While in Australia earlier this month we bought a Nokia 1100 cell phone from Telstra. It was only a hundred dollars, included prepaid minutes, and was very helpful to change dinner reservations and to order pizza at 2am. The only downside of this GSM phone was that Telstra had locked it so that SIM cards from other companies wouldn’t work. Telstra did provide a ’service’ to unlock my phone for $50AUS within the first 6 months, or $25AUS afterwards. That sounded fair, but as usual what you can pay for in the real world, you can get on the web for free.

trycktill is a swedish website that calculates the unlock code for your cell phone. The site also has english and danish translations available. To get to the unlocking page, and avoid being redirected to fbi.gov, first click on the Var det nagon som sa gratis? link, and then change to your preferred language.

After entering my phone’s information I entered the first code. It failed. The directions say the second most likely code is the seventh code. That one worked and my phone is now free to use any SIM card in any country. I’m looking forward to using it in upcoming trips to France and Denmark.

Categories: WebTools
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.htaccess files are a very powerful tool of the Apache web server, but complicated to get working. They are used on this site to rewrite the urls into reader friendly names instead of the php=5&….that lies underneath. They also control access to your files. In this case I’m using the .htaccess file to stop people from linking to my images, movies, audio, and flash to use on their site. This doesn’t stop people from linking to my pages, which I’d like them to do early and often.

A lovely thing about .htaccess files: if you place them in a directory, the conditions and permissions you set up affect all subfolders of that folder. So, if you want to protect all your images, just drop a single .htaccess file in your main images directory, and all subfolders are taken care of.

Here’s the code that I’m using for my .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.buzolich.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://buzolich.com [NC]
RewriteRule [^/]+.(jpe?g|gif|png|mov|swf|avi|mpe?g|mp3|wav|wmv)$ - [F]


Note: The file is four lines, and each line starts with Rewrite…

Categories: Apache
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