Another 15 minutes

An Android phone will scan your entire memory card for music and images and display them as available media in the players and albums, but maybe you don’t want to show all media but only specific folders. There is a solution for this. To hide media in a specific folder from the player apps do this:

1. Windows: Open notepad and save an empty file as filename “.nomedia”. Linux: In a terminal window create a file called “.nomedia” by typing “touch .nomedia”.
2. Connect your Android phone by USB and copy the file into all folders you wish to hide from the media scan.
3. Done.

The media (music, images and movies) contained in this folder will now be ignored and not show up in your MP3 or movie player on the phone. To access and play them you can use a file manager, like Astro File Manager.

I have had my HTC Desire Android phone for a while now and I have a few recommendations for free, good, useful, nice and fun apps & games for your phone. In Sweden we only have free apps in the market so far, so these recommendations are only based on free apps. Here’s my list so far…

Android applications:

• Astro File manager. A useful file manager app so you can browse your files and folders.
• Transdroid. Monitor and control your uTorrent client at home on your mobile phone.
• MixZing Media Player. Pretty good media player for you music.
• Ringdroid. Create ringtones from your favorite songs.
• Weather widgets (yr.no). Weather widget and clock from yr.no.
• Swedish dictionary.
• Scandinavian keyboard.
• Handcent SMS. Very nice SMS application, can be modified to look any way you want.
• WordPress. Manage your WordPress blogs from your mobile phone.
• Layar Reality Browser. A fun augmented reality browser.
• Köp & sälj på Tradera. An ebay-like app for Swedish Tradera (eBay).
• aDyno. An app for your car, it can measure 0-100 times, laptimes, g-forces, show graphs and record data.
• Advanced Task Killer. Kill applications that are running in the background.
• Trafikinfo. Show’s traffic information on maps, roadworks and other notes (Sweden).
• Bambuser. Stream video in real-time from your mobile phone.
• Google Maps.
• Yr.no. Weather application from yr.no.
• Remote RDP Lite. Remote desktop application.
• Twitter.
• Shazam. Application that identifies songs by listening to them.
• 3G Watchdog. Monitors your data traffic.
• Google Goggles. Google image search.
• Mix Megapol. Stream from MIX Megapol radio station (Sweden).
• SMS-Biljetter. Manage yall our SMS-tickets in Sweden with this app.
• Cinema. Movie player.
• Compass.
• AFT Supernytt. Aftonbladet news (Sweden).
• IDG.se. IT news from idg.se.
• Prisjakt. Compare product prices and read reviews (Sweden).
• Week Number Widget. Displays the current week number.
• tv.nu. TV-guide (Sweden).
• Nimbuzz IM & Voice. MSN, ICQ, Facebook chat and more with one app.

Android games:

• Jewels. You probably know it, classic game.
• Bistro cook. Cook the right ingridients to serve a complete dish.
• Air Control. Direct airplanes to the right runway, very nice.
• SuperYatzy Free. Yes, Yatzy.
• Robo Defense Free. Your avarage tower defense game for the phone.

Yesterday I got my new mobile phone, an HTC Desire. It’s just amazing, such a great interface and super fast with so much capabilities. I think it’s better than Iphone in so many ways, i love Android and what HTC has done with it. There are a few glitches with some widgets, but nothing major so far. I will have great fun with this phone and with can do so much, no limit with seems. Top notch! I’m on a horse.

Ever since I noticed that TouchFlo 3D (also known as Manila) got updated on newer phones, but not on my HTC Touch HD, I have been thinking of doing it myself with one of the multiple custom ROMs available for this phone, made by enthusiasts of the Windows Mobile community. The newer versions of Manila has alot more nice functions and much better looks that I want, my phone comes with version 1.3 so it’s pretty basic. The procedure seemed a bit complicated though, and I didn’t want to risk my warranty on the phone. But after e-mailing HTC asking whether or not the HTC Touch HD (Blackstone) would ever get an upgrade to Windows Mobile 6.5 and newest version of Manila and they replied…

- We currently have no knowledge of any planned updates for the HD. It is unlikely to be updated to 6.5 or beyond as Microsoft have made some hardware restrictions on devices that can use 6.5 that the HD does not meet.

… I decided to go ahead with my plans, since I know that many people use Windows Mobile 6.5 and later versions of Manila on their Touch HD’s and it runs just fine. I’m gonna go for Dutty’s “Leo” ROM with Windows Mobile 6.5 and Manila 2.5, since Dutty seems to be the most popular and skilled ROM cook out there, and here’s a step-by-step guide on how I did it.

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Recently I noticed that the camera in my HTC Touch HD showed I had only 59 photos left until my memory card would be full, which was strange because I had only used about 3.5 Gb out of the 8 Gb available. This seems to be a bug on the phone when approaching about half of the capacity of your memory card, for most users this might happen when the amounr of free space is closing down to 4 Gb, a patch for it should be available from HTC sooner or later I guess. After searching some information about this problem I stumbled upon some ideas that might fix the problem, one being to connect the phone to your computer with USB cable in disk mode and do a normal defrag of the drive. In my case this did not work. Another idea was to save more files to the card so the amount of free space would be less than 4 Gb, thus forcing the decive to recognize the 4 more gigabytes that are available. This worked better and here’s how I did it…

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Here is a small collection of applications I recommend and find either very cool or useful for your HTC Touch HD or any other Windows Mobile phone. These applications will unlock hidden powers inside your phone and make it even more user friendly better looking. So here’s my list, in no particular order…

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Alot of people seem to have problems with auto-updating WordPress to version 2.8.2 with the processes freezing at download, stuck with message the the file is being downloaded but nothing ever happens. This only seem to happen on some blogs, 2 out of my 3 blogs worked just fine, but one needed more help.

The problem seem to be with some plugin. Here is what you do to successfully get the update through. Go to the plugin page, select “Active” plugins and then use bulk action to deactivate all active plugins. Don’t worry if you have many plugins already deactivated and don’t want to manually activate the ones you actually used one by one, you can activate them just as easy. Now proceed with the core upgrade, it should go through right away. Then, go to the plugins page again, select “Recently active” plugins and then bulk action activate them again. All done!