I’ve tried on and off for a while to figure out how the use my GSM/HSPA cell phones as a dial up modem, and I was never able to find a decent tutorial online that would walk me through the steps.

Everything that I read in the Ubuntu forums, as well as elsewhere simply said “it worked out of the box for me, are you stupid that you cannot get it to work?” with no explanation at all as to the steps that were taken to get there.

The level of frustration reached it’s peak when I had a customer call me, because he had a need for a Rocket Stick, but it had to work on an HP Mini 1100 Netbook, that was running an HP customized distribution of Ubuntu Linux.

Being the optimist that I am, I told him that I could get it up and running for him no problem, and that I would even deliver the hardware and handle the software set up for him (he’s currently hospitalized, and I’m a chump). I figured it would take about 20 minutes of tinkering at home, and then I would be ready to go.

I got home, plugged the Stick into my laptop, right clicked on the Network Manager icon in my task bar and went to “Edit Connections” Once I got there, it was a very simply little wizard that would allow me to choose the country I live in (Canada) and then my service provider (Rogers Wireless). Simple, easy, and ready to go. Right?

Wrong.

The problem is, once you have configured the settings through Network Manager, there is no obvious indication of how to actually use the connection. There is no “Start” button. There was no indication at all of how to get the connection up and running. It turns out, to the best of my knowledge that this is a largely useless step, as you don’t even need to set anything up there at all. The good part, is it put the settings in front of you, so that you didn’t have to google them. These settings, actually get used in a PPP dial out program, I chose gnome-ppp. Off to install gnome-ppp, and away you go…if only it was so easy.

Getting gnome-ppp to dial out was a piece of cake, provided that I dialed out as root. There was no way that I could find to set the permissions properly to let a normal user dial out. After a bit of though, I actually came to the conclusion that this was a benefit to me, because someone would have to know my password to use my connection if they found my laptop, so it is something that I can live with. Strangely, I noticed after playing with it a little bit more, that once the root user had dialed out, any user who was part of the dialout group could dial, it just seemed for some reason that root had to dial first. If I try to dial out as myself, I am told that the device is busy. How…odd.

Edit: I discovered earlier today that the Network Manager Applet is indeed able to handle the connection for you, and you do not need to dial out using gnome-ppp. I was unable to see how to set the connection due to the roughly 100+ Wi-Fi access points that with in range of my apartment. Once you choose the connection, it will ask you to add the device to your keyring, and you are good to go, as any user.

Once I got this all sorted out, I delivered the hardware to my customer, installed gnome-ppp onto his machine, and we were up and running before you knew it.

Steps to Dial out, in order…

• Insert the Rocket Stick into your USB port.
• Unmount the USB key that contains the Windows Software, you do not need it.
• Right click on the network-manager applet, and choose “Edit Connections”
• Click on the Mobile Broadband tab, and add a connection as appropriate to your GSM carrier. Write all of these settings down. You will need them later.
• If it is not installed, install gnome-ppp. I imagine there is a KDE equivalent out there for you KDE users. It should work just as well.
• As root, run gnome-ppp.
  • Click on the Setup Button
  • Click the Detect Modem Button
  • Use the modem as detected. Mine was detected out of the box, but leaving the setting for Modem Type as Analog Modem, do not change it to USB. More on this later.
  • In the Options tab, I set mine to dock to the notification area when connected.
  • Copy the settings you wrote down earlier, to the dial out screen of gnome-ppp
  • Settings
    Rogers Wireless
    Username : wapuser1
    Password : wap
    Phone Number : *99#

    Fido / Microcell
    Username : fido
    Password : fido
    Phone Number : *99#

  • Hit the Connect Button, and enjoy 3G bliss…

When I got home, I decided to see what other pieces of hardware that I had at home, that I would be able to use in the same fashion.

So far, my Nokia e71i, RIM Blackberry 8120, and Nokia 5310 have all worked perfectly. A couple of the settings were a little bit different, and with the Nokia’s, you strangely have to put them into “PC Suite Mode” instead of “Connect PC to web”. It worked like a charm though.

This was all actually so easy to set up once I wrapped my head around using it as a Dial Up Modem (Who know broadband dial up existed? Not me!), that I started to look for some other ways of connecting, primarily using Bluetooth.

My Nokia e71i, also works flawlessly as a modem over a Bluetooth connection as well, if you use the instructions I found in a Blog via a google search

I’ve actually taken a couple of his steps and automated them with a simple shell script that I put into my ~/bin/ called “bt-dialer”


dan@sober: ~
$ cat bin/bt-dialout
#!/bin/bash

sudo rfcomm bind /dev/rfcomm0 00:21:FE:D5:1D:48 4

sudo gnome-ppp &

This script sets everything up for me, and dials out for me, all automagically.

You do have to double check every couple of times to make sure that your phone is still on the same Bluetooth channel. Mine changed for some random reason last night, and everything broke until I pair deleted all Bluetooth pairings on both the phone and the PC, as well as rebooted the phone. When I rebooted, I reran the steps from start to finish, to find out the phone was on Channel 2 now, instead of Channel 4. Not the end of the world, but definitely a pain in the ass.

Next step? Write a couple of switches into the script so that I can tell it what phone I happen to have with me at that moment in time.

It’s gonna be slick.

So, my e71 has been delivered.

I’ve been playing with it for a couple of days now, and my first impressions so far are very, very positive. I’ve used S40, and S60 phones for a couple of years now on a fairly consistent basis, and this device, with S60 were one of the biggest reasons that I’ve resisted the iPhone 3G since it launched half way through last year. I’ve been using an e61 for my personal phone for the last few months, and the changes between it, and this are huge, and very welcome.

Hardware
The hardware feels great in my hand. It’s a nice solid feeling phone. It’s not like some of the other “Smart Phones” that I have played with recently. It’s got a good amount of heft to it, it definitely does not feel like a cheap, plastic phone at all. The stainless steel shell, is definitely something that the rest of the industry should take a look at. I’m looking at you, Samsung. The Jack, just feels cheap compared to this thing.

For starters, the phone is noticeable smaller than the e61. It’s a slight amount wider than my Blackberry Pearl 8120, but noticeably slimmer. It hides in your pocket pretty well. The e61 always felt excessively large when I was using it. the e71, just feels right. The screen is amazingly sharp, whether I am reading an email, scrolling through a play list, or watching a movie (I used a rip of “The Count of Monte Cristo” for testing purposes), the screen impresses. It’s bright, with excellent colour reproduction. There was very little blur during the fight scenes in The Count. Playback was buttery smooth, and the volume was nice and loud as well. With a decent set of A2DP headphones (I used my Motorola HT820’s) this could almost be a commuter’s dream come true.

The keyboard on the Nokia’s feel a wee bit off though, for a couple of reasons. The button presses are not as distinct as my Blackberry’s have been. I used a 8310 Curve for most of the last 18 months, and switched out to my Pearl about 3 months ago when I felt I needed a change, and the keyboards on the ‘berries just simple feel better. This is purely subjective, so take it with a grain of salt what ever size you choose. Another thing that I don’t like about the keyboard, is that the 3rd row of keys is off by one. I will explain this later.

Wi-Fi. I’ll never doubt reasons to have Wi-fi on a phone again, now that I have played with Joiku Spot. More on this later.

The ear piece speaker seems “tinny” when I talk to people. I’m going to play with another one tomorrow and see if this is just my unit, which I think it is.

Software
As for the software, well, it’s phenomenal. I have always loved how customizable S60 phones are. It usually takes me about 20 minutes to have my phone set up “just right”, and in the case of this one, it was even quicker. The “Phone Switch” application that is kept under tools, is just awesome. It paired with my 5310 using Bluetooth, and sucked all the contacts directly from one phone to another, all in less than a minute. It was an absolute joy. I was never able to test this feature using my e61, as it arrived with a Bluetooth radio that simply never worked, I could never get it to turn on, so this was a very pleasant surprise.

JoikuSpot Light. Awesome, awesome software. This piece of software completely justifies having Wi-Fi on your 3G cell phone. It was the first 3rd party app that I have installed on this phone, and it has been just a little bit so far, but it will definitely get more use in the future. In short, it turns your GPRS/EDGE/HSPA/UMTS phone into a Wi Fi router, and let’s me connect my laptop to the ‘net anywhere that I have cell service. to the doubters, who are telling me to just tether the phone with a USB cable, or even Bluetooth, and go that route instead, all I have to say is forget it. I play with way too many different software options on my laptop (currently triple booted with Vista Premium, Ubuntu Linux 8.04, as well as FreeBSD 7.1) to bother dicking around with different methods of tethering, give me Wi Fi any day.

S60’s dialing options have always perplexed me. With *every* other phone that I have, I can press the green “go” button, and I get to a list of calls that have been made, or received. Once I am at that list, I can scroll through them, or start to dial a new number. With my S60 phones, I can only dial a new number from the home screen, not from my call log. This perplexes me to no end. I also have no yet been able to figure out how I can dial alphanumeric phone numbers on this thing. Letters or Numbers, there is no option for both, which would be great if I knew what numbers are included in 1 (800) 9 TD VISA. I don’t use phones with T9 enough to know what numbers correspond to what letters off the top of my head, and calling my credit card company tonight to order a new card was a royal pain in the ass.

Being able to print a PDF that is emailed to me, from the phone, to my Samsung Laser Printer, that is connected to my Debian Linux file and print server, over Wi Fi, gave me some serious nerd wood.

The calendar app that comes with the phone, is far, far better than what is included with my ‘berries. It gives me way more options and let’s my organize my day easier.

Rogers Wireless though, as seems to be their way, have done their best to cripple a lot of the features of the phone. I am not able to use Nokia’s “Download!” service, as Rogers seems to have diverted the link to something on their internal WAP (I’ve unlocked the phone, with some help from The Cell Phone Doctor and am using a Fido line instead.), but I will get around this once I take the time to de-brand the phone, and remove Rogers middleware junk out of the default firmware. Rogers, please, allow me to have an easier way of rmoving your branding from the device, without having to potentially brick it. I would rather buy my hardware directly from you, rather than have to deal with grey market handsets of questionable origin, but you seem to make it harder for me to do every single day.

I bought a new laptop not that long ago.

It’s a modest machine by today’s standards, I suppose, and it has more than enough hardware to do what I need it to do.

Sadly though, this is where it becomes painfully apparent that “needs” and “wants” aren’t even in the same ballpark, never mind being cozy next door neighbors.

I have in the past, spent many, many hours playing Unreal Tournament. I was never a compulsive gamer, but there was something about UT that got to me, more than any of the Quake or Doom derivatives did. I just liked it more. It was quicker, simpler, and easier to just play. I didn’t have to worry too much about if my buddies were online so we could get a game going, single player was for the most part all I really wanted, and there were more than enough servers with just a few people on them, that I could go multi if I wanted, and not get hopelessly owned over and over again, I could hold my own.

All of this, was accomplished on some -very- modest (by today’s standards) hardware, back in ‘00 or so.

The hardware?

• AMD K6-III @450. Yes, a K6-III, not a K6-II. It had the on die cache.
• 256 MB PC-100 SDRAM. Yep, good old 100mhz SDR.
• 32MB TNT2 Ultra Diamond Viper 770, later some ASUS card. The Diamond was… unstable…
• SB Live! OEM Soundcard.
• 17″ Panasonic e70i Monitor running 1024*768 @ 85hz.

Life was good, I was happy. I could frag away with out a care in the world with the game at medium settings, and get about 70 FPS, more than enough for my needs.

Imagine my surprise, when I bought UT3 the other day, and installed it on this (comparatively) muscle laden notebook. I’ll give you the short version: I’m disgusted.

Just playing the pre-rendered cut scenes pegs the CPU to maximum load, and even attempting to play in a 640*480 pixel window, with all the settings at their lowest is a jerky slide show, that actually looks worse than I remember UT1 looking. The graphics looked awful at that low of a setting, and the game was not even reasonably playable. This, on a dual core 2ghz beast, with 3 gigs of DDR2 ram, and up to 1 gig of vram (i had it set to 512mb).

It makes me wonder though, what is the real problem? Is it the game? Or is it Vista? Hell, is it just the crapware infested HP OEM install of Vista that I have for that matter?

Sadly, I can’t even put in my old UT1 CD and play that. Well, I haven’t tried, but past experience has told me I will have the exact opposite problem, where the game will play at about 3000 FPS (it did on opiate) and it will still be unplayable.

Fuck it, I’m installing Lemmings.

After hearing back from a couple of different technicians, and finding out that the repair costs for my old laptop (opiate) were out of line with reality, I went ahead and purchased a new laptop today.

It is in many ways remarkably similar to my last one. Same 14.1″ screen, similar nVidia graphics card, similar processor, much larger hard disk, and 3 times the memory.

• HP Pavilion dv2928se
• AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-60 @2ghz
• 3GG DDR2 SDRAM
• 250 GB 5400 RPM HDD
• 8X Dual Layer DVD+-RW w/ Lightscribe
• 14.1″ Widescreen HD BrightView LCD Screen (High gloss, ick…)
• nVidia geForce 7150m mobile GPU
• MS Windows Vista Home Premium (32 Bit)

The overall “Windows Experience Base Score” is 2.6. Screen shot below gives all the gory details.

So far, I haven’t played with it all that much to be honest with you. I have decided that I am going to give Vista as fair a chance as I can, to form my own opinion of it, rather than keep up with the opinions of others that I read online. I figure I will give it a week or so before I even install my beloved Ubuntu.

So far though, I’m not all that impressed. The list of short comings that I have found so far, out of the box have been surprisingly long, and infuriatingly tedious to fix.

• I hate all the CrapWare that comes preinstalled. I had forgotten just how much crap you get on an OEM install of Windows. I’ve spent about 3 hours just uninstalling garbage that came preinstalled on the machines
• Considering how much CrapWare comes installed, there is a shockingly small amount of useful software installed out of the box. I’ve been spoiled over the last few years with how bloody complete the Debian/Ubuntu desktop experience is. From word processors to terminal emulators to image editing to multi-protocol chat clients, it’s all just there.
• IE7 is not complete garbage, although there are some things about it that have irritated me at work over the last few months, that have bugged me just as much at home. It just seems slow as hell when opening a new tab.
• Speaking of IE7. How on earth do people stand dealing with all the advertisements on the web without using AdBlock Plus? Seriously, install Firefox and ABP, RFN, you will be happier.
• Constant reboots after Windows Update are getting tedious. Do it right boys.
• I just burned an Ubuntu CD, the burn took a lot longer than I was used to. I think it’s the SemiCrapTrialWare CD burning software that was included. K3B for the win.
• The recovery disks are an astonishing 13GB in size, give or take. For less software than fits comfortably on the 700MB CD I just burned. That’s a lot of CrapWare.
• It seems to work harder than it should under Vista. With iTunes importing my music collection, and my typing in this Firefox window the CPU is at 40% load, with the ram at about 45%. What gives? It should be idling nice and low.
• The Gadgets in the Windows Side Bar are kind of neat. They look a lot like the KDE Widgets that I played with a couple years back when I was monkeying with Mandrake, now Mandriva, just much more polished. I might revisit KDE.
• I despise the new Start Menu. It lasted about 20 minutes before I reverted to the “Classic” menu.

We’ll see how it goes. I’m going to do my best to give it a fair trial, but I will not be at all surprised if the Ubuntu Disks come out this weekend.

Oh, and before you ask, why not the new Macbook?

I’m down with the AMD Processor, I don’t need the extra muscle that Intel would provide, and that one spec aside this thing has better all around spec’s than the MacBook did, for $650 less. Considering that OSX would probably piss me off as much as Vista, and it would be an Ubuntu box anyway, why bother?

Oh yes, one more thing, the new hostname is sober…

It’s been a little while….

I’ve been busy as hell with work lately, and time for this place has, as I am sure you can imagine been less than existent, but I find myself with some time tonight, so I might as well fill the world in on the new toys, as well as the status of some older toys.

Opiate (The Compaq notebook) is dead. It was in my case about 2 weeks ago, I grabbed it on the way out of the store to head home, only to hear a stomach churning ‘thud’ as I realized I had not zipped up my laptop case. The machine still boots, I am able to access it over the network, and every thing seems to be fine, except the screen doesn’t come up at all. I have a tech who is looking at it, and I am hoping the repair bill will be less than $300.

Hush (The Asus EEEPC) is still kicking along with out a problem, except every since I did a dist-upgrade to xubuntu 8.04.1 my Atheros wireless card will not connect to any network that has encryption enabled. Pain in the ass. I plan on moving it back to Gutsy this weekend.

Flood (The Q6600 Media Beast White Box) is kicking along nicely as well, after being upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 as well, other than for some reason Apache will not run, it segfaults every time. I am planning on wiping the box clean this weekend, and reinstalling from scratch. Purging and reinstalling the Apache packages has not helped.

I picked up a Canon SD1000 Digital Camera around new years, I’ve put it to fairly good use, I just haven’t uploaded a lot of the pictures from it, I need to get back on that, and update the photolog script so that it works with the new systems, as well as the new host.

I bought a 1 gig iPod shuffle about 2 months ago. It’s junk.

My Blackberry 8310 has died a rather spectacular death due to leaving it in the car while camping all weekend, during a period of very heavy rain. I replaced it just yesterday with a Blackberry 8120, the Pearl with Wi-Fi. I’ve tested both the VO-IP abilities of the phone tonight, as well as the data capabilities using Wi-Fi, and so far I am impressed. Even with our cable modem maxed out on a torrent download (Debian DVD images) the call quality was reasonable, although not ideal. It would be considerably better if we had a more stable router. That’s something to ponder…

I’ve started painting again. This is detailed . It’s been nice to rekindle the old attachment, it is something that is fairly mindless for me, and let’s me take my mind off work for an hour at a time or so. I will upload more pics as my progress on that, as well as other pieces comes along.