Since moving to New Zealand, I’ve noticed that some of the familiar holidays are the same, but some are different. While this is expected for things like national anniversaries, the one that keeps causing me grief is Father’s Day. In Canada, it is the 3rd Sunday in June. In New Zealand, it’s somewhere in September. This is further compounded by the false sense of security given by the fact that Mother’s day is the same day in both countries, the second Sunday in May.
I have yet to forget to call my dad on Father’s Day, but I’m sure that it’s going to happen one day. What I need to do is set up a series of overlayed calendars (Birthdays, NZ holidays, Canadian holidays, etc) or a series of remind scripts to handle all of this. Then I just need to sync all of this to my phone.
Nays first.
I was a bit worried yesterday when I noticed that the ringer on my mobile wasn’t ringing. Text messages give a single beep and 3 vibrates, but there was no beep. A little testing with changing the ringing profile showed that none of the ringtones were working. However, the keypress tones were working, so I knew the speaker wasn’t dead. Then, as mysteriously as it began, the problems ended on their own. I hope this isn’t the foreshadow of things to come. I’m not impressed with current phone designs and I don’t want to have to buy a new one.
On the other hand, I’ve finally been able to successfully connect to my phone with gammu. I’ve used the data access cable on windows before (with some of the most horrible proprietary software I’ve ever seen), but had troubles accessing the phone through linux. I don’t know what I’m doing differently, but after writing a very basic configuration file, it just works. Even better, wammu seems to be infinitely better than the windows software that came with the data cable. Wammu is a bit slow, and seems to not have an option to sync everything at once, but it works well.
There are a few bonuses that go with using gammu/wammu:
- I can save important text messages onto the computer.
- In general, message organisation is easier. Sorting, searching and deleting subsets are things that you just don’t get with the phone’s OS.
- Time synchronisation! I don’t know why Vodafone doesn’t broadcast a time sync with the GSM signal, but setting the time based on the computer’s clock is the next best thing.
- Life synchronisation. This will take a bit of extra work, but it’s possible to update phone numbers, calendar entries and todo lists. With just a bit of text manipulation, it should be easy to perform regular updates to the phone. Hurray for reminders. Punching these things into the phone using 0–9 is a real pain.
- Probably lots more, but I’m still exploring what gammu is capable of.
