ten mov.es

If you use the iGo Stowaway keyboard with a Nokia phone (or Palm OS devices), you’ll find the layout doesn’t readily lend itself to the keyboard shortcuts you might have been used to with previous keyboards (or Nokia’s own keyboard.) This means you usually have to complete some tasks via the phone’s keyboard or buttons.

But actually there are things you can do to avoid doing that. One is that the Stowaway driver (not the Symbian one that comes with the phone) contains a tab that allows you to reprogram shortcuts to load specific applications:

This is useful, but it doesn’t help when you just want to send a message, say, or access the menu buttons in the bottom corners of the screen.

There’s no way that I can find to access the right hand menu button from the keyboard, but the Windows key (between the Ctrl and the Alt keys on the left hand side of the keyboard) will access the left hand menu, (so long as you’re not on the usual home/standby screen, for some reason). Moving through the menu and submenu items is then possible via the arrow keys (Hit Enter to launch the function.)

Yeah, I know it’s not the most exciting insight on the planet, but I was kind of excited to find out about it. and wish I’d known about it before.

PS: Don’t buy the Stowaway from the iGo website: It’s $150 there. You should be able to pick one up from Amazon or elsewhere for a third that price.

Filed under: hard

The best way to keep tabs on who is linking to your Flickr photo album is through Technorati, the blog-tracking service. But it’s not as straightforward as it could be, so here’s a guide, based almost entirely on that provided by the Technology Evangelist Ed Kohler, for which I offer grateful thanks.

Setting up the Technorati end

1. Sign up for Technorati if you don’t already have an account. Go to Technorati’s start claim page, and click on the Blogs tab:

2. Scroll to the bottom of the page to the Claim a Blog section and paste in your Flickr.com page into the URL box:

3. Click on the Begin Claim button:

4. You’ll be taken through a four step process, the next stage of which is to choose your “claim method”. Use the Post Claim method if you’re offered more than one, by clicking on the blue link, as per below:

5. In the next screen follow the instructions by selecting the prepared code in the light green box:

Setting up the Flickr end

6. This is where it gets trickier: open a second browser window, go to your Flickr account and choose a recent photo that’s public. Choose the “Edit title, description, and tags” link on the right hand side:

7. In the description box of the photo delete all existing descriptions (copy them if you like to a text file — you can always paste them back later.)

Copy the code from the Technorati box into the Description field of your Flickr photo, deleting all the stuff that isn’t the link:

(Removing both other descriptions and the HTML code seems to be important. Without it, it might not work.)

Save changes to the photo:

Wrapping it Up

8. Now go back to the Technorati page you were on before and click on the button “Release the Spiders!” This will instruct Technorati to go look at your Flickr page and look for the code:

When this is complete you should receive a message on the Technorati page saying it’s successfully added your Flickr page to your list of monitored blogs. If it’s unsuccessful, go back to the Flickr image and check

• the photo is public 
• you’ve removed all other Description text 
• you’ve removed the HTML from the link

and try releasing the spiders again.

Monitoring your Flickr photos

So how do you actually keep tabs on the Technorati page?

9. Once your Flickr page is “claimed” it should appear on your Technorati page (http://technorati.com/people/technorati/[YOURNAME]). Click on the green Authority button below the link to your Flickr page:

10. You should see a list of those blogs and websites linking to your photos:

Either bookmark this page, or else subscribe to its RSS feed. Either way, you should now be able to keep tabs on who’s linking to your Flickr photos.

This first appeared on my loose wire blog: How to Monitor Your Flickr Album Using Technorati

Filed under: hard

If you’re using Windows XP, recovering from a crash or whatever, and find that your Firefox bookmarks (and bookmarklets and bookmark toolbar) have disappeared, here’s what to do:

1. Find your profile in c:\Documents and Settings\[your XP user name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

2. There should be a subfolder there called bookmarkbackups. Find the most recent bookmarks html file in there (usually with a date after the ‘bookmarks’ bit.

3. Copy it to somewhere safe and rename the existing one bookmarks.html.

4. Copy it to the default profiles folder (up one level from the bookmarkbackups folder, deleting the existing bookmarks.html file.

5. Close Firefox if it’s running.

6. Run Firefox. Your old bookmarks should be restored.

(And, while I’m at it, here’s a solution if your Firefox browser refuses to remember any of your changed settings in toolbars etc when you close it, resetting everything back to what it was before. The same bug — likely to be fixed soon — also deletes your search engines in the search box to the right of the address box. This fix will fix both problems:

• Locate the localstore.rdf file in the same place as above.
• Delete it.
• Restart Firefox. You should be good to go. Thanks, GreenKri.)

(An earlier version of this guide can be found at Loose Wire Blog.

Filed under: hard