Connecting a Lumia 920 or other WP8 device to a Mac/Linux/iPad

So the folks over at Nokia Connects have sent me Lumia 920 to have a play with. This isn’t a review, that’s not what I do here (it’s a good phone though, I’m liking it). If you’re interested in my opinions, follow me on twitter @the_accidental. Anyhow, I head @whatleydude ranting on The Voicemail (go subscribe – it’s full of ace) about the problems getting media off the 920 to a Mac.  There’s the official Windows Phone app of course, which kinda works, but isn’t that great. But you have other options too, some of which will work on Linux too. Be sure to read till the end, I just sussed out how to mount the 920 as a drive on my mac…

Full Screen Nokia Maps on iOS

So Nokia Maps is a pretty good web app on iOS, but wouldn’t it be better if it was full screen and didn’t take up a tab in Safari, and appeared in the multi-tasking menu properly? Like this:

p-p-p-pop up a Pureview?

A rare blog from me, of thoughts not actions.

Pureview in Puremotion from the eye? (this was a N8)

So, today Nokia announced the Lumia 920, with Pureview, and Puremotion. Also, @Whatleydude was talking about pop-up shops, and lumias:

Dear @nokia. FREE IDEA: Please setup some kind of POP-UP STORE in London to celebrate the launch of the Lumia 920. I WILL BE THERE.

— James Whatley (@Whatleydude) September 5, 2012

So, I thought this was a great idea (partly for awful pun potential…). And obviously set it up somewhere with a good view…a pureview maybe… and in (pure)motion too….;-) Pop-up shop on the London eye anyone?

Get a 3G hotspot in a pod, imagine queuing up to buy one, when you pay you get on the eye, given your phone, setup by the top of the eye, ready to take and share your new pureview pics…bet the night skyline shots would come up good.

Of course, would I queue up to buy a 920? Hmmm, tricky. I’ve been thinking of (finally) getting an iPhone, but I like WP7 and love the promise of WP8…just need to see if it delivers for me. But then it’s almost certainly gonna be cheaper than an iPhone, and wireless charging is one of those little things that makes things better everyday…hmmm.

Right, enough thoughts for now, not really the theme of the blog. But I’ve been thinking about starting something, somewhere, for my thoughts…. (that’s quite meta- a thought about blogs about thoughts in a blog not about thoughts).

Rygel not working on Ubuntu?

Trying to setup Rygel and finding it seems to start ok, but you can’t see it from any device, not even upnp-inspector on the same machine?

If it’s the same issue I had note that:

• Although /etc/rygel.conf probably exists, it’s overridden by ~/.config/rygel.conf
• It may be starting on lo rather than eth0 (or whatever is appropriate).

The key point about that first point is that although my /etc conf file was correct, the user one had upnp set to false, d’oh!

Force WP7 update on a mac

So I read this post  on using Zune to force-update a lumia over on The Nokia Blog, and wondered if I could do the same with my mac. I couldn’t replicate the trick with windows phone connector, but I *could* detect the update was there by using Zune on a Win7 virtual box install. Once it was detected I shut down the VM and fired up WPC again – this then let me install the update. I tried it this way as I didn’t want to risk a FW update from within a VM in case of issues.

Surprising that the “update available” flag seemed to be set on-device, not in the software though.

Lumia How-to: Bookmarklets

This is hopefully the first in a series of posts, getting back to the sprit of why I originally created this blog: instructions on how to do things a little out the ordinary with tech, written down here primarily for my reference but so they’re also available for all. Although the title is “Lumia” how-to, I guess this could also apply to WP7 in general. Hopefully you’ll find them useful, if there’s a subject you’d like me to cover then fire away in the comments.

Today, bookmarklets.

New Nokia Lumia (or other windows phone) won’t software update?

So, got your new WP7 phone/Lumia, you want it up to date. So you plug it in, fire up windows phone connector and check for updates.

But you get error 80072fa8 – bad times!

Turns out the *phone* needs a net connection. I setup my 3G APN, re-tried and it worked fine.

WindowsPhone/Lumia Not connecting to your mac?

…and just getting unhelpful suggestions from WP Connector to reboot the phone?

• Close windows phone connector.
• Plug in the phone.
• Restart connector.

Obvious, but might save some faff.

Nokia Lumia 800 and O2 PAYG

So I’ve just got a Nokia Lumia 800 for trial from Nokia Connects, and they’ve kindly included an O2 microsim to get me up and running…nearly.

For some reason it doesn’t detect the APN settings correctly. So to get mobile data working, you need to do the following:

1. Go to settings, mobile network.
2. Scroll down, “Add APN”
3. The details you want are:

• APN: payandgo.o2.co.uk
• Username: payandgo
• password: password

And you’re good to go!

Bonus pro-tip for you: Dial *#10# to check your balance.

Bonus pro-tip2: Contract settings:

• wap.o2.co.uk
• o2wap
• password

HOWTO: Import photos from a Galaxy S2 into Aperture

So, I’ve been noticing some odd behaviour trying to import from my SGS2 into Apple’s Aperture. Basically, if you connect the phone in mass storage mode (either via settings/wireless/usb utilities, or the notification bar if you have debug mode on) then let aperture launch, or open the import menu, you can’t import from the phone. The solution is to do things in this order:

1. Get to the “USB Connected” green android screen – you know the one I mean. DON’T HIT CONNECT!
2. Start Aperture, hit import to get to the import mode.
3. NOW hit connect on the phone.
4. In the bottom of the import window on aperture, the SGS2 will appear in the file system view. There you can browse to SGS2/DCIM/Camera and import your photos/video as normal.

For some reason the SGS2 doesn’t appear as a device in the main import selector top left. And for some reason it won’t appear in the file browser pane at the bottom, unless it’s connected AFTER you get to this view.

I don’t know if this is Samsung’s bug, or Apple’s – someone needs to sort it out!

How to Upload Photos from an N8 to a iPad, Wirelessly

OK, so I promised a new blog post on twitter, to make up for the O2 based ranting last week, so here it is :-)

I’ve posted before about connecting with the camera connection kit, but what if you don’t have one? You can still get your files from the N8 to the iPad over wifi.

New Lapsed Beta!

UPDATE: The beta expired at the end of the month, and the new Qt4.7.3/QtM1.1.2 completely breaks Lapsed. So there won’t be a new version up till I have time to redo the camera code. It seems Nokia don’t like to make things easy…

So Nokia have released the Qt 1.1 SDK beta, complete with amongst other things, Qt 4.7.2 and Mobility 1.1.1. This is great news, as they fix a bunch of the bugs I was hitting in earlier versions.

So here’s a new beta of Lapsed for you all to try! You’ll need Qt 4.7.2/Mobility 1.1. If you can’t work out how to get that installed, beta software’s probably not for you. As usual, try this software at your own risk. The beta will stop working at the end of the month – I hope to get this into Ovi soon…

If you try the beta, please do one thing for me: Post a short comment letting me know if it worked ok and what device you’re using. I want to know about it working right and any bugs. If you can describe how to reproduce the bugs all the better!

iMovie doesn’t find iPhoto videos?

In my case it was because I keep the iPhoto library on a different drive, and symlink it to ~/pictures. iMovie for some reason doesn’t get on with this. Launch iPhoto with alt held down, select the iPhoto library directly (not the linked version), let it start then quit. iMovie will now live happily ever after…

Other issues with iMovie not finding the videos would appear to boil down to the same problem, perhaps with a different cause.

PUSH Snowboarding Ideas

So, Nokia and Burton have some cool stuff going on with PUSH Snowboarding. The basic idea is to take a pile of sensors, put them on the board/rider, connect wirelessly to a Nokia to log the data, and Do Cool Things. And they’re not just doing them themselves, everyone can join in the fun! They’ve open sourced all the code, and published all their test data.

Connecting an iPad to an N8

So you’ve shot a load of great photos and video on your Nokia N8, and you want to show them off, edit them on a big screen etc. Ideally you want to transfer them to your iPad so you can do this on the go. Well, here’s how:

N8 connected to iPad with Camera Connection kit