Random stuff always seems to happen in a non-random fashion. When you're hanging low, for instance, more bad things seem to happen to you. I suppose that's partly the case with me, currently: I'm currently out of a job so money is an issue (not currently that much of an issue but it's there) hence my perspective is tainted by that. Which brings us to the event: the battery in my Dell m1330 just died on me, from one day to the next. No degrading or anything first, to give me a warning, it just up'ed and died. And how do I know? The incessantly blinking light on the front panel, the fact that the bios suddenly tells me that, although the battery is 100% charged, there's just no communicating with the battery (great assumption there).
So, what's a guy to do? Check dell.com of course! You wouldn't want one of those non-dell batteries, now would you? Well, seeing as Dell is selling it's batteries at about 800 kr. a piece (for the 6 cell variant) I'd MUCH rather take my money elsewhere (and no, I also do not EVER buy original printer toner cartridges - I'm not bending over for these companies). So, what's a guy to do? Ebay! Turns out that a lot of sellers in Hong Kong (!) will ship a battery to Denmark ... for just about \$50. And that's including shipping. And we're talking the 9-cell battery.
Am I worried about the battery I'll get? Sure, to a degree. However, given the lifetime of the Dell battery I had, I would be just as worried about buying a new one from dell. And on Ebay, I have the possibility to check feedback from buyers whereas with Dell there's no way of knowing (other than googling) how many bad customer experiences there are.
So, that's the bad. The good was a repeat of a hacking experience I had a while ago. Specifically, hacking my Nokia N73. Hacking might be overstating it, seeing as I just applied a third party tool on the phone, then updated it's firmware. Nonetheless, it did give me great pleasure to be able to switch the firmware on the phone from the basic European I had set it to a while ago (to get rid of T-Mobile's ridiculous advertising on my phone) to a Scandinavian firmware that includes a Danish dictionary.
The basic steps included in the process (that runs on Windows, unfortunately):
- Find, download and unzip the Nemesis Service Suite (should be here).
- Find, download and install the Nokia Software Updater (should be here). Then reboot (seriously Nokia, why??)
- Make sure Windows sees your phone.
- Backup stuff on your phone
- Scan for devices with Nemesis Service Suite.
- Select your device, read the values from it, click enable on the product code, then change it to what you want (here's a list of product codes for the N73).
- Write the value to your phone with Nemesis.
- Enjoy your new firmware and sticking it to Nokia (no, they don't like it when you change the firmware without asking them).