2 months ago a friend of mine was going to the US for a holiday and wanted to borrow my Navman GPS pda. Instead of buying the US maps from Navman at their ridiculously high prices, my friend bought a copy of TomTom Navigator 5 and installed it on my Navman instead. Of course, I did not object.

For those who are interested, TomTom doesn’t make their Australian maps available for purchase. The TomTom software sold here comes with US and EU maps only.

TomTom does work with my Navman PiN 300, which is actually a rebadged Mitac Mio 168. I found it used to crash whenever I left the software running, then powered the Navman off and on again. I had to do a hard reset on the pda to get things working again. There’s a 5.21 update that’s supposed to fix that. After installing it, it helped the problem slightly. The software still crashes, but doesn’t bring the whole PocketPc down with it.

So how does TomTom compare to Navman? The Navman software I’m using is Smartst v3.0, not the latest and greatest. TomTom’s cool because you can customise alot of things, including map colors and celebrity voices. However, my friend complained that it lags often, frequently giving directions a few seconds too late. SmartSt updates quicker, maps are a bit clearer, but it’s so B-O-R-I-N-G compared to the TomTom.

All in all, I’d say SmartSt’s better in terms of usability, and at least it doesn’t crash often on the Navman. TomTom’s way cooler and good for impressing your friends. TomTom also works with a wide array of hardware. Other people I know have got it working with cheapish Bluetooth and Irda (infra-red) units bought from eBay. What better way to add value to your PocketPc?

If you’re in the market for a GPS, should you get a PocketPC based unit or a standalone one? I have no experience with the standalone units, but I believe they should work better. However, if you buy a pda unit like the Navman PiN, and you live in Australia, you can also claim the unit as a tax deduction, so it’s worth considering.

Apologies for not posting anything new in ages, but thought I’d share this little gem. Last year, I bought myself a Navman 300 Pocketpc GPS unit. As I used it more and more, I found it extemely difficult to establish a satellite lock, which meant I couldn’t use the stupid thing. When it worked, it worked okay, but it was hard getting it to work to begin with.

Now there are several general tips I tried using to establish a lock and improve my reception. I made sure the car wasn’t moving when I switched the Navman on, stayed away from high buildings, made sure my car windscreen wasn’t electronically heated etc… but nothing worked.

Earlier on in the year, I attempted to load TomTom 5 onto the Navman (which worked!), but I’ll blog about that some other day. Anyway, it was almost impossible trying to test the unit since it was increasingly difficult to establish a satellite lock. In frustration, I decided to buy an external antenna to improve the reception. I blamed the hardware, thinking the little foldout antenna on the Navman 300 was the cause. There are lots of cheaper external antennas available on eBay for much less than Navman charges.

Anyway, just when I was about to throw in the towel, I stumbled onto this web page, that had a firmware that claimed to dramatically improve the reception. By this stage, I was ready to try anything, so I downloaded the firmware, followed the instructions and experienced no problems.

And I’m happy to say, my satellite reception takes less than 30 seconds on average to establish a lock. And when it’s locked on, it stays locked on, unless I’m inside the Sydney Harbor Tunnel of course.

I have heard cases of people stuffing up their Navman as a result of loading this firmware, so while it did work for me, exercise caution. No one’s going to be held responsible if your Navman becomes an ugly PocketPC only pda.

http://www.fiddaman.info/navmanpin/download.htm

I was very blessed this week. Not only did I get my replacement iPod yesterday, today my dear sister gave me her new Vodafone Sony Ericsson V600i 3G phone. Vodafone Australia’s trying to get everyone on to 3G, and are practically giving this phone away to any of their existing customers who ask for one.

My sister’s happy with her Motorola Razor, and seeing that I’ve had no luck with my mobile phone, she gave me hers. I’m currently using a Vodafone Sharp GX30i, but I’m on the Optus network. How I got stuck with that phone’s a very long story not worth repeating, but basically I’m stuck with Simplus, an Optus reseller, to November 2006 so it’ll be a while before I can kiss Optus goodbye.

Anyway, apart from the Vodafone branding, and how common the phone was, the V600i was pretty cool. I charged it up, then inserted my Optus sim card, and was greeted by “Insert correct sim card”. The V600i was locked to the Vodafone network, and could only be used by Vodafone sim cards.

Now this wouldn’t be new news to our friends in the US, who are used to having their phones locked to their carrier, but in Australia it’s unheard of. Already having the stupid Vodafone branding all over the phone and within the phone’s software is bad enough, but not being able to use it with another carrier just plain stinks.

Fortunately, there was a sticker on the box that said Vodafone would give you the unlock code for free simply by logging on to the web site. But the blasted Vodafone web site doesn’t make it easy to find a link to the page you need.

So here it is.
http://www.vodafone.com.au/unlock

My sister’s going to get the code and I’ll enter it once I get it. Stay tuned.

2 weeks ago, I had the sudden urge to backup all 28.5gb of music on my iPod. I use Anapod from Redchair, so it was a simple matter of copying and pasting to my hard drive.

So everything was dumped over without a hitch, but the next day, there was trouble! When I tried playing a song, the hard drive would spin furiously, the iPod would hang, and the song would not play. If I left it and didn’t touch anything, the song would play after a few minutes of hang time, but it would skip. Going from one track to the next also had the same long delay.

I did the resets a couple of time to no avail. When I tried hooking it up to Windows, it could not be detected. On my MacMini, I could see it in iTunes, but couldn’t do anything with it. Maybe the backing up of my music the night before gave the iPod a bit of a workout and stuffed it up.

So I gave up, and decided to send the iPod back to Apple for warranty service. When I first bought the iPod back in Aug 2004, I had the hindsight to get the Apple Protection Plan, that added another year to the iPod’s original one year warranty. But the guy at the Apple store told me he would register everything on my behalf and there was nothing I needed to do. To my horror, the Apple site said my iPod was out of warranty.

Fortunately, I was able to fax my proof of purchase over, and was able to print a prepaid shipping label. So I went to Australia Post and had it sent off, and didn’t hear anything from them for a week. But last Thursday, I got a call from Apple and they asked for my Apple Protection Plan Enrolment number, which I had handy.

Now I was a bit worried about Apple honoring the warranty, because when I just bought the iPod, I dropped it on my driveway. Which resulted in 3 visible dents, the case beint slightly bent and scratches all over. The iPod did work okay, and it was only after one and a half years of use did it start acting up.

I checked the Apple Service Status site everyday, but they didn’t have much information there. But yesterday, I got an email saying the a replacement iPod had been shipped out, and they gave me a tracking number that I could check on the Australia Post web site. The stupid site kept reporting that nothing by that number could be found.

Today, I got iPod! It was delivered to the office, and I’m happy to say Apple gave me a brand new unit. I was half hoping that they’d run out of 4th generation iPods and sent me a iPod video… but of course I was dreaming. Currently moving all the songs from my computer over to the iPod. Through iTunes. Stupid Redchair has this activation thing that binds it to the serial number, and their deactivation process isn’t instantaneous.

So I had problems with my pc at work for a long time. Blasted thing wouldn’t allow any USB storage devices to work, such as my portable external hdd or USB keys.Whenever I plugged my hdd in, the broken USB icon would show on the taskbar with the balloon message “USB Device Not Recognized”. Very annoying cause I had alot of eBooks etc on the hdd that I couldn’t access.

Nothing was wrong with the drive, as it worked on every other computer. I had admin access to the machine, which runs WinXP Corp. Tried everything from reinstalling USB drivers, uninstalling hardware in Device Manager etc to no avail.

So I gave up and just left it for a couple of weeks, and yesterday I wanted to do a search on google for something, and IE’s autocomplete came up with the term I used before relating to this. My trigger happy finger on the Enter key fired off this search by accident, and a couple of new entries from some forum came up.

One of the guys basically said he powered off the computer, pulled out the plug from the socket, and left it for half an hour. When he powered everything back on, his USB drive got recognised.

I had little faith, but left with no further options, and nothing at work to look forward to, I did the same before I left yesterday, came back this morning and tested.

IT WORKED! Hooray! Everything’s back to normal now.

Thinking about it, it does make sense. The computer doesn’t really power off completely while it’s still plugged in… and maybe the power supply wasn’t sending the right voltage to the USB ports and had to be reset… of course all that doesn’t matter cause it works now!

Half of the world probably knows this by now, and I found this out when Windows 2003 Server was just released years ago, but completely forgot about it. So I’ll blog about it now and never forget again!

Had a new server set up for work today, and installed Windows 2003 Server Web Edition. It was a test server, and I wanted to install SQL Server 2000 to have the web applications all run on the same box.

But double clicking on x86\sqlsetup.exe resulted in the error message “Windows cannot open this program since it has been disabled”.

I then remembered that Win2k3 Web Edition is a cheaper, scaled down version of Win2k3 Server that’s intended to run and host web applications. I reckon other non-Microsoft apps like MySQL will install just fine, but don’t take my word for it.

A quick google search brought me to the MSDN link.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/819258

jasonwong.net has been offically relaunched… no more beta! For the past year, I’ve neglected this site and have not done anything with it, which resulted in out-of-date content, huge drop in search engine rankings and tragically, a sharp drop in visitors.

Now, the site is powered by WordPress 2.0, one of the internet’s most popular opensource blogging software. Wasn’t too painful porting the posts from the old site over, as they were stored as XML originally. I have also recently upgraded my other blog, ahbeng.net (which runs on Drupal) to the latest version. Will blog more about my experiences with both WordPress and Drupal, and what my recommendations are should you be interested in setting up your own blogging system.

What are my plans for jasonwong.net? Well, I plan to update all the content on this site to begin with. I also want to make this blog geek focused, blogging about IT related stuff & toys. ahbeng.net will be a blog about my personal social life, and anything else that doesn’t belong.

I will also be using this site as a resource for web-development/coding/database/infrastructure related hints, tips & techniques. I can never remember something brilliant I did in the past, so blogging it on this site which I can have access to anywhere anytime would be ideal. Plus, others often approach or give me help so blogging about it benefits everyone, not only me!

How exciting!

After a very, very long hiatus, jasonwong.net is “almost” back with a new look & feel and powered by WordPress, one of the most popular PHP/MySQL opensource blogging systems.

Unfortuately, my previous host has also decided to go on a permanent holiday, but I found out too late. Therefore, jasonwong.net was off-line for a long period of time, and I’ve lost my precious search engine rankings! Serves me right for neglecting this site.

Nevertheless, I’ve rebuilt most of jasonwong.net. There are a few things that need to be fixed or tweaked up, and I’m going to climb back up the search engine ladder.

I’ve just launched a new blog, which you can find at:
www.ahbeng.net

Note: You may not understand it if you don’t know Engrrish.

Happy New Year to all of you.

It has been a tragic end to 2004 with the lost of many lives and massive destruction due to the tsunamis.

So help out by:

• Praying
• Pulling out your wallets
• Donating to the cause