPTVe are showing up in the net…

a user of AT&T’s UVerse service posted a description of how he replaced the harddisk in his IPTVe STB with a bigger one.
You can find it on uverseusers.com.

You basically can do the same way if you e.g. want to make your second STB in the household completely silent at operators using MSTV’s IPTVe but are not offering a diskless version, like BluewinTV in Switzerland or T-Home in Germany. In that case you can replace the harddisk with a disk on module (basically a flash memory with an IDE connector, emulating a harddisk drive).
So far the theory… in reality this is not allowed as long as you don’t own the settopbox.