Skip to main content

How to use your Blackberry on Aircraft without causing Disasters

I'm sure that seasoned air travellers know all about this but I haven't flown much since I got my blackberry and I only got clued into this with a little slip from one of the flight attendants during the usual "how life-jackets can save your life at 30,000 feet" speech.

Note: these instructions are for the Blackberry Pearl. They may be different on other Blackberries.

It's simple;

BEFORE you get on the plane;
  1. Scroll to the aerial icon marked manage connections and click on it.



  2. Choose the option marked Turn all Connections Off



  3. Press the ESC/Back key to go back to the main screen.

  4. Power off your blackberry until the plane has taken off and is in level flight.

In Level Flight
When the Air-Hostesses or the Captain tell you that you can turn electronic devices on, turn the blackberry back on. It should not establish any connections.

Now you can use your Blackberry as a game machine, MP3 Player, Movie watcher and note taker (Memo Pad) during your flight. In fact, you can even read old mail and compose and send new ones.


After landing
  1. Turn your Blackberry back on (you did have it turned off for the actual landing didn't you?)

  2. Go back to the Manage Connections screen

  3. Choose Restore All Connections. Don't worry that checkboxes on this screen are unticked, just choose to restore all connections and they'll sort themselves out.

    Any "sent" messages (which got stored in an outbound queue) will now actually be sent.

Happy flying.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How to Change Your Notification Options for New Lotus Notes Mail in version 8.x

Don't worry, I'm not patronizing you (my readers), I just decided to re-document this for one of our internal users and thought you might want to be able to use it in your own user documentation. WHAT IS THIS DOCUMENT ABOUT? Some people who don't get a lot of mail, like to be notified when such an event occurs. Notification can be; via a sound via a pop-up box via the system tray (where the computer clock is) The pop up box looks like this; Other people, who like myself, get too much mail would rather not be notified. The aim of this document is to tell you how (and where) to turn these options on and off. CHANGING YOUR SETTINGS To change your settings from the Notes 8.x client; On the Menu, click File , then Preferences... On the left hand side , click on the little plus sign to the left of Mail to expand the options. Click on the option marked Sending and Receiving . In the middle section, under receiving, you can control your notifications. If you untick the box mark

How to Create an Auto-Response Mail Message in Lotus Notes 8.5.3+

Why would you do this? Suppose that you have an externally accessible generic email address for your company; support@mycompany.com or info@mycompany.com. You might expose this to the web and allow people to send messages to you. Setting up an auto-response email will tell the senders that their message reached its destination and that it will be dealt with accordingly.  It's also good practice to include links to FAQs or other useful information. Why 8.5.3 The techniques we'll be using here work in older versions of Notes but some of the options seem to have moved around in 8.5.3.  I figured it was a good time to show you where they've moved to. The Procedure Start Domino Designer and open the Mail file to be modified.  A really quick way to do this is to right-click on the application tab and choose "Open in Designer". In the Left hand panel of designer, expand Code and then double-click Agents.  A new window should appear. Click the action

How to Do a Mail Merge to Email using Lotus Notes

Why do one? In today's "green" world, it makes much better sense to send out emails than letters but you still want to personalize them. Sadly, by itself Lotus Notes doesn't support mail merge to email. Of course, we know that outlook does (but then it lets anyone and anything send emails for you - even when you don't want them to). So, how to do it in Notes? OpenNTF The first port of call is OpenNTF ( http://www.openntf.org/ ). This place is full of great things but most of them are really badly documented. Still, these guys give things away for free and they develop in their spare time, so we should be grateful for what we get. There's a great little project there called MailMerge Excel to Notes . Go there, click on releases and download the ZIP file. Getting to the Code The installation is tricky though I've noted that since I asked the author about the install, it's been updated (so maybe these steps are less necessary). Unzip the files to somewher