Disclaimer: I don’t work for SKTelecom (Helio). I guarantee no level of service support for this article. YMMV. Also, Since I haven’t had much time to work on this article, I’ve only included the section on creating ringtones.

Creating Custom Ringtones for the Helio Fin with iMovie.

Getting your custom sounds into Helio Fin ringtone format is as simple as rendering them to an MPEG-4 file and renaming it.

The Fin will check a few things before allowing media to be used as a ringtone.

1. The video format - yes, you must have a video track for your ringtone.
2. The audio format - no, it won’t allow straight mpeg1-layer3 audio
3. The file size - there’s some limits just so it won’t run out of memory
4. The file name - we’ll have to rename the extension before loading it to the phone.

Once you have these requirements met, your media will work just fine. To get your media into this format, we’ll use iMovie and Quicktime export.

Creating the ringtone

Start by creating a new project in iMovie. I generally like to make 1 new project per each ringtone I make. I the drop down menu, you’ll want to select MPEG-4 as the video format. You might want to save the project in a subdirectory of your Movies directory if you plan on making a lot of ringtones. The Fin requires that an MPEG-4 file have a video track in order to play it as a ringtone. This probably assumes that if it does, it’s from a phone or at least isn’t really just a custom ringtone. It’s annoying, but easy to get around.

Once you’re into the main iMovie editing window, click over to the “Media” tab, then select “Photos”. Select a photo from the iPhoto selector and click the checkmark button in the preview to drop it into the editor. If you like to have a custom ringtone for each of your callers, you might want to get an appropriate photo for the friend you’re making the ringtone for. Once you have a video track, click over to “Audio” and browse to the audio clip you’d like to turn into your ringtone. When selecting, don’t worry if the clip is in the middle of the song, we’ll set that start point in the editor after we drop it in.

Drag your sound file to the audio track in the editor. iMovie will spend some time importing it and then some time rendering the waveform and audio preview (the green line on top of the waveform). It’s worth noting that the Fin’s ringer is pretty quiet. Make sure that the sound clip is fairly loud; check that the dark purple waveform takes up a good 50% of the middle light purple audio track. If it doesn’t you might want to boost it a little bit by clicking over to the “Editing” tab, Audio FX and raising all the sliders (It usually takes me a couple attempts to get the volume and quality I want, but I’m pretty discerning).

Your final ringtone should be about 30 to 40 seconds long; in most cases you’ll end up playing only 20 seconds or so. Since most songs are much longer than this, you’ll probably want to find the best part of the song to turn into the ringtone. Click the audio track to make sure it is selected. Use the zoom slider in the lower left to zoom into the waveform as it plays and find the point where you want to start the ring. Move the playback head to the exact point you want to start at, then select “Split Selected Audio Clip at Playhead” from the Edit menu (cmd-T). This will make a break in the audio track. Click the section you don’t want (on the left) and hit the delete (backspace) key to clear it from the editor. Move the audio track to about 0:00:05 after the start the project timeline. The small gap will prevent the beginning of your ringtone from getting clipped when it plays on the Fin. Edit the end of the clip by grabbing the right side and sliding the endpoint around. Once your ringtone is the length you want, stretch the photo video track so that it covers the entire audio clip (including the gap at the start).

Exporting the ringtone

After you’re happy with the ringtone and you’ve saved your project, you’ll need to export to the proper file format. In iMovie’s “Share” menu, select “QuickTime”. This will drop down the Share sheet with QuickTime selected. Change the drop down menu to “Expert Settings” and click Share. This will show a brief compressing sheet and then pop a Save dialog. Here’s where we trick the Fin into thinking it has a camera phone video. We’ll need to choose the correct video codec as well as rename the file extension.

Select “Movie to MPEG-4″ in the Export drop down menu.

Click the “Options…” button.
In the MPEG-4 Video settings, set the following options:

• File Format: MP4
• Video Format: MPEG-4 Basic
• Data Rate: 32 kbits/sec
• Image Size: 176 x 144 QCIF
• Frame Rate: 8
• Key Frame: Automatic

In the MPEG-4 Audio settings, set the following options:

• Audio Format: AAC-LC (Music)
• Data Rate: 64 kbps
• Channels: Mono
• Output Sample Rate: 44.100 kHz
• Encoding Quality: Better

Click OK.

Now, change the “.mp4″ file extension to “.3g2″.

Click Save. This will begin the movie compression. If all goes well, you’ll have your ringtone in the right format for playing on the Fin once this completes.

Loading the ringtone on your Helio Fin

Getting your ringtone onto your Fin is fairly easy. Just email it to yourself! There is one caveat however: Helio caps the size of attachment downloads. In order to download, your ringtone must be less than 1MB. For 30 second ringtones however, this usually isn’t a problem as most files exported with the above process will come out to around 300KB-700KB.

Once you’ve emailed the ringtone to your Helio Fin, check your Helio Mail and download the ringtone. After downloading, the “Download” button becomes an “Action” button. Click the spark again and select the #2 option “Save to Video Album”. Click the red power button to return to the main screen, then the camera button. Go to [3] Int Album. Select the default folder and find the your ringtone video. I like to put all my ringtones into a separate Ringtones folder. Once you’ve found your ringtone in your internal album*, use the left soft key to select Menu, then [3] Set as Ring.

Done!

MuppetMan

*When browsing videos in your internal album, the volume will start out a little low and increase. This doesn’t really affect the ring volume

So, I guess “The Incredible Hulk” was at least as good as Marvel vs. Capcom 2. And, I guess they are gonna do an Avengers movie.

A couple of days ago my father was being a whiney bitch. He was going off on how it is important for me to walk at SJSU commencement (I’m not). The singular reason I did the work to complete my degree was because Judy wanted me to; not for myself, not for anyone else, not for any other benefit. Now, at the end when all the work is done, he selfishly demands to be part of the experience. He tirades me with tenuous reasons why I should walk. Every reason thinly veils only his personal desires. He wants the achievement to be his own. Like he gives a fuck about me. If he gave two shits about me completing my degree, he’d have helped me pay for college. If he really cared that I finished, he might’ve helped me not encumber myself in debt. If had any desire to support me he wouldn’t have forced me out of his goddamn house when I was on hard times trying to figure out how I’d finish the degree. If he’d really cared at all he’d have asked me “What classes are you taking?”, “Who are your professors?”, “How are your grades?”, “Are you happy?”, anything. 

I guess you could say that this was my first real (unsupervised) trip to Vegas, so I got to do pretty much just what I felt like doing, which was great. Anyhow, the sites and activities are well documented by others, I’m sure, so I’ll just go over the numbers.

Friday:

Venitian, $10 Craps (3-4-5) on $200 bankroll: -$55

Venitian, Cryptic Hospitality: +$500

Saturday:

Palazzo, $10 Craps (3-4-5) on $300 bankroll: +$410

MGM Grand, $5 Craps (3-4-5) on $300 bankroll: +$99

MGM Grand, Ka by Cirque du Soleil: -$280

Sunday:

Casino Royale, $5 Craps (5x) on $300 bankroll: -$300

Venitian, $10 Craps (3-4-5) on $200 bankroll: +$105

Total (hospitality, show, and gambling): +$479

So, my personal gambling (not counting Judy’s penny slots) plus the Ka show plus Cryptic Hospitality still ends up fairly well in the black. Even with the couple hundred we spent on dining, souvenirs, and conveniences, we’re still ahead by a fair amount. Nothing like a free trip to Vegas to lighten your spirits

Disclaimer: The Helio Fin does not interoperate well with Macs. If you want a smooth, well integrated experience, may I recommend the iPhone. If you happen to already have a Helio Fin and Mac, then this guide is for you. I don’t work for SKTelecom (Helio) or Apple. I guarantee no level of service support for this article. YMMV.

Step 1: Bluetooth Pairing the Helio Fin with a Mac

One of the most critical things to do in setting up a new phone is getting your address book onto the device. My preferred method is via the Fin’s bluetooth connection.

Enabling Bluetooth on the Helio Fin:

First you must enable bluetooth on the Fin (it’s off by default). Do this by navigating to the bluetooth settings: Menu>[1]Customize>[7]Settings>[8]Bluetooth. Once in the bluetooth settings page, you must enable a couple different things:

• First, turn on Bluetooth: Select [1]Bluetooth Mode, switch to “on”, [•]confirm.
• You must also turn Visibility on: [6]Settings>[3]Visibility, switch to “Visible”, [•]confirm.
• You may also want to set the device name. This is also in settings, name it whatever you like

Now that Bluetooth is enabled on the phone, you’ll want to power cycle the device to ensure that the chip registers. Unfortunately, Helio phones don’t support Mac OS X’s 8 digit pairing passwords. To work around this, you have to use a third party application called iStumbler to pair the device. (go download it; I’ll wait).

Using iStumbler to Pair Your Helio Fin with your Mac:

In iStumbler with your Mac’s bluetooth turned on, click on the bluetooth icon in the lefthand column of the main window. Next, click the “Pair” button in the upper right corner. From here, you’ll be greeted with a pairing screen and (if you successfully activated the Fin’s bluetooth) your phone should pop into the list of visible devices to pair. Select your device and hit “Pair” to drop down the password entry sheet.

Enter a password that’s easy to type into the phone (1234) and hit enter. When you attempt to pair, make sure the phone is open and ready. Enter the same password in the phone when the request pops up. If all goes well, you’ve paired the Fin with your Mac. Open System Preferences on the Mac and go to the Bluetooth Prefpane (Hardware). You should now find your Fin in the list of paired bluetooth devices, listed as a Mobile Phone, not connected. Make sure to check “Show Bluetooth status in the menu bar”. Before leaving System Preferences, you’ll need to enable transfer to the Mac from the phone.

Click “Show All”, then go to the Sharing Prefpane (Internet & Network). Enable Bluetooth Sharing here by checking the box. Also setup any file receiving preferences; this will dictate how and where the files from the phone end up on your Mac. I recommend leaving the destination folder as your account’s Public folder.

Now that the Fin is paired and bluetooth is set up, you’re ready to start transferring data.

Step 2: Uploading Your Contacts from Address Book.

If you use Address Book.app to store all your contacts like I do, you’ll be sad to hear that the Fin does not support SyncML (and therefore iSync). Hell, the Fin doesn’t even support standard bluetooth file exchange! Despite my general technolust for the Fin, it irks me that Samsung didn’t build in such standard features into this otherwise great device. According to the Helio instruction book, you’re supposed to enter all your contacts into their online webmail and sync via the 3G mobile internet connection. Screw that!

Even though the Fin’s bluetooth is mostly useless, it still does support the bluetooth object exchange (OBEx) protocol. You can use OBEx to push data in both directions between the Mac and the Helio. Luckily, the Helio Fin does support standard vCard contact files; we’ll use this capability to load our contacts on the phone.

Exporting your contacts from Address Book:

1. Open a temporary folder in the Finder to store your vCards.
2. Open Address Book.
3. Select the contacts you want on your phone by holding the command (apple) key and clicking. Release the command key
4. Hold down the option (alt) key.
5. With the option key held down, drag the contacts sideways until you see the vCard icon under the mouse cursor. You should have a red star with the number of vCards you are dragging.
6. With the option key still down, drop the vCards into the temporary folder.

You should have a whole bunch of vCard files now. If you only have a single vCard file, it means you weren’t holding down the option key before you started to drag or you let go in the middle of the drag.

Transferring vCards to the Helio Fin:

Now that you have your contacts in a format the Fin will recognize, you can use bluetooth OBEx to transfer them. Assuming you’ve paired your Fin successfully, this part is pretty easy. First, you’ll need to put the Fin in bluetooth receive mode. To get there hit: Menu>[1]Customize>[7]Settings>[8]Bluetooth>[4]Send + Receive>[1]Receive Mode. The Fin should show a “Waiting to Receive…” screen. Go to your Mac and hit the bluetooth icon in the menubar. Under “Devices” you should see the name of your Fin. Go to this submenu and select “Send File…”. You’ll get a file browser window pointing to some random directory. If your temporary folder full of vCards is still open, you can go to this window, then drag one of the vCards to the file browser window. This will change the directory in the file browser.

Before you hit send, select all the vCards you created by band selecting or holding shift. Once you send the vCards the OBEx session will end, so select more than one so you don’t have to keep setting the phone to receive mode. I found that the transfer may fail mid way if you select a lot of files. If this happens to you, just resend the files that didn’t make it; or if you like you can send 15 at a time just to be safe. Once you’re done sending your vCards your Fin’s contact list should be filled with all your contacts!

One thing to note: while the Fin does support vCards, sometimes the data will become mangled for custom fields. I found that all the birthday fields became mangled in the transfer process. Phone numbers, though, generally make it across ok.

If you ever want to return the contacts on your phone to your Mac, you can OBEx them back. Hit Menu>[1]Customize>[7]Settings>[8]Bluetooth>[4]Send + Receive>[3]Send Contact on the Fin to get to the contact transfer page. When sending, your Mac should show up in the list of trusted devices because it is paired. No action is required on the Mac side to receive the files (depending on your sharing preferences), and you’ll find your vCards in your Public folder if that’s where you set the destination in the Sharing Prefpane. The names will be kind of odd, but you should be able to just drag them back to Address Book to re-import them.

In part 2 I’ll cover creating and uploading custom ringtones as well as loading media on the Helio Fin.

So I’ve settled on getting a Helio as my primary cell phone. My main reasons were the internet integration and GPS features provided with the Helio service. While the iPhone has the nicest web browser around, the Helio Camera, GPS, and Web 2.0 integration beat it hands down. Particularly the Fin’s 3.0MP camera; my number one reason for getting Helio. Granted, while Nokia has a wide range of 5MP cameras integrated into their line of smart phones, the Fin’s 3.0MP camera has HelioUP.

The photos in this post were both HelioUP’d with 2 different Helio Samsung phones. The one on the right is from a 2.0MP Helio Heat (at the default 1.2MP setting), the one on the left is from the 3.0MP Helio Fin. Notice the legibility in the sandwich menu added by the extra resolution. Similarly, the iPhone’s 2.0MP camera just doesn’t cut it; From playing with the iPhone, I find the photos too fuzzy and blury. In my opinion, 3.0MP (scaled down to ~1.5MP for sharpness) is just about the lower threshold of quality for blog posts. Anything lower looks just a little too shitty.

One thing I have to give the Helio Heat credit for is the built-in camera “flash”. It has a dinky LED light that shines for dark poorly lit photos and videos. The flash makes a world of difference for the Heat’s CMOS camera and makes shooting (close range 3′~4′) photos in dark places like night clubs and restaurants very feasible. For my photos though, the majority will be taken in well lit or day light places.

Hopefully having instant flickr upload from my camera (with geotagging!) will get my blogging output up to respectable levels.

Another Helio Heat photo:

Another Helio Fin photo:

I love the sharpness of the Fin’s photos.

IMG_1371,
originally uploaded by kelnishi.

Laundry seems to never end at my apartment. The last load of jeans didn’t dry all that well, so my chin up bar is doing double duty as a clothesline.

For now, my two options are:

1. Live without a login dashboard
2. Disable the K2 sidebar

Both options are rather unsavory. I like wordpress AND K2… but it seems like with every new version automattic tries just a little harder to turn it into a contest of who I should dislike more.