Hints for working with the poorly-designed Windows Mobile 5.0
Are you tired of having your text being camouflaged inside some complicated background images? Tired of searching the Internet for a background that has some contrast with the text? Download this pocketpc theme. Black.tsk Place it in your \My Documents\ folder of your Pocket PC, tap on "Today Settings" and "Appearance" tab. Select "Black" as the theme. And enjoy reading white letters on a black background. No more blue letters on a blue sky, or gold letters on a sunset background.
I noticed that if you have English (Canada) set as your country in the regional settings, and you happen to look at the Date area. You can no longer see what day of the week it is on the Today screen. Follow these steps to correct it:
- Select anything other than English (Canada) as the region, such as English(Caribbean)
- Select the Date tab.
- Pick which Long date you like, if you like to see Tuesday, May 23, 2006, select dddd,MMMM dd,yyyy
- Hit OK up in the top right, it will tell you something about changing the Locale
- Once again tap on Regional Settings
- Select English (Canada)
- And hit OK and never look at the regional settings again. Unless you want to go through this procedure again.
If you want to do ftp transfers, and look at your local LAN through wireless. I recommend Total Commander/CE . Something like this should be included right in the portable Windows versions. It makes the PocketPC twice as useful! You can edit the registry, have multiple-window views of remote ftp sites, and explore your local LAN. It also has a text editor that will open text files with extensions other than .txt This can allow you to maintain a website, with just your handheld. Also this text editor can let you modify your .dct files in the dictionaries folder. Thus making your handwriting transcriber even more effective. You would normally have to move the file onto a PC, edit it, and move it back into your PocketPC.
Also, as of May of 2006, there is an update for the windows mobile 5.0 and some of the issues it has with my HP iPAQ hx2000 series. It seems to be a little less likely to lock up. I keep a SD Card in it all the time, and that would cause it to bugger up, causing me to need to hit the reset button about every half an hour. Check the HP website for the latest news. It also adds an icon next to the wireless icon which lets you disable the USB network when your machine is sitting on the cradle. itask is faster too.
Update: I have been using this for a few weeks now, and have only needed to use the reset button once Normally, I would have to hit it about every half hour of use.
As of yesterday, Skype has made all telephone calls to regular phone numbers inside North America free. So good-bye long distance calls. And maybe good-bye Vonage Holdings Corp. (don't try to compete with ebay)