dsandler.org

Video: white screen of death; endlessly scrolling menus.

As you can see, my beloved Z520a’s screen is broken; probably a fatigued connector in the hinge. Apparently, this just happens to Sony-Ericsson phones. [Good timing, too: I’ve had the phone for 18 months, which is out of the 1-year warranty but still six months shy of an upgrade discount.]

Bizarre voicemail on our office phone: juanita.mp3. I hope she found her keys!

(continued…)

Thanks to this hint and Sony-Ericsson’s HID tool (warning: very buggy), I was able to bang together a quick and dirty iTunes Bluetooth remote control (for the Bt-enabled Z520a): ds-iTunes.hid. Send this to your phone (Bluetooth OBEX will do) and it ought to be usable immediately. The UI is passable but reasonably blurry and ugly; this is what you get for creating it entirely in Interface Builder with Unicode dingbats for button icons, and then scaling it down to fit the phone’s display. (Like I said, Q&D.) I haven’t tried the keystrokes on iTunes for Windows, so some of them might not translate quite right. You’ll have to try it and let me know.

In honor of Link’s 20th birthday, here are some wallpapers for the Z520a I crudely slapped together: [main, front]. (For his 21st birthday: pictures of potions, naturally.)