USB will charge all european phones

I whined. A few months ago, when I first heard that Europe was trying to force cellphone makers to standardize on one charger.  Maybe bitched more than whined, but that’s just splitting hairs.  I thought it was a bad idea.   I, too, have the box-o-chargers, some of which dating back to the mesozoic era of charges.  Rather, I bitched because I saw it as a superb opportunity for the bureaucrats to screw it up:  USB was quickly becoming the de-facto standard, and we didn’t need some committee in Stockholm or Brussels designing some heptagonal “standard”.  So here it is:  Mea Culpa.

Europe, with their continental sensibilities, has reached an agreement with big names (including Apple, for those of us tired of the proprietary iPod connector), to standardize chargers to, you guessed it, USB.  Assuming other countries jumps on the bandwagon, or at least don’t change their connector just for Europe, this can have a bit of an effect at the landfill:  every year, 130 million of us get new phones. That’s 65,000 tons of junk. скачать фильм без регистрации трахни меня

Hopefully now we won’t have to throw away the chargers.

In the past few months my Blackberry has started misbehaving. The clickwheel has become erratic, mostly scrolling down: sometimes it will scroll down, and sometimes it won’t. Also, it wouldn’t “click”. So I decided to opt for surgery.

First job: get rid of the retaining ring. Just pry it off gently from the left, right, and bottom sides.

blackberry clickwheel extraction

Then pop out the clickwheel assembly. This can pop out (it is held in place by a small magnet) or you can gently lift it off with a small screwdriver.

The contact at the bottom looked awful. A cotton swab (that’s “q-tip” for the rest of us), some alcohol and a can of compressed air is all that’s needed to clean all around. Dab, don’t smear. Also clean the little wheels on the clickwheel assembly.

Pop things back together…and…wait? did you not keep track of the orientation? Not a big deal. The contact at the bottom of the clickwheel assembly can point up or down.

blackberry clickwheel extraction

The verdict? Not sure how well it works yet. I’ll have to give it another day or so to make sure. It scrolls better now, and I am able to click again, though perhaps the clicking is too sensitive.

Here are some more annotated pictures of the process.

Mickey

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Callwave.com

On average, studies are indicating that the average professional is interrupted every three minutes with email, answering calls, chat requests, etc. This apparently is costing us all about 2 hours out of each day, just trying to get back to completing our primary work.

How does anyone is actually anything done?
When I consult professionals about their communications, one of the usual “ah ha!” moments I get is when we get around to talking about it means to be mobile, starting with their cell phones.

I usually ask a few questions:

at your office
Do you get a lot of calls during the day?
Do you have to stop your work to answer them?
Have you ever considered using an office assistant to handle your calls?

outside of your office
Do you have to call your office voicemail to check your voice messages?
If you are able to forward office calls to your cell phone, do you often forget to do so?
Do you use your voicemail to screen your calls?

If you answered “Yes” to any of these, read on.

Setting up your cell phone as your single source of voice communications is the one the first basic steps to going fully mobile as well as maintaining your sanity.

I tried that already, but I couldn’t screen my calls on my cell phone like I can with my office

line.

With Callwave, now you can, and far better than what your office line could ever do.

Callwave is another free service that I consider a must-have for professional or small business. At its core service, it is a Voicemail-to-Text transcription service* (a-la-Jott.com’s voice-to-text transcription service). By enabling certain Callwave features, it can help you gain serious productivity and allow you to be completely mobile.

If you’re like me, most of your calls tend to be urgent but very few of them are not drop-everything-right-now type of emergencies. So, I have to be able to screen these calls, at the same time I have to maintain my interruptions to a minimum if I’m expected to get anything done.

Here’s how I recommend setting things up

Step 1
Forward all calls to Callwave’s voicemail. buy aricept Whenever I don’t pick a call or I have my cell phone turned off, all my callers are sent to voicemail on Callwave’s service. In order to make that work, you have to use what most major cell phone carriers call Busy Call Forwarding (Verizon is *71). What this does is send the caller to Callwave’s Vtxt enabled voicemail instead of your carrier’s default voicemail.

Step 2
Have Callwave send voicemail transcriptions to your cell phone’s SMS. As soon as my callers are done leaving a voicemail, Callwave sends a txt message to my cell phone with the transcribed voicemail. This feature comes in very handy whenever I happen to be somewhere that I can’t take calls but I can read txt messages.

Step 3
Make sure Callwave sends an email message with the full audio to your email account. Callwave then sends an email of this message to my Outlook Hosted Exchange service. I filter them into an Outlook folder that archives them. This enables me to store the audio of every message I ever received, with searchable transcribed text as record of my messages. No more full voicemail boxes or lost messages.

Step 4
Install Callwave’s Internet Answering Machine to screen your calls at your office (or laptop). Last but not least, when I am my office, it plays voicemail audio through my speakers with the use of Callwave’s Internet Answering Machine. This lets me screen the calls for emergencies, without having to stop whatever it is that I’m doing.

The last tip I recommend is setting up twice day to return calls, once in the morning, and once before COB. With Callwave, you definitely rely on your cell phone as the single communications point, while keeping the interruptions to a minimum, but allow for truly important emergencies to get through.

This agrees entirely with the principal of centralizing your information storage, while distributing access across various mediums. A topic I will be coming back to from time to time.

*These transcriptions are sophisticated automated transcribers. While not entirely accurate, it helps you get to the gist of the call without having to pay for expensive human transcribers. But trust me, it’s pretty darn good.

BTW, this post falls under a new category, Total Mobility. This is category will cover services and gear that I use that keep things going smooth, wherever I happen to be.