Treo 650 dialling from calendar

I have a lot of phone numbers attached to calendar entries, in the notes field. They're usually for conference calls and the like.

On my old Treo 600, I could simply cut the numbers, then paste them into the phone app, then dial. Easy, if a little awkward.

My Orange Treo 650 has a special 'homepage' application that acts as the default app when you press the green phone button. This app links to other apps, including dial pad. And worst of all, it doesn't let you paste numbers onto it; you must do that from the dial pad. And to get to dial pad, you need to navigate to it (about 4 key presses).

FieldPlus (just google for it) is a great, free application that solves this. Install it, and it'll add a new Preferences item for FieldPlus. Open that, and there's a pull down to select specific functionality. The important one is 'Center Action', choose "centre button does = 'single action'" and "single action = 'use selection'". Done.

Now, to dial from calendar, highlight the number (a double click), press shift, then press centre button. Treo dials the number. Lovely.

This also works in other apps, the prefs allow you to prevent this behaviour as you wish. FieldPlus also lets you do clever things with text selection, but i've never had problems with that, so don't use it.

One annoyance - in the call log, instead of the number being shown, it just says "Dial Number". Not such a great hassle compared to the hassle it saves.

Easy, Free DVD backup on Mac

There's lots of articles and howtos on the best way to backup DVDs. Half of them look too complicated, and the other half involve buying something, usually expensive.

My solution is free software - 'free' as in 'please contribute'. I think the first tool I use - DVDBackup - has already suffered because of lack of donations...

My requirement is to save the movie onto disk, using my Mac. Since my kids regularly demolish CDs, DVDs and other relatively fragile media, and I don't have a DVD burner, I prefer to save it as a file. I don't like [S]VCD formats either, and they're a hassle...

Having a portable, interoperable format (like MP4) is also useful if i'm travelling; my laptop's external CD/DVD drive and media itself are extra weight, and I travel light.

Four steps:
1 - pop in DVD
2 - run DVDBackup - google for "DVDBackup 1.3" and you'll find it

• this will strip out all the encoded stuff and stick the film sans crap in a folder somewhere
• the overall size will still be massive (6Gb or so), but DVDPlayer / VLC can play it fine
• it takes a while...

3 - run HandBrake - go to http://handbrake.m0k.org/

• point it at the previous folder, choose format, desired file size and start
• this shrinks it to a usable size, at the expense of quality
• this takes even longer...

4 - make donations!

According to the Handbrake FAQ, it can do the second step itself, so you can avoid using DVDBackup. In my experience, especially with later DVDs, it can't; so I still use DVDBackup.

I did use ffmpegX, but I find the user interface too complicated - far too many options. However, this will convert to other formats that Handbrake won't. See the Handbrake FAQ on that too.

Treo 650 local files & large memos

The memo field on the Treo can't be too large otherwise it won't sync properly (with Windows/Outlook at least).

I like to keep things like FAQs to hand, and so this causes problems.

Solution:
1) convert large memos into HTML format, and stick them on your SD card (root directory will do, sub-directories can also be used for images, etc..)
either/or
2a) create a browser bookmark to "file:///yourfile.html"
2b) create a new favo[u]rite pointing to the same thing

And yes, it is three slashes in "file:///"