Friday, May 16, 2008

Adding ringtones to a VX9100 (lg enV2)

Verizon, true to its style of nickel and diming its customers for everything, doesn't allow you to set music you transfer to your phone as a ringtone. So you have two choices - 1) buy songs from verizon's music store 2) get a third party to convert the clip into a (very) low quality, proprietary QCP file, for which priviledge you pay a couple of bucks per ringtone.

I opted for the latter option, but found the quality of the QCP file to be horrible. After a little haggling with the tech support folks at this third party, however, they told me the big secret: Just send an email to your-number@vzwpix.com - what's in the text doesn't much matter, just attach an audio file your phone can play (mp3 or wav works fine on the VX9100) and send it. Include a leading 1 and the area code in your phone number, or else the email will bounce. I'm guessing this works with a bunch of other verizon phones - just beware you'll have to pay for data (hey, that gives me a great idea for a distributed denial of cash attack...)

I had actually tried this, but I sent my message to vtext.com instead, which didn't work - d'oh, that could've saved me a few bucks. It strikes me that, given this one bit of information from this company, I could go into business competing with them - all I lack is a program that can generate QCP files (for other phones) and a few other esoteric formats.

Here are the details for the curious (steps 1 and 2 are just how I clip an audio file and save it as a mp3 - you can use whatever other software you like):
1 - use audacity or the like to trim the file, export as wav
2 - lame foo.wav -h -V 0 ringtone.mp3
3 - send an email to your-number@vzwpix.com, attach ringtone.mp3
4 - on receipt of message, click options -> save as ringtone


Thursday, May 15, 2008

Die, old phone, die!

The contract finally expired on my motorola v32x. When I was in the store selecting a replacement, I asked them if they could recycle my old phone. They said yes. I asked them if they could recycle it if it wasn't all in one piece. Again, yes. I asked them if I could smash it in the store. They said no. Ah well... I was able, however, to rip the flimsy piece of shite in half before giving it back.

Friday, May 9, 2008

Stop it, stop it, stop it.

Just because two or more bad things happened at once does not mean it was a perfect storm. Stop saying it. That goes for all of you.

Friday, May 2, 2008

all i have today is a link...

U.S. gas: So cheap it hurts Western Europe pays about twice what USians pay ... still think that gas tax holiday is a good idea?