This tutorial will guide you through turning your Nokia N95 into a WiFi (wireless) access point. No more tethering via USB or Bluetooth. Using JoikuSpot Light, a totally free utility that works well as long as you only need to use HTTP and HTTPS protocols, you’ll be up and surfing in no time. You’ll have to go with JoikuSpot Premium if you need POP3, SMTP, etc. [click to continue...]

World Golf Tour is a free, Flash based (no download required) online golf game. You can play up to 9 holes on one of two courses (with more to be added soon) in a “closest to the pin” match. The “getting started” tutorial will walk you through how to play the game and explain each feature (club selection, swing type, aiming and striking).

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I’ll be the very first to admit it: I stink at video games. Flash based web games, console games, PC/Mac games. All of them. Not since the days of NES have I been even half-way decent. And even then, it was probably the hours and hours of time I put in that allowed me to finish games (usually on the “easy” level). That doesn’t stop me though - I still find the hugely entertaining, and World Golf Tour is no exception.

NirCmd is a freeware utility that allows you to perform tasks from the command line, .bat files, desktop shortcuts and even Launchy. There’s a large list of commands on the NirCmd website. I’ve picked out a few that I’ve found useful, but you may find another great use for NirCmd after reading through the examples. This was written and tested in WindowsXP but it should also work in other versions of Windows. [click to continue...]

Launchy is a open-source keystroke launcher for Windows (including Vista) covered briefly here last month. Here are some advanced tricks I’ve found for Launchy. [click to continue...]

So, I’m trying two new things with this post. The first is writing it as I’m looking into this application, and the second is actually using the application. It’s Instantbird, a cross-platform instant messenger built on Pidgin and Mozilla. It should be noted that this is far away from a stable release. [click to continue...]

Sumatra PDF is a very simple PDF viewer that I find to be faster than other programs like Adobe Reader (an 80MB app to read PDFs?) and Foxit. It may lack a lot of features compared to Foxit, but if all you want to do is quickly read a PDF after you’ve downloaded it, this is the program for you. You can download it here. It is also usable as a portable application, as it’s just one file with no external dependencies so you can easily run it from external USB drive.

After you have it installed, go to Start -> All Programs -> SumatraPDF and click on SumatraPDF. It might ask you if you want to make it the default PDF viewer, in which case you should say yes. If it doesn’t, you can go to File -> Make SumatraPDF a Default PDF Viewer.

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The following is another “guest blogger” tutorial by Skyler Huse

Foobar is an application I think everyone should try. It’s an audio player that plays a lot of different file types (MP1, MP2, MP3, MP4, MPC, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC / Ogg FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, CDDA, WMA and more with optional components). It also does more than just play your music. It can rip songs from CDs, convert songs to many other formats, you can edit the tags of your songs, customize virtual everything, and lots more. And the best thing about it is that it uses less ram when compared to most other audio players. This makes it perfect for using while playing games, if you use it for nothing else. [click to continue...]

During the short time that I’ve been writing these tutorials for Simple Help, I have had many occasions where I wanted to copy files from my laptop to my N95 quickly and easily. Even though I don’t use Windows much, I thought perhaps somebody had written a client for the N95 that will connect to folders shared through Windows File and Print Sharing, so I started Googling around. I came across two such applications. SymSMB is available as a time bombed evaluation version and SMB4S60 is an open source (free) application. Seeing how I’m into open source software, I decided to give SMB4S60 a try, and it works fantastically. [click to continue...]

As I started my tutorial on adding fonts to PuTTY on the N95, I very quickly decided that having to enter a user name and password every time I logged in was taking too long. So I generated an RSA key pair with a blank pass phrase just to save time. Don’t worry, of course I deleted the key pair as soon as I was finished. The last thing I need is to lose my phone and have some stranger logging into my server!

Note: this procedure is not specific to just the N95, nor is it only specific to Linux. I use Linux in my examples because I’m not a Windows user. The procedure described below on how to generate RSA keys can be adapted to puttygen.exe on Windows. [click to continue...]

Now that you have PuTTY installed on your Nokia N95, it’s time to add additional fonts. The default font works fine for me, but others may want something a little larger or smaller. [click to continue...]

The built in text viewer on the N95 works fine for viewing text files but recently I have wanted to be able to edit rather than just view them. Copying a file to my laptop, editing it, then copying it back to the phone seemed silly to me so I stated Googling and came across DEdit. I expected something similar to Windows Notepad but I was pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong. DEdit is a far better text editor than Notepad! Juriy Bakunin was definitely thinking when he wrote this one! [click to continue...]

So far I really like my N95. However, I have found at least one shortcoming. The calculator it comes with is terrible! See for yourself:

Lucky for us there is a better calculator available from Nokia. The Enhanced Calculator For S60.

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If you’ve been wondering why there haven’t been any Mac tutorials lately, here’s the reason - I’ve acquired another site, SwitchingToMac.com. I’ll be leaving all of the existing Mac content here, but going forward, Switching To Mac will be where all my Mac/OS X focus goes. Simple Help will turn into a Windows and Linux (and Windows Mobile, Symbian, BlackBerry etc) site. If you’re an RSS subscriber because you liked the Apple content, you might want to unsubscribe from this site (you don’t have to) and subscribe to the Switching To Mac RSS feed instead.

Also, there’s a pretty active forum over there, with a lot of really helpful, friendly and active folks.

You may have also noticed that the massive majority of posts lately have been from folks other than myself. Ken Murray is a Linux genius and recent N95 owner, and Skyler Huse has been coming up with some great Windows stuff. This has allowed me to focus on getting Switching To Mac transferred (I had no idea domain transfers could be such a hassle), redesigned and a lot of articles queued. Ken and Skyler will continue to contribute to Simple Help, though you should see more frequent posting on my part too.

If you like watching movies, you can take them with you and watch them on your N95. One easy way to do it is to convert your movies to a format that DivX Mobile will play. In this tutorial I use mencoder on Linux to convert a movie to XviD. XviD is an open source MPEG-4 video codec. The DivX player plays XviD files very well. I will also provide links to the Windows and Mac DivX Mobile bundles which include a special version of the DivX Converter for Mobile. [click to continue...]