I have managed to get my Benefon phone working – the problem turned out to be the battery – I bypassed an IC Switch inside the battery and put it on charge for a few minutes and things started working. The battery is now up to 20% charged – correction… 23% charged. As yet I have not tested the GPS functionality, so that will be my next step. I also have not managed to change the settings for where position SMS messages get sent since Benefon seem to like to stop people ‘playing’ and lock users out of this setting. So I have emailed them to get the phone unlocked.

Once that is done I can start having some real fun. It appears that the protocol is slightly different from what I thought… Then again it may be the SMS library. Just checking that. No. SMS Library looks good, so it looks like the protocol documentation is not totally accurate. Simple fix.

On the subject of the SMS control software from the PC, this is now working much much better… If I send an SMS I now only receive one SMS in return. This is fantastic – and how the software should have been behaving to start with.

The SMH is reporting that there have been some complaints that watermarks added to TV channels are causing burn-on on Plasma TV’s, and that owners are being warned to be careful of their contrast and brightness settings. This has always been a problem with computer monitors – you can see this on the screens on any railway platform…

They also have an article Suggesting that higher airfares are on the way