Sometimes this might be the purpose, getting rid of old junk and starting fresh on the new location.

I must admit that I am a collector; my c64 history, all the articles I ever wrote and ALL mails ever written.

For quite some time, but many years ago, did I use Forté Agent. It was brilliant as it could handle mail and Usenet news in one package. I was even a paying user for very long, provided points of view for the future development even if I now realise that there was a lot going on behind the scene with the program. It was sold to Alcatel and then divested again from Alcatel (who naturally failed big doing anything relevant to the product!). Eventually Mozilla Thunder showed up – it was just as competent, and it was free. News was deleted from the offerings of my ISP and the other News servers that could be accessed for free were closed. With News not being accessible, migrating to Thunderbird I found that I had produced quite a lot that was now locked in, in the Agent proprietary storage format. BUMMER!

I have migrated the archive with every swap of computer since, both for me and my wife until today where the ultimate solution has been applied – it’s now being uploaded to GMail, so it’s not available and not bound to me remembering to migrate it every time. RELIEF!

So how did I do it?

1) First step – extract it from the Agent cage.

This is a tricky step. The only relevant solution is to extract it using the only relevant converter there is. Aid4Mail. This program converts also very large mail boxes between formats. I used Agent as source and Outlook PST as destination.

2) Second step – get it to GMail.

The trick here is to use Outlook as the vehicle that takes you there. Basically I followed this guide.

What you need to do is to

a) Enable IMAP in GMail. Under Settings, Forwarding and POP/IMAP there is an option to simply enable it. Save the setting and that piece is taken care of.

b) Define a GMail account via IMAP in Outlook. To be honest, this is the tricky part. Defining username, password and servers might be straight forward, but you need to do the advanced setting, defining SSL and also a specific port. There are guides available for this, for example this one (Swedish I’m afraid but I’m sure you can find it in your language as well or have it translated).

c) The guide referenced on the first line of this section suggests you import messages from the PST file. That’s not really needed. It’s even a fairly clumsy solution. All you need to do is to open the PST file. (Select Open from the Archive menu). Quite a lot easier as the target is not to have the mail available in Outlook when I’m done with this. If it was, you can of course also copy the PST to the hidden directory where all of the others are also placed.

d) Now the really easy part – just select the directory with the mail and copy it got the GMail folder. It will naturally take LONG to copy data over IMAP. We are talking hours even with modest volumes, but who cares – let it work overnight and wake up a happier person!!!

Learnings

Did the above sound easy? In theory YES, but in practice NOT AT ALL!

My transfers were interrupted many times for various reasons.

Key one was that it wasn’t possible to create subfolders. Thing is – I didn’t have any subfolders so this was in fact an error that indicated unsupported characters in the directory names. Of course the “/” is not to be used, but I also guess that the “!” and the quotation mark itself.

Secondly there is a restriction on length of the tag name. If the foldername that gets to the tag is longer than the allowed tagname, then you’re our of luck.

Create an IM account that will allow you to do Fb Chat also on the handset.

On N900, go to settings where you have “VoIP and IM accounts”

Depending on what you have installed in terms of protocols, you either set up a Jabber account or you can directly select Facebook.

Add FB as Jabber account (fallback) http://thenokiablog.com/2010/02/10/how-to-add-facebook-chat-nokia-n900-out-of-the-box/

Add more protocols: http://thenokiablog.com/2010/02/05/conversations-nokia-n900-facebook-chat-aim-msn/ … After this, I believe that you will have Facebook as an option when selecting a protocol.

Regardless of which, you need the Facebook data which you get here: http://www.facebook.com/ajax/sitetour/chat.php?jabber_client=3

Next thing you want to do is adding all you Facebook contacts to your handset:

Manually adding them is naturally not feasible. So, for this, add the application Hermes. It does both Twitter and Facebook.

http://hermes.garage.maemo.org/

Merging contacts:

Now there is one drawback in all of this – you now have a lot of contacts, of which several are the same person, but you have them as separate entries for phone/sms and Facebook.

There is a solution:

Download “Merge your duplicate contacts” (very descriptive name

http://www.nokian900applications.com/merge-your-duplicate-contacts-for-nokia-n900/

Furthermore,

I have installed “Facebook Widget and Photouploader”. I guess that it still needed to uploading pictures and as it provides the desktop widget…

My favourite IM client is Trillian (now version 5 beta). I just quickly added a Jabber/XMPP account and used the Ovi mailaddress and password. After this I suddenly could use the Trillian client to send and receive messages to Nokia owning friends. Sure beats the cost of SMS any day of the week!

After reading up on the picasa.ini format, I see that there is a reference to the faces in it; The rect64 value is the location of the rectangle and the 16 byte value after is the person. Like this:

faces=rect64(7aba40739a7c79cc),75bf2e1b31682632

In the end of the picasa.ini file there is a section named [contacts]

75bf2e1b31682632=[my google accountname]_lh,807347f0b130260

The latter must be a reference to an id in the contacts.xml (field bolded – Search path on my Xp installation: c:\Documents and Settings\[name]\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Picasa2\contacts\)

I have a number of “unknown” people in my contacts.xml (such as the one above) – they are all garbage.

<contact id=”b9a1192a96e98d7″ name=”Unknown” display=”Unknown” modified_time=”2010-06-28T18:48:21+02:00″ sync_enabled=”1″>
<subject user=”[my google accountname]_lh” id=”807347f0b130260” person_id=”pISMFWwoX-SCa3htCsnNVl1oaUzi8If3QVwrey6Mlrs”/>
</contact>

As you can see the id for the contact above is the same one as referenced above as the “subject user”

So I am now planning to see if I could make some sort simple of referential integrity validator; all persons referenced in the picasa.ini files must be in the contacts.xml file and those being represented as “unknown” are garbage and should for sure be deleted from the contacts.xml file.

Anyone having any view or insight of this?

This is the error received:

Error: [AnyDAC][Phys][MySQL][LIBMYSQL] Field ‘series’ doesn’t have a default value

Googling lead me to the MP forum, where quite a few had the same issue. I must say that what I say below does solve the problem (no error message) but I am yet to see if i’s a good thing so that it also works, or I just lost the symptom. Anyway, here’s what to do;

Fire up MySQL Administrator (I have it on the machine but it might be a separate download – i don’t remember). Log on and if you forgot, the default password for the user “root” is “MediaPortal”.

Select “Catalog”, followed by “mptvdb”. Select table “schedule” and then in there you see the field “series”. There are possibly several ways to solve this. The MP forum suggests you set the default value to “1″. This might do it, but it’s in my opinion possibly fixing it by introducing a source of error.What I did was unticking the “Not Null” check-mark. I tried both options and both seem to work, but I would suggest you take my advice on this. My suggestion is having the program accept no value, rather than fooling the checks by introducing a dummy value that could potentially cause error later in the process…

PLEASE mind: Do not follow the suggestion above. It proves that recording stopped working and accessing the guide turned strangely slow. The suggestions found that haven’t been claimed utterly stupid are these;

http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/516773-post1120.html
http://code.google.com/p/mp-web-interface/issues/detail?id=34

It shows that I can just double click on the outline of the window, and hey presto – it’s there again!

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5302510/Server_2008__Win_7__Vista__Activator

The area seem fairly complex but the activator seem to support it all …

So, this is how to do it, and also the why in a sketchy outlines form, assuming system 4.2E as I have. Do also ensure that you have a working internet connection to the unit; Wireless via the built in set-up or wired via a USB to LAN type of connection. I have a third party version of the latter that works nicely.

Install HackMii
This is a step needed to install Homebrew channel (HBC) and BootMii. A channel is an icon in the system menu and HomeBrew Channel is hence what you need to do in order to get a button that gives a menu which contains the homebrew stuff on the SD memory.

In order to install HackMii, you first need to install Bannerbomb Version 2. Instructions on the page, which also instructs you how to install HackMii. Install all three components of the HackMii (HBC and BootMii being the two most important at this point).

Install Homebrew Browser – Optional but highly recommended
I would suggest you already at this point create a directory on the SD that is called “apps” and get Homebrew Browser. HBB allows you to download Homebrew material directly from the unit. Download link and instructions all on the page.

What you do with apps – all in DOL or ELF format – is to depack them into a directory of the apps folder on your SD card. Then rename the file to boot.dol/elf (whichever extension the original file had). Talking about the SD card, I will call it SD: in the examples below.

Install a USB loader
There are several to chose from, but to keep it simple there are basically two that stands out to do the job.
- USB Loader GX
- Configurable USB Loader
I installed both of them, and there is really no harm in doing just that. They don’t conflict so there is no harm in having both. If one fails, try the other.

Mess with IOS
See IOS as releases of the OperatingSystem. In order to have this working there are a zillion things to do here that fiddles with IOS files and installs special version of them. This seem to be a complete science of it’s own, but again to keep it short, there seem to be two things you are recommended to do. Install an IOS222 and a IOS249
- IOS 249
- hermes IOS 222/223 (End of the page – search for “Descarga”)

Install to SD://apps/IOS249 … A very detailed guide is available here.
Optionally you can also install Hermes 222/223. Again, I think this is something to do just in case the 249 fail you and you need a plan B. Described here. I didn’t do this and it works fine without it. By the way, the IOS249 giude talks about another app called AnyTitle Deleter Mod v6b, which can uninstall IOS files. Might be handy for some.

If you have done all things right now, you will have one or possibly two USB loader options available in the Homebrew Channel.

Final part
Starting the HBC every time may seem tedious. There is something that is called the WAD manager 1.5, that you can install and start from the HBC. It creates channels for Homebrew applications. So, using it you can have a link directly from the Nintendo Wii menu directly to the USB loader application (or any other application). I failed this step repeatedly, and the reason was that you need to you run BootMii and back-up the NAND memory to a file on the SD card for it to work. So, please ensure that you install it (unless you did in the earliest steps). Start it but starting the HBC and pressing “Home” (the house on the controller). There you will see a menu that allows you to run BootMii. Now control the app with reset (step on step forward) and reset (select current option). Awkward steering mechanism but it does work. While at it, I can strongly recommend reading the FAQ here. These are qualified guys for sure!

Let’s now prepare the games
The early USB loaders could only access drives using the WBFS, so you needed special programs to format and manage. Now the loaders can do it also for FAT32 disks and USB Loader GX can possibly also do NTFS. Again, for maximum compatibility I would advice you to use the WBFS option and get a nice program that will allow you to take the ISO files (or possibly even the RAR files) and copy a playable image on the drive.

So, obtain a unit that can connect to the USB port of the Wii. A larger USB stick will do, but in order to have a point I do recommend a harddisk. Preferably the “portable category” where you need no external power, but it’s all taken from the USB port. I parted with some money for this beauty. It’s a white 2.5″ drive from Western Digital. Please mind; 320GB is A LOT. The average game is around 2GB. I think I have stuffed over some 40 games (all of which I own the original disk of course and it takes some 90GB.

I use WBFS manager 3.01 (Windows only) and it works like a charm. Takes the ISO files (not to be mixed with the IOS files), converts them and places them on the disk in a MOST userfriendly way. It can also take cases where the ISO is RAR compressed and depack it transparently in the conversion process.

So, with games on the disk and the machine prepared, start the USB Loader GX. You now see a graphical representation of the games installed on the harddisk if it worked. (A reason for failure is if you connected the using to the wrong USB port). You can download themes but more importantly you can download representations of the covers in 2D and 3D, plus also for the discs. There will be spinning disc images that you click to start the game in at least some of the layouts of the menu. I pressed a blank cover and selected to download. hey presto, I had an AMAZINGLY nice menu to chose from. For every game you can select IOS version and a lot of other things than might be relevant in some cases. For the New Super Mario I needed to select IOS 222 as IOS 249 didn’t work.

In general I must say that obviously a tremendous amount of time must have been invested in making and perfecting this and it looks and works SO good! I am totally blown away by how good it works and home crisp the design is! The Configurable USB Loader can most likely do the same, but I didn’t go all the way with it quite yet.

Installing HomeBrew was pretty easy. Depacking the BannerBlaster V2 and HackMii 0.6 was just depacking and putting it on the CD card.

HomebrewChannel worked and I had mixed it up with the HomeBrew Browser, so the HBC was empty. Stupid me was waiting and waiting. I was expecting it to update but read up and realised the mistake. I run WLAN using MAC address control and no WEP/WPA so I basically cannot use the Wii’s WLAN capability, and did get a corded access (USB LAN converter).

So, I downloaded the HomeBrew Browser and depacked it to a newly created “Apps” folder on the SD card. Now I could add a bunch on nice applications and run them.

Next work item is adding the new 320GB USB disk and ensuring I can access ISOs from it.

I understand that there are a few things to do in order to make that work;
- Fiddle with the cIOS
- Install something that allows accessing units connected via USB (USB Loader GX seems to be the program people recommend). Download from here. There are other alternatives. Check here to see which they are and a very detailed comparison.
- Connect a USB disk. A compatibility list is provided here
- Get a WBFS manager (These are available, the best Windows one seem to be WBFS Manager. Current version is 3.0). It can access WBFS formatted device.

Seems there are a comprehensive guide here: http://gwht.wikidot.com/usb-loader

A channel is an icon on the Wii starting screen, and HomeBrewChannel (“HBC”) is adding such a channel that gives you access to HomeBrew applications. HomeBrew is a fair pick of a word as it’s home made stuff, which is not officially authorized and can come in any quality from professional/commercial to pure rubbish.

The obvious starting point for reading up is HERE

The law
So, naturally Nintendo didn’t intent us to use the equipment we purchased in a manner they do not approve of. It’s not only unauthorized, they are trying their best to prevent it from happening. If somebody claims it’s illegal, then rest assure in most jurisdictions it’s not. Actively bypassing protections schemes to be able to copy a game might be, but to do it to install a custom DVD player is for sure not no mater how hard a hoard of Nintendo lawyers will tell you something else. Please mind that legislation works; you have the actual legislation but nothing there in any law says you cannot fiddle with your Wii. NOTHING! However something in your local law can establish a principle of enforcing mechanisms that impose limitations of usage and the Nintendo lawyer will say it is applicable for the case. Even a pretty lousy lawyer would be able to state that this is obviously a clear case.

System Updates
The menu system of the Wii is software. Some games requite a revision of the system software that is newer than a certain revision. Nothing more strange than that a PC program cannot run on Win95 and ME but only later ones, or need DirectX 9 or later. Games can seemingly enforce updates for you, presumably only if the unit is Internet connected.

Any hack of the system software is logically eradicated from the system if it’s updated. It’s not supposed to be there, to there is no reason to ensure that it stayed if Nintendo didn’t want it there in the first place.

So there are two things to know;
- How to install, and
- What to install

Installation
Depending on the system you have, you need different methods to perform the installations. The installer uses loopholes in the system to allow to be installed. Loopholes are shut per the Nintendo updates, why new need to be found for newer versions.

From what I read, if you have a recent system (which at the time of writing seem to be Version 4.2 – I have 4.2E where E is for Europe. It’s visible under Wii Options and then Wii Settings – top right corner) the best solution is to install the Bannerbomb Version 2, which is the mean to facilitate the installation of the program that will enable HomeBrew.

What you then install is the HackMii package. Current version is 0.6. Bannerbomb installations guide asks you to install it with the HackMii package described below. Installation guide is here

HackMii contains three parts;
* BootMii – Current version: public beta 4 This is the piece that allows a nice set of features. It can make a safety copy of the system memory so that it can be restored and also facilitates the activation of the HomebrewChannel. The program is nicely presented here, and it’s pointless for me to repeat that very comprehensive text.
* The Homebrew Channel 1.0.6 – is a self-updating homebrew application loader by Team Twiizers which allows users to load homebrew applications without having to run an exploit every time. Once installed, users can access the channel from the Wii System Menu just like any other Wii channel. It can launch or install homebrew applications from an SD or SDHC card or via TCP/USB Gecko using Wiiload.
* DVDX v2 – Installs a hidden “channel” which can be used by other homebrew applications to access home burned and factory pressed DVD content without the need for a modchip. This does not modify any IOS in any way, making it very safe

A nice read with screen illustrations can also be found here

So, you have read this far and have come to the conclusion that it’s doable (right you are) but think “Why do it?”. Some are into the sport of proving it could be done. Assuming you are the kind that need a bit more tangible use in order to spend a night on getting this to work, then the answer is to run Homebrew applications. There is actually a fairly impressive range of stuff available that turns your Wii into a much more versatile machine that you found it to be out of the box.

A list of relevant software is here

Extra reading
CompleteSoftmodGuide – It looks most complete. Lots to read, and not to that you necessarily are interested in all of it, even if you are interested in the topic.

For the dare devils of you. Can’t recommend this. It’s playing with fire for real! HERE