The key points I would like to write about is the lack of features that these cars have: navigation, key-less locking, heated windshield, automatic windshield wippers and automatic lights. You really miss things if you’ve had the luxuries for the last 2.5 years.

During the time-frame that I was driving the Polo, I had an assignment to visit a new customer. I instantly thought this is the perfect opportunity to try the navigation on my cell phone (Nokia E66) – It was working really well! The Nokia navigation software works out of the box and even tells you where to go. Of course a problem arose: after using the navigation software for 20 minutes my cell phone was out of battery

Wise Note: If you decide to use the navigation software on your cell phone be sure to plug it in to the power supply…

Due to setting up D’s E71 I had a deep knowledge how to use and customize an S60 phone (like E71 and E66) and up until today there was constantly one thing bugging me: the phone started blinking when the display went into standby – why??? Not only does that waste power but it is also hard to identify if I have missed calls or text messages…

So I googled a solution for that:

1. @ Menu > Tools > Profiles select a profile and select “personalize”
2. Go to “Breathing light” and set it to off
3. press the navigation key to the right to set it off for all other profiles

After that your phone only blinks if you have a missed call or a text message.

But what is this feature made for? I assume that if you want to distinguish between two profiles (like default and silent) you can activate this feature in the silence profile, so that you can easily see that your phone is set to be silent…?

You might think that’s no big deal, but it really is – try to search on google without the ability to go back to the search results by pressing the backspace key…

…so I’ve searched for a solution and found it pretty fast:

1. Go to ‘about:config‘ in Firefox
2. change the value ‘browser.backspace_action’ to ’0′

So, this little bug in the default configuration of the Firefox browser on ubuntu cost me 5 minutes…
…If you would count all the minutes from all users that are trying/using Firefox it would be a really big amount of wasted time

First I tried different DVDs, then I tried them on a Windows Laptop to doublecheck – it was always the same, on the Windows Laptop the movies started playing on my brand new Ubuntu installation it didn’t. So I started asking Google, which told me to go to https://help.ubuntu.com/9.10/index.html which is one the most clean websites I’ve ever seen. There it is written down in the first sentence:

In order to play DVDs you must install some additional software. Unfortunately, DVD support cannot be provided by default in Ubuntu due to legal restrictions in some countries.

OK, legal restrictions are stealing my time…
…but after installing everything that is needed (by just clicking on the links on that help-website) the first DVD (a german movie called “Sonnenallee”) started playing instantly after inserting. But now I wanted to watch an episode of “Frasier” from one of D’s DVDs – It didn’t worked *grrrr*

After banging my head against our brand new 24′ TFT monitor I’ve decided to rethink the situation – Heureka! Once upon a time I’ve heard something about region settings in DVD players…
…so Google this time told me to go to http://blog.moybella.net/2007/03/25/setting-the-region-of-you-dvd-in-ubuntu/ which is not as clean as Ubuntus help website but did give me the answer to my question (How to change the regional setting of the dvd-drive in my brand new Ubuntu system?). So, after installing a little command line application, starting it and setting the DVD region to 1, I’ve started enjoying watching an episode of Frasier

In wikipedia you can read the following regarding the idea of DVD regions:

DVD region codes are a DRM technique designed to allow motion picture studios to control aspects of a release, including content, release date, and price, according to the region. DVD video discs may be encoded with a region code restricting the area of the world in which they can be played.

After 5 minutes of trying every USB port and every order of plugging-in, start-the-program and install-the-software we took a look at the support-website, which reads:

*Only CardScan version 8 software is Microsoft Vista Compatible. Note: CardScan Personal is currently not compatible with 64-bit Windows systems.

So there wasn’t a chance to use this little card scanner on our computer…