Vibration

When I was at work my mobile phone bleeped in a discrete way when there was an incoming call, a bleep which was quite loud enough to be heard in most work environments without irritating colleagues. The bleep even worked pretty well on trains.

Some years on, I have a more up to date mobile phone - a Lumia 950 - and I have, after some flapdoodle, managed to get it to bleep in a discrete way, although I have not managed to control the more exuberant noises it can make in some circumstances.

However, as noticed at reference 1, I am now having a go at Descriptive Experience Sampling, using my mobile phone as a bleeper when outdoors, and have now clocked up a little more than 600 sample points - a lot more points than telephone calls, texts or anything else. Analysis is ongoing.

Then this morning, I suddenly thought that maybe having vibration on would be helpful when walking on noisy streets, such as East Street here in Epsom. An obvious enough thought once one has had it, but I had not had it before. So I go to the phone to find out how to turn vibration on.

Before the advent of Windows 10, I am fairly sure there used to be something in settings which you turned on or off, with a little slider telling you the current setting, a little slider which you still seem to get for on or off for wifi networking. So I used the usually helpful search settings feature to be told that there is nothing in settings for either vibrate or vibration. I then tried Cortana, my personal assistant, and she was of no assistance in this matter at all, with the best she could offer being something to do with something called touch, which did not seem to be right at all. I gave up at this point, deciding that it might be better to wait until I got home and had to proper computer to play with. Once there, I pop 'lumia 950 vibrate help' into google and up comes the answer at reference 2 - and above. Vibrate is nothing to do with settings and lives at the bottom of volume control, a place where I had never noticed it, despite using volume control quite frequently. And with various other web sites offering more or less complicated solutions to the problem.

It seems that vibrate is much more tricky than just on or off these days and can cope with all kinds of geeky requirements - so I look forward to tomorrow when I shall test whether and how the (H)MS Clock talks to (H)MS Vibrate.

I now have a little more sympathy for the friend who got very cross when MS moved the print function in Word from wherever it had been for years into hiding inside the file function, where he did not, for some hours, think to look for it. Whereas when I had hit the same problem, I was lucky enough to take a peek in file after minutes rather than hours.

PS: later, Wednesday morning: geeks one, amateurs nil. Turning vibrate on did not result in vibration.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/descriptive-experience-sampled.html.

Reference 2: http://devicehelp.optus.com.au/web/.