Tim Menteles Website » How-To

Trouble pairing a Blackberry Pearl with Motorola HS850 Headset

tim — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 07:04:23 +0000

Recently I finally got out and replaced that piece of junk RAZR that’s been a pain in my ass for the past 6 months (that’s another story). Anyway, I replaced it with a Blackberry Pearl. I was a little hesitant to pick up a Blackberry, but my new job (another story for later) urged me to get one.

Long story short, I decided to pair my Motorola HS850 bluetooth headset with my Pearl and I ran into problems — Read on to see how I fixed it.

The basic instructions to connect your HS850 with any phone are this:

With the boom closed, press the ‘receive call’ button on the headset — hold it for 5-10 second until the blue light stays on
On your phone, attempt to connect to any new bluetooth devices

Normally, that’s all that’s involved however for some reason, my Pearl would never connect! So, after searching thru a number of message boards, I figured out the solution. Basically, during step 1, when the blue light turns on, flip open the boom and the light will stay on for a longer period of time. This will then allow the connection to occur.

Simple, yes, but it wasn’t perfectly clear.

Hopefully, someone finds this and it saves you from having to search for an hour like I did!

Losing Weight with the Wii

tim — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 18:52:09 +0000

Maybe this is one way I can convince Anna that I need a Wii!? This guy decided that he’s going to track his physical progress after playing 30 minutes of Wii Sports (which I hear is really fun) daily for six weeks.

“OK, so I was thinking one day after I played a good 1/2 hour of Wii Sports that I was getting a pretty heavy duty cardio workout. I decided to try out an experiment, where I would do everything I normally did, eat everything I normally ate and see if anything changes after playing 30 minutes of Wii Sports everyday for 6 weeks. If I miss a day, I’ll make a note of it and that weeks report.”

He will finish up on January 15th, so be sure to check back there for his progress…I know I will…

Here’s the link

Hack Your Brain with an iPod

tim-digg — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 05:40:58 +0000

By stimulating your brain with binaural frequencies, you can simulate the effects of coffee and sleep among others (including a dentist’s drill). For the best listening experience record it and drop it onto your Ipod.

HOW TO – Make a 12 foot GPS wall clock

tim-digg — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 20:19:41 +0000

I’m smelling one of my next projects here!

So here is the little project that grew to 12 feet. We added a GPS receiver so now we have a 12′ clock that sets itself, displays hours/minutes/seconds, and is accurate to 100ns. Beat that bed side alarm!

How To Create RFID Access for Your Front Door!

tim-digg — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 20:23:44 +0000

Here’s an awesome detailed “how-to” on creating RFID access for your front door!

Tips for Cleaning Your Hockey Gear

tim — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 12:39:59 +0000

With the hockey season being over, it’s time to clean out the bag and wash up the gear. This year, I decided to do some research and see what I can do to get my gear a little more clean than in the past. In past years, I’ve used Febreeze and just sprayed the hell out of the gear and then let it dry — that usually works pretty well, but my gear continued to look grubby and it still smelled after a while. So, in my extensive research, I found a few websites that suggested that you could just throw the majority of your gear in the washing machine. I thought that sounded weird, but my gear is so old, what could it hurt?

So, I grab my elbow pads and shin pads and in the washing machine they go! The result: my shin pads haven’t been cleaner! So, here’s my tips for cleaning YOUR gear this year:

Throw softer gear (basically anything but your helmet or skates) in a front-loading or commercial washing machine

I put ours on a slower spin, that seemed to keep them from banging around too horribly

The website I read suggested putting in 1 cup of soap and 1 cup of ammonia (I just used the soap, but that worked pretty well)
Always use cold water
For harder gear (skates and helmet) I just used Febreeze, but the website suggests putting them in a bath tub and scrubbing with a toilet brush (a new one, please!). Someday I may try that with my helmet, but my skates are too expensive to try that!
After all this gear is washed up, throw it in front of a fan. Leave it there for a couple days. Some of those pads will suck up the water, so it’s necessary to let it dry for a couple days before putting away for the season

That’s all I guess. As I think of things, I’ll add more points. Happy Cleaning!

My favorite Firefox Extensions

tim — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 02:53:51 +0000

So, as the “Firefox Guru” around the office, I’m often asked to show off my favorite Firefox Extensions. So, I’m sent scrambling for my laptop to open up Firefox and find which extensions I have installed. So, instead of that method, I’ve decided to blog my favorites. I will try to keep this list updated as I find new favorites.

All-In-One Gestures – Allows you to browse by using only your mouse (open tabs, go back and forth, etc)
AdBlock Plus and the Filterset.G Updater – Automatically blocks ads — I rarely see ads any more on any site — and when I do, I block them!
DownTHEMall! – will let you download all of any type of file on a page — handy for grabbing pictures or movies or whatever else you may want to grab in bulk
Google Preview – Adds a thumbnail to google searches. Handy for when you know what a page looked like, but not the URL
ColorZilla – Eyedropper that allows you to choose colors from another website
MeasureIt – Measures elements on a page
IETab – Allows you to open those pesky IE-Only pages within an embedded version of Internet Explorer inside one of your tabs
Nightly Tester Tools – With this, you can install older extensions among other things — It comes in handy when you use firefox betas
ForecastFox Enhanced – Shows the forecast and a nice map with the current weather — great when it gets closer to the weekend and you want to know how nice it’s going to be!
Greased Lightbox – This is not an extension per se, but it’s a Greasemonkey script that completely rocks! It allows you to open image links in a preview window so you don’t have to actually navigate away from a page to see an image.
Customize Google – This allows you to customize the output and functionality of google. I like it because I can force gmail and gcalendar to use https — secure is better! It has many more features than that however, so check it out.

Those are many of my favorite extensions.