How to export contacts from dead phone with no screen

My PDa phone died the other day - well, the screen at least. The phone can still talk to the PC but i couldn't for the life of me extract the contacts from the phone to Outlook.

Still i found a nice solution. You need the pim.vol file from the phone and Perl installed.
Plonk the pim.vol file in c:\perlscripts and grab Sasha's script from here from which you'll have parse_pim.pl in the same directory.

If like me you're on WinXP, do start run cmd.exe and cd c:\perlscripts. Once there type parse_pim.pl pim.vol and the script will extract all the phone details.

Passing references to variables between forms in c#

Somedays i forget everything i've learnt. Being a VB programmer in the past has instilled some bad habits on how to think about forms, their controls, methods or properties when in C#.

Luckily ahmedilyas has posted a lovely little tutorial here. Ok, perhaps we shouldn't be referencing a form with another form. If doing everything by the book you should be building some data classes external to both forms and allow them to access the data through those. But today i catch myself modifying someone else's code and the oppotunity isn't there to completely rework the class definitions.

Streaming uk football through xbmc

Perhaps i'm late on the scene on this but it's a nice trick.

Ok, how to get uk football streamed to your xbox. You need sopcast installed and running on a pc on your home network. You need a file on your xbox in a location where xbmc will see it. The file is a text file - i've named mine sopcast.m3u. Contents of the file are;

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:- 1,http://:8902/tv.asf
http://:8902/tv.asf

Edit it for your pc's ip address obviously and if you're using a recent copy of sopcast the port should be correct. Older sopcast versions use 8900.

On the pc, find a stream to watch. For UK football you should be able to find a sopcast stream from;
http://www1.myp2p.eu/competition.php?competitionid=&part=sports&discipline=football or http://www.engfootball.com/

Once it's running on the PC, switch over to your xbox. Load up xbmc (you have got it installed as the dashboard right?) and add a source which points to the folder containing the m3u file. Click the sopcast.m3u and you're away.

Getting out of BT Broadband

It can be done! BT have provided a trickle of a service since i started with them six months ago. A letter of complaint followed by two months of line testing. At the end, one guy on technical support ran a different test from normal and determined the line was capped after all. No compensation followed by further real poor speeds and i complained once more - they helpfully gave in and released the MAC code. Straight back to BeThere via Quidco and i earnt myself forty quid in the process. 24Mbps, static line and no limit all for £18 a month inc. vat. Can't complain and happy to be back.

Where to put pspvice on your psp

I'm running 3.90 M33-2. Make sure you have the 1.50 addition. PspVice goes in psp/game150. I use stylemo's excellent guide to upgrading.

now for a bit of C64 Kickstart pleasure

Flickr photos now in planetnomad

Flickr photos are now arriving in planetnomad.com. There's still some style settings to correct in regards to their size in the gmap marker htmlwindows but i'll fix that any day now. It's surprising how many photos are loaded onto Flickr without decent names or descriptions but nevermind, that's what ppl do.

Just like any other feed, e.g. Reuters News Service or Road Traffic News, users can set up to receive emails on new objects as they arrive in a certain area.

Generating HTML emails using c#.net

This missed me for days. My code was generating html which i placed into the body of an email. Problem was that the html was appearing as, well, html rather as text even though i had set the content-type as text/html. Found out this weekend that i was missing a single line of code;

MailMessage.isBodyHTML = true;

fixed.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.mail.mailmessage.isbodyhtml.aspx