Sunday, November 05, 2006

A new home for this site

So I finally gave up on the idea of a FreeBSD VSP and went with the simpler, cheaper solution. I got me a Linux one :-) It's not exactly what I wanted (I like FreeBSD damnit), but it is here and it works.

Over the last couple of weeks I've migrated my DNS, mail and web off RUCUS and out of Rhodes, not because I have anything against them, but because I'm a big boy now and should be paying for my own hosting.

If anyone is interested, this site is hosted by rimuhosting, a New Zealand based VPS hosting company with machines in a Dallas co-lo centre. Mici is ammused by the name, but so far they've been nothing but efficient :-)

Oh, and it's Ubuntu for the zealots who're wondering which way I went.

posted by guy at: 18:19 SAST | path: /general | permanent link

Saturday, October 07, 2006

Of Showers and Baths

I finally got the hell in with our excuse-for-a-shower this morning and decided, in good South African fashion, to make a plan.

See more ...

posted by guy at: 15:23 SAST | path: /general | permanent link

Vodafone branded Sony Ericsson K750i

So Mici bought at Sony Ericsson K700i. It's a nice phone, but the version Mici got came from Vodacom and thus was heavily Vodafone branded.

Vodafone branding sucks! They do all sorts of aesthetically ugly things, like changing the icons to ones that are basically red and white so there is no contrast and you don't know what they are. They also do some evil things, like removing the option to send photos via e-mail — they want you to use their (expensive) MMS gateway. There are no less than five ways to get to the Vodafone Live website, from which you can download their (expensive) content. I've got no problem with the idea of Vodafone Live, just give me the choice.

Since Vodafone's branding restricted Mici from doing things she wanted to do (and which were possible on other, un-branded K750i's), I did some searching on Google to try and work out what could be done. I came across the DaVinci Team. They offer un-branded firmware for Sony Ericsson phones, at a price.

At first I was very dubious. Having some understanding of the implications of flashing the wrong firmware to a device, I wanted to make damn sure I wasn't going to brick a brand new ZAR 2000 phone. So I did some searching around the topic and found lots of other people with good things to say about them. There were two things that swayed me, however. The first was that their forum site provide very frank information — what the implications are, how to chose the right firmware, what happens if you brick a phone, etc. More importantly, it tells you how to update your phone in such a way that Sony Ericsson's own update service still talks to the phone. This effectively does them out of revenue, so it's definitely a recommendation. The second recommendation was from PayPal. The fact that they used PayPal inspired some trust in giving up my credit card number, and the fact that PayPal had over four thousand undisputed payments to them made me feel safer. So I duly handed over EUR 10 (ZAR 102 after charges) for the ability to re-flash Mici's phone.

The good news is that it all worked perfectly.

I changed the firmware language from VFE2 to EUROPE2, and the CDA number (which apparently identifies the phone model, firmware, and filesystem) from a Vodafone one to a generic South African one (the same one that K750i's bought through MTN use, coincidentally). The firmware went back a version from where it was — it was running R1DB001 before the change, and R1BC002 after. But it worked! No more Vodafone branding. Anywhere.

The next test was to see if Sony Ericsson still liked the phone. I used Sony Ericsson's own update software to re-update the firmware to the latest version. It picked the phone up as a EUROPE2 language phone, and pulled down the latest version of the new firmware. So now Mici has an up-to-date phone with no Vodafone branding. And she can phoblog, which is all she wanted to do all along. :-)

There are three things that come out of this:

Kudos to the DaVinci Team for a very reasonably priced (even in .za terms) and efficient service.

Kudos, too, to Sony Ericsson for making a great phone in the first place, and for providing the ability for end-users to update their phones.

And lots of dingbats to Vodafone and Vodacom. If you weren't so fascist about the way you branded your phones, people wouldn't want to remove the branding. My own Sony Ericsson K700i is Vodacom branded. The branding is subtle and doesn't break functionality. It's also still there, despite the fact that I've had the phone for nearly two years. The K750i's in-your-face branding lasted three days. Learn from this ...

posted by guy at: 10:27 SAST | path: /general | permanent link