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I received an unusual text message this morning from the Portuguese Government.

Swine Flu Text Message

Roughly translated it says;

“Autumn officially begins today, and thus Swine Flu will probably return, and most of you will die. If you begin to feel unwell, please file your tax return immediately. “

No, actually it says;

“With symptoms of flu, please stay in your house and telephone 808242424 or contact your doctor. Strengthen your hygiene measures. Avoid infecting others. Consult www.dgs.pt”.

The tax return part probably comes later.

Nokia have just opened up the beta of their Mail on Ovi service to everyone. Previously only available on Nokia mobile devices, this now adds a full web interface.

Mail is the latest service to be offered by Nokia’s Ovi suite of online and mobile applications, all of which work seamlessly between Nokia high-end devices and Ovi on the web.

I use all of the services almost constantly and, if you can ignore the odd beta glitch at this stage, they range from being extremely useful (‘Contacts’, ‘Sync’ and ‘Calender’), to incredibly flexible (‘Share’ – unlimited media storage with highly effective, finely grained sharing options), to being so well done that it is downright spooky (the ‘Maps’ cellphone application if you add the – not free – ‘Drive and Walk’ voice-guided satnav. You have to use it to believe it as it’s mostly so accurate that it is genuinely eerie).

Generally I am not a fan of handing out free publicity to big companies on this blog, or any other blog, but I am quite happy to publicise Ovi.

Great services, and they only just got started.

The Ovi service faqs are here and they are worth looking at.

All Ovi services, by the way, other than ‘Files’ on the web and the ‘Drive and Walk’ add-ons for ‘Maps’ on mobile devices, are free.

I just hope that they do not go on to somehow screw all of this goodness up.

Alrighty, here are the manual settings for getting Gizmo5 VoIP to work on a Nokia N95.

Note that I eventually used my Gizmo5 sip number (you can find it on your Gizmo5 account page) as my username in the required fields, instead of my actual username (which did not work).

In Tools -> Settings -> Connection -> SIP settings create the following profile:

Profile Name: sipphone
Service Profile: IETF
Default Access point: [your WLAN AP name]
Public user name: sip:1747xxxxxxx@proxy01.sipphone.com
Use Compression: No
Registration: “When needed”
Use Security: No

Proxy Server: sip:proxy01.sipphone.com
Realm: proxy01.sipphone.com
User Name: 1747xxxxxxx
Password: [You SIPPhone password]
Allow loose routing: Yes
Transport Type: Auto Port: 5060

Registrar Server: sip:proxy01.sipphone.com
Realm: proxy01.sipphone.com
User Name: 1747xxxxxxx
Password: [Your SIPPhone password]
Transport Type: Auto
Port: 5060

Registration: “Always on” and “When needed” is the switch to turn on and off SIP registration.

In Tools -> Settings -> Connection -> Internet Tel. Settings create a new profile for “sipphone”(1747xxxxxxx), name it “sipphone”.

Restart the phone!

At this point you might want to change registration to “Always on” in “SIP settings”.

The phone should now start to get a WLAN association, with a WLAN icon on the top right of your screen indicating success. Then it will take a little while to register to sipphone.com, after which a small internet call icon will appear next to the WLAN icon.

Voila!

This information should be useful to plenty of people judging by the amount of requests for it out there on the interwebs.

Sapo VoIP on a Nokia N95. The definitive guide.

Have your phone ready? Got your WiFi router set up and already working for normal net access? Here we go:

1. Go to your user page on the Sapo portal and make sure that you have enabled VoIP, chosen a number and entered a password for it.
2. Get your phone and go to Tools -> Settings -> Connection -> Sip Settings.
3. Press ‘Options’ (bottom left soft key) and select ‘New Sip Profile’.
4. Enter these values on the first screen:

Profile name: Sapo
Service profile: IETF
Default access point: the name your wireless router broadcasts
Public user name: +35130xxxxxxx@voip.sapo.pt
Use compression: No
Registration: When needed
Use security: No

5. Press ‘Back’.

6. Click on the ‘Proxy server’ field, a new screen will appear.

7. Enter these values:

Proxy server address: proxy.voip.sapo.pt
Realm: proxy.voip.sapo.pt
User name: +35130xxxxxxx
Password: enter the password you chose on the Sapo website. This is case sensitive.

Allow loose routing: Yes
Transport type: UDP
Port: 5070

8. Press ‘Back’.

9. Click on ‘Registrar server’, another new screen will appear.

10. Enter these values:

Registrar server address: voip.sapo.pt
Realm: voip.sapo.pt
User name: +35130xxxxxxx
Password: your chosen password. Case sensitive.
Transport type: UDP
Port: 5060

11. Press ‘Back’.

12. Press back again, and again until you get back to the ‘Connections’ screen.

13. Scroll down one place and select ‘Internet tel.’.

14. Click ‘Options’ and then select ‘New profile’.

15. Select your number as just entered on the Sip configurations above.

16. Change the name from ‘Default’ to ‘Sapo’. Click ‘Back’.

17. *Important*: Restart/reboot your phone.

18. Try to make an internet call.

19. Wait a few seconds for the service to register.

20. Hopefully, you are now able to make and receive high quality VoIP calls via Sapo.

If you have any problems at this point, first go back over the above configuration screens and check every setting, especially watch out for where you should have written ‘proxy’ and where not. Also double check the port numbers – note that they are different for the proxy server and the registrar server.

Still have problems? Leave a comment below.

[This post is also archived as a wiki article here]

I have just put some new images up into my Lifeblog Images Section. Not usually of much general interest other than to me and to those following my Lifeblog Project, this time they might also be of some interest to those of you who were curious as to the true quality of the much-talked-about camera in the Nokia N95. Hyped, or not? See for yourself.

Here are the images;

First test shot, straight out of the box.
My Labrador/Ridgeback puppy, Juno.

The result of the first rain shower this Autumn here in the Algarve yesterday.
A really interesting and exciting photo of my boots.
An image made this afternoon of a bud on a plant in my courtyard that I have forgotten the name of.
And, finally, my lunch today of scrambled eggs and Tabasco.

For those of you who are indeed more interested in the technical photographic side of things than my lunch; all images were shot with the phone set to the full 5mp resolution. All on auto exposure, auto focus (wait for it to beep and confirm that it has actually found and locked focus – hold the shutter release half way down, then wait for the beep and the screen target bars to turn green before pressing the button all the way – or it will bite you and go ahead without focus), and auto everything else that could be switched onto auto, basically. The only slight exception was the image of the bud on the plant, which was shot using ‘close up’ mode, although other than the mode everything else on that shot was set to auto, too.

None of those images are now as they originally were straight off the phone. All have had some degree of lightness, contrast, colour and sharpness adjustments made afterwards. The negative side to that is that you need to do post-capture image manipulation at all, but such is life with digital. The positive aspects are that surprisingly little adjustment is required with the N95 imaging, and that the phone’s images do have plenty of information captured within them to adjust with.

Overall, considering that this is a phone that we are talking about here, I’m more than happy with the level of quality that it can generally achieve with reasonable lighting. I wouldn’t want to throw away my Nikons and try to make my living with it, but then that is not what it was designed for anyway.