I just received an email from “Chime”, the developer of the WonderSilk application for the Sony Clie NX series PDA’s, and he said that he has no development plans for Sony’s new Clei UX series PDA’s. He says this is because the UX does not support Silk Plug-ins like the NX series did.

I had some high hopes of converting many of my current WonderSilk Skin designs to the UX’s vertical format. I also had some ideas for some new skins, but it looks like it won’t happen. Major bummer!

If you bring up the Program Guide by pressing the Program Guide button, you can press the Select button to bring up a pop-up menu for the selected show. The problem is that if you try to do this on a show that’s currently airing, ReplayTV will switch to that channel and dismiss the Program Guide. Here’s how to avoid tuning to the channel and instead, bring up the pop-up menu…

Bring up the Program Guide by pressing the Program Guide button on your ReplayTV remote. Navigate to a selected channel and highlight a show that is currently airing. Now, instead of pressing the Select button on the remote, try pressing the Enter button. This pops up the expected menu with all available recording and “Find All episodes” options!

While ReplayTV does not include pay Per View (PPV) channel data in its Program Guide, you can watch and record PPV through ReplayTV! Here’s how…

Press ReplayTV’s “Input” button on the remote and cycle through all the ReplayTV’s inputs until you reach the “DirecTV” direct input (theoretically, this should also work as well for DISH and Digital Cable PPV, it will just be labeled differently.) Use the DirecTV remote to view the channel guide (there will be a slight delay), get “Info” on the programs, and finally purchase the program. You can now watch the PPV with all the usual “benefits” of ReplayTV (pause, REW, FF, etc.) Just be sure to turn off any scheduled recordings while you watch otherwise the channel will change to that recording show.

If you want to record the PPV, while tuned to the PPV channel through the direct input, press “Record” on the ReplayTV remote. This initiates an “immediate” record right from the input where you can specify the recording quality and the duration of the recording (in 1/2 hour increments). Just be aware of any conflicts that may occur while you are recording.

Here’s an undocumented easter egg for ReplayTV boxes running v5.x. It was posted by tk2x on the AVS Forum…

“If you have been watching too much good programming with your Replay, and your brain can’t muster the long attention span needed when skipping commercial breaks, try this fix:

“While playing a recorded show, press Play to go into slow-mo, then FF 2 times to go into 3x slomo.

Now hit the Commercial Advance button once to turn off CA. Then, hit it again, and you’ve got…Content Advance. All that pesky content will be skipped, so you can enjoy the commercials uninterrupted.”

What a great way to watch all of those cool commercials during the SuperBowl while avoiding that nasty football!

Here are several undocumented button press combinations that will invoke some useful features and tools. The syntax is to press the number keys shown and then press the “Zones” key…

111 + Zones Puts the Replay in “game” mode after you have entered either “Joshua” or “Tic Tac” into the Claw Foot Portal. (see below on how to access the CFP.)

411 + Zones Shows you information about your ReplayTV box including the serial number, the software version, the most recent connection, etc.

243 + Zones brings up a “utility” menu that lets you force a network connection, toggle a network meter, memory meter, position display, and several other utilities. The bottom of the screen is also the infamous “Claw Foot Portal” (CFP)

382 + Zones On 4xxx series and higher, this lets you reset your ReplayTV to factory defaults. If your ReplayTV becomes unstable, or if you want to resize the photo partition, this is an excellent option. Note: This will erase all shows, ReplayChannels, and Program Guide data! If your ReplayTV box is an earlier model running the 3.x software, use 777 + Zones instead.

243 + Zones While in the Setup Menu lets you modify some IR remote settings letting you control two different Replays with one programmable remote. You can also adjust the HUD transparency. here on older models.

876 + Zones When the machine is next rebooted, this will take you through the full setup process.

887 + Zones While in the Setup Menu, this displays a list of ReplayTV development credits.

888 + Zones While in the Setup Menu, this displays some very funny Haiku poems written by the ReplayTV development team.

999 + Zones on 5080 shows “DownloadQueue requests: ISN” screen. This is a “mockup” of a screen. The data is fake and the same on everyone’s box.

Here are two undocumented “Swipe strokes” that you may find useful.

1. “Command Bar” stroke
You probably know that when the Virtual Graffiti area is displayed, doing a “Lower-left to Upper Right” stroke (“/”) will bring up the “Command bar” from which you can select available options like “Cut, Copy, Paste, etc.” Well, if you are like me, you probably keep your Virtual Graffiti area hidden most of the time to take advantage of the NX’s HiRes+ screen. To activate the “Command bar” with the Virtual Graffiti area hidden, do the same stroke, but be sure to start the stroke anywhere in the Status Bar at the bottom of the screen.

2. “Switch Silk Plug-in” stroke
If you have a Silk Plug-in installed such as WonderSilk, Decuma, SilkCalc, etc., you can toggle between the last two used by doing a “reverse Command stroke”. Starting anywhere in the Status bar, stroke from “Lower-right to Upper-left” (“”). This will swap the Virtual Graffiti area with the last-used Silk Plug-in. Note: for this to work, you must first “enable” the two Silk Plug-ins you want to swap by tapping on the Silk Plug-in Manager icon (the fourth from the left on the Status bar) and select any installed Silk Plug-in other than StandardInput. For example, select the WonderSilk Plug-in. Now, do the stroke, and you are swapped back to StandardInput. Stroke again, and WonderSilk swaps back ready to use. This only needs to be done once, but it must also be done after a reset.

Credit for finding and informing us of these strokes goes to the diligent guys at ClieSource!

Here are a three tips to consider if your battery is not holding a charge like you think it should…

1. Does your Clie “come on” when you have it in your pocket, your purse, or in its case? Engaging the “Hold” button will prevent it from accidentally coming on. Alarms still sound, but you have to disengage the “Hold” button in order to access them.

2. Check your “hacks” or “system extensions”. For some reason, it seems that when I enable certain of these types of apps, my battery runs down faster. Your milage may definitely vary with this one, but that’s how it has happened for me. Not sure why.

3. Play with the brightness level. I find that by keeping the brightness over 50% causes definite unnecessary battery drain. I typically keep my display brightness set at about 30 percent and find it very easy to read in an office environment. For those times when you want to “show off” or show some photos or something, just increase the brightness temporarily. At night, when I don’t want to bother my wife, setting the brightness to the minimum setting is more than adequate in a darkened room. The brightness control is always available from the Standard Virtual Graffiti area, and is also in the “Extension>>” menu in ZLauncher’s QuickLaunch+ Anywhere function.

Want to see red? With the new “WS-Red” WonderSilk Skin, you now have a “night-friendly” WonderSilk Skin to use with your favorite Astronomy app!

I have been using two Astronomy apps (2Sky and Planetarium) on my PalmOS PDA’s for a long while, and though they work and look great on my NX70V, one huge annoyance is their “night” modes. This mode colors all of the program elements in “red” to make it easier to see in the dark. The problem with the NX70V is that because these programs are not HiRes+, the Virtual Graffiti area is always enabled resulting in a bright, full-color, distracting area–too bright for the “night” modes.

Enter my new “WS-Red” WonderSilk Skin! It’s simply a re-rendering of the current Standard Input Virtual Graffiti input area colored in Red. No frills, no extras, just a nice, red Virtual Graffiti area.

And here are a couple tips:

1. If you use the CodeDiver app, you can “force” this Skin to activate every time the app is run and then revert the skin back to its original when you switch to another app. CodeDiver can be found here at Handango.com.

2. Once you enable WonderSilk (or ANY “Silk Plug-in”) you can switch between the current and the last-used “Silk Plug-in” by doing a stroke with your stylus from the middle of the status bar diagonally up to the left into the Alpha section of the Graffiti area. This can come in very handy if you just want to quickly switch or don’t want to bother with CodeDiver.

Note: WonderSilk only affects the Virtual Graffiti area, not the Status Bar.

This skin, like all skins and information on JimsTips.com and WonderSilkSkins.com is free. If you find this skin or any information on this site useful, please consider donating to JimsTips.com. Your contributions help defray the ongoing costs of keeping this site up and running.