Digital driving with Digital Dash
I've been wanting to get into mobile computing and I've gone so far as to spec out a system for my Jeep. One of the things I've been looking for is a way to make using a computer in a car, easy and safe while driving. I've found several solutions out there and one I really liked is
Digital Dash from G-Net in Canada.
This a very nice solution that puts the main functions like GPS and DVD controls where they are easy to access, even on a 7" screen. Because the monitors are touchscreen and keyboards are not very user friendly when your driving, having software like Digital Dash is the way to for a truely mobile pc.
I liked it so much, I ended up getting a license for it :)
The St. Louis Science Center Sucks
I used to love going to the St. Louis Science Center as young lad. After the Oak-Knoll History Museum closed, the Science Center was the next best thing St. Louis had to offer. They even had the old Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops figures that stood outside of the Oak-Knoll History Museum along with a Saturn IX rocket. It was a great place to go to have fun and learn at the same time. Now it's just a corporate front for the X-prize. The Planetarium is no longer open to the public and the interesting and unique displays that were available have been replaced by sterile propaganda for the space prize.
My Fiancé and I decided to take a day last weekend and visit the Science Center. I had not been there in a very long time and I was looking forward to the trip. When we got there, I was taken back by the fact that hardly anyone was there. There were numerous parking spaces available. I remember having to park and walk because the attraction was so popular. When I started for the main entrance, I found it no longer existed. The entire top level of the planetarium had been sealed off and now the only entrance was through the basement. The Saturn rocket was AWOL as were the dinosaurs. Entering the basement, all of the fascinating displays of the decades were missing as well, replaced with a replica of the x-prize ship and some stupid space propaganda. There was nothing here worth viewing so we headed down into the tunnel, from the Planetarium to the Science Center building. This tunnel had been stripped of anything visually interesting and replaced with over-powered florescent lights, stainless steel paneling and very stark messages about how space is great. It was not even worth the effort.
Inside the tunnel, there used to be displays explaining very interesting and fascinating things such as the inner workings of a coal mine, the inside of a storm sewer and other underground phenomenon. This was all replaced with more stark, sterile space crap and this was only the beginning of how badly managed the Science Center has become. Once inside the main building, we found everything that once was, was no longer. The lightning machine was gone, replaced with tables and chairs for a refreshment stand. The first floor displays were gone, replaced with more tables and chairs. Sure there is a large Rube Goldberg type machine that fills the entire atrium, but that gets really boring after about two minutes. The animated dinosaurs that used to roar and come to life, were gone. Everything was gone. It was at that point that we decided to leave. This had been a complete waste of time. Everything good about the Science Center has been removed, obliterated and utterly forgotten. It's very sad that an attraction that was as fascinating as this once was, is now nothing more than corporate propaganda designed to tell us how great space is and why we should care. Well, I don't care and I'll never be back. I bet a great many other people in St. Louis feel the same way.
The St. Louis Science Center Sucks, Period!
Setting up the Motorola E815 & the Tungsten E2 part III
This guide is for setting up connections from a Tungsten E2 and a Motorola E815 Phone. This guide was created by Steven Levenhagen and I've published it here, with the author's permission, to help in the quest to pair the awesome E815 with the Palm Tungsten E2.
Internet Connection
Go to the phone settings menu
Preferences > Connection > Motorola Phone
From the connection menu, choose "Edit"
That should be all that's required.
The following section is only needed if you have not setup your dial-up account already
Go to the Bluetooth menu
Click Setup Devices Button
Click Phone Setup Button
Click Phone Setup Button
Click bottom button (dial-up or whatever name currently exists)
Click Next
Answer no to high speed service
Click next
Click next
Fill in your dial-up information. For those of you (should be everyone) who have free long distance, your dial-up number most likely won’t matter.
Click Done
Click Done
To start your internet,
- Make sure your phone has Bluetooth powered on
- Make sure your headset or any other Bluetooth device is off
- Click connect
(Editors note: Bear in mind that for Verizon subscribbers, you may or may not be able to connect to the Verizon data network. The firmware currently is the deciding factor. If you have the latest firmware (as of this posting date), the E815 does not support CHAP and therefore you will not be able to authenticate with Verizon. But you will still be able to connect to a regular dial up provider.)
Setting up the Motorola E815 & the Tungsten E2 part II
This guide is for setting up connections from a Tungsten E2 and a Motorola E815 Phone. This guide was created by
Steven Levenhagen and I've published it here, with the author's permission, to help in the quest to pair the awesome E815 with the Palm Tungsten E2.
The Dialer
Now that they're paired, you still need to get the dialer to work.
Go to the phone settings menu
Preferences > Connection > Motorola Phone
From the connection menu, choose "Edit”
Set model to "Standard GSM"
This will make a "details" button appear, click it.
Erase the init string contents and replace with +Mode=2
Set Speed to max speed (115,200 bps).
Click Ok.
When using the dialer to make a call, you may get the following screen:
Don’t worry, it works just fine as a dialer.
There are however a few conditions for your phone to dial however:
- Bluetooth power must be on
- You must have your phone flipped open
Now, on to the Internet...
Setting up the Motorola E815 & the Tungsten E2 part I
This guide is for setting up connections from a Tungsten E2 and a Motorola E815 Phone. This guide was created by Steven Levenhagen and I've published it here, with the author's permission, to help in the quest to pair the awesome E815 with the Palm Tungsten E2.
Initial Palm to Phone Setup
First, make sure you pair the devices:
Open BlueTooth On/Off Icon
Turn on BT
Click Prefs Button
Click Setup Devices Button
Click Phone Setup Button
Click first/top button on Phone Setup screen (not the dial-up button)
Click Next Button
Select Motorola from Manufacturer List
Select Other from Model List
WAIT BEFORE TAPPING NEXT!
Now, before you select a model, open your phone and do the following to make your e815 discoverable:
Menu--> Settings-->Connection-->Bluetooth-->Power On
Then, from the Bluetooth menu
Bluetooth-->Setup-->Find Me
You now have 60 seconds to find the phone. Click next on your T|E2 now.
Your phone should show up if "nearby devices" is selected in the "show" menu.
If phone is visible, click the ok button
Click Next
You'll be prompted to enter a passkey for your phone
create and enter a 4 digit key and click ok
Your phone should then prompt you to pair with your palm. Click yes, then enter the same key above using the phone's keypad and click the ok option on the phone.
This needs to be done quickly on your phone and the phone may not accept the key fast enough. If that happens, simply repeat the above steps again a second time. The only difference in the steps is that when the palm discovers the Motorola phone the second time, a gold key will appear. This is fine, just continue the process as described above. MAKE SURE YOU USE THE SAME PASSKEY the 2nd time.
Your devices should now be paired.
When prompted if you want to setup your device to connect to the internet and send email click "no". You can do that later.
Now, you need to make a choice or be willing to change your settings often.
If you want the dialer to work instead of internet, follow the directions for the dialer if it is more important to use the internet, follow these instructions.
Getting the Motorola E815 features re-enabled.
This is my story of how I finally got my Motorola E815 from Verizon set up the way I wanted instead of how Verizon thinks it should be. I'm not going to go into a great amount of detail since the resources I've provided, below, already do such a great job of documenting the processes. What I am going to do is outline what I did and how I was able to get it to finally work, from a layman's point of view for those that are brand new to phone hacking.
I got the E815 in March when I updated my calling plan to add my fiancé. I previously carried an LG6100 and I absolutely hated it. In fact, I was going to smash it with a sledge hammer and capture it on video to share with the world. Kind of like my own "office space" machine killing frenzy. Anyway, I knew nothing about the E815 phone and my only concern was that it had good speakerphone and bluetooth capabilities. After receiving the phone and doing some playing around in the menus, I decided that I really liked my new phone but I knew that Verizon had locked out many of the cool features and I made it my mission to unlock as many of them as I could. The two features that
were disabled which I really wanted was the ability to move pictures and ringtones between my phone and my pc without using the stupid pix place service at .25¢ a pop or "Get It Now" and pay through the nose for something I can do myself. The other was to delete all of the stupid, moronic, idiotic photos that come pre-installed on the phone. Neither Verizon nor Motorola provide a means for accomplishing this and I loathed looking at these stupid images every time I went into the photo gallery.
So I started my quest on Howard Forums. I had find a great deal of useful information on this forum for working with my previous phone. The Howard Forums are a wealth of information, but be forewarned, because the site is so huge and the info-mine so extensive, that sometimes, finding what your searching for, can be like finding a needle in a haystack. From there, I followed a link over to Mark_Venture's V710/E815 Info page which was incredibly helpful. Lastly, I ended up at the Nuclear Elephant's V710 info page and E815 seem edit page which had some great tidbits as well.
Between all of these resources, and posting some questions on Howard Forums, I was able to glean enough information so that I was able to accomplish my goals. Of course, this meant I had to buy some software, download more software and buy a USB data cable. I purchased the USB data cable from a seller on ebay. I bought the Mobile Phone Tools software from BVRP Software. I found and downloaded the Motorola PST after doing some searching and coming up with a link to a Russian
bit torrent site and downloading the .rar compressed software.
My first step was to get the phone connected to the pc with the USB data cable and install the correct drivers as outlined on Mark Venture's pages. This was simple and painless. Next, I installed bitpim. Not wanting to use 'beta' software, I installed the released version, only to find out that it will not communicate with this phone in any way. So then I went back, after un-installing bitpim, and downloaded the current beta release. I was able to see the phone but I was unable to connect and view the file system. Eventually, the software just bombed out and I had to control-alt-delete and
kill the process. After reading Mark's info, I decided to look for the 7.3.1 copy and by changing the url at sourceforge, I was able to download it.
After I uninstalled 8.something, I installed 7.3.1 and I was able to view my file system without a lot of problems. I found the preinstalled photos under Motorola -> Shared -> Picture -> (name of image file). Showing no mercy, I deleted all of them. Hot damn! The stupid images are finally history. I tried to delete some of the installed ring tones, but was unable to do so. BitPim would throw up an error when I tried to do so and since I don't care about the tones that much, I just moved on to my next objective.
I fired up the Motorola PST software and pointed the new hardware wizard to the driver folder created by the drivertool.exe program. It loaded all of the drivers and I was in. Now I fired
up P2K Seem for V710 and set the bytes to 90 and pulled up seem 2742. Before starting any edits, I copied the original seem to a file on my computer just in case I screwed something up. Now, With P2K Seem, I was able to quickly and easily edit the seem. I changed the bit to enable OBEX so that the Multimedia Studio portion of MPT would be useable (hex 6A) and I enabled the Transflash Copy/Move Options. (hex 75). For a highly detailed step by step for this process, Mark's E845 Seem Edit page is a great resource.
Now that I had the seem edited, I powered down the phone for over 20 seconds and powered it back up. I tested the phone with my pda and my headset to make sure that those were still working properly, which they were. Now I fired up the Mobile Phone Tools after editing the detect.inf file to change the driver for the E815 to be E815M. "M" being the designation for the multimedia studio functionality. Be sure and connect through bluetooth and not the USB cable in order for this to work. The software should bring up the phone image with a clickable icon for the multimedia studio. Click
on this icon and you will be able to move ringers, mp3's and images to/from the phone and pc. Life is great.
I then created my own graphic for the wallpaper and copied it to the phone. No more crappy images! No extortion payments to Verizon! This is way it should be. Good luck with your quest and happy modding.
Reference Material:
These are the threads at Howard Forums to which I have subscribed in order to gain a better understanding of how all this fits together.
E815 Quick start guide to hacking & PC configuration Updated 7.17.05 (Final Revision)
help with transfering mp3s & pics to e815
I cant delete the stock photos on my E815
FULLY ENABELED and TESTED 2742 SEEM...
Who am I?
After reading this well written blog, I find myself questioning who I really am (politically speaking) There are so many of these things with which I agree. But I have a very hard time even fathoming that I could in any way be even remotely aligned with 'democrats'. And that's because there are so many flaming liberals that are so off the deep end that I would be embarrassed to be even remotely associated with them. So now I don't really know how to define myself. There really is not a party that espouses all of my beliefs, but there are a great many from each party that I firmly share. So who am I? I don't really know, but I certainly intend to find out.
