A man with a mission...

Bluetooth Tethering with the N900 and T-Mobile

I’ve been spending the last few train rides to and from work every day trying to figure out how to tether my N900 to my laptop. While Firefox Mobile is nice, there are some things my desktop does better. I first tried using the PC Suite from Nokia, but that wasn’t successful (it apparently doesn’t support the N900). I then tried JoikuSpot, which is in beta. Sadly, I encountered the “phone reboots when clients connect” bug. However, if they fix that, that piece of software looks very promising. I finally went down the road to Bluetooth Networking.

In order to pull this off, you’ll need to get a handy little application from the Application Manager. Under the Network section, look for “Bluetooth Dial-Up Networking” in the Extras repository. After you install that, you will want to restart your device. Next, pair your N900 with you laptop (this varies per operating system. I used Windows 7 and these instructions will assume that). After pairing the device, add a new Dial-Up connection on that modem. The phone number will be *99# and you will leave the user name and password blank. Save the connection, but cancel it when it tries to dial (it will fail anyway). Now, launch the device manager, and find the Bluetooth modem that should have been installed when you paired the N900 to your computer. Open its properties, and go to the Advanced tab and set the Extra initialization commands to at+cgdcont=1,"IP","epc.tmobile.com". After this, you should be able to connect to the Internet though your phone.

To prove that it works, I wrote this on the train, and I’m posting while still on the train. :P

I found this particular wiki page to very useful in setting this up, but I found translating the instructions to Windows 7 to be a bit difficult at times.

March 1, 2010 | Filed Under Mozilla, Personal | 3 Comments 

25 Random Things About Me

I’ve been tagged a number of times by the “seven things” and now the “25 things” meme going on around the Internets. I figure that 25 > 7, so 25 things must be a superset of seven things. Hurray for killing two birds with one stone.

I’m supposed to put the “rules” here, so here they are:
Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you.

Taggers:

(maybe more – I’ve been putting this off for a bit)

Now for 25 Things:

  1. I love to learn new things.
  2. I’m oblivious to a lot of things in life. Some people equate that to me not caring, which is mostly wrong.
  3. I’m shy, but if you know me, you might think I’m lying.
  4. At one point, I forced myself to not have an opinion on a lot of things. This is now pretty natural. It is how I reduce stress in my life (don’t sweat the little stuff). As a result, I sometimes say that apathy is my anti-everything.
  5. I love my job. I really really do.
  6. I have never been to a concert. Ever.
  7. I only drink mixed drinks and wine. With that said, I barely ever drink.
  8. I love to read Science Fiction, but never make time to go get a book to read. Once I get the book I tear through it though.
  9. I have an incredibly strong inability to lie. My only defense is not answering a question, or omitting information.
  10. I can’t cook. I’m working on fixing that.
  11. When I was young, I wanted to be an astronaut. I even went to space camp. Yes, it was awesome.
  12. If you ask me a direct question, you’ll get an honest and sincere answer. You may also not like the answer. Or, you’ll get no answer (see #9).
  13. I like random. I try to do something random every day. Keeps me on my toes.
  14. I always have too many projects I’m “active” in. I’m working on changing that to make my life more manageable.
  15. I have officiated soccer since I was 12. I don’t know why, but I like doing it.
  16. I love humor. I employ it as often as possible (goes great with #13).
  17. I love running. I don’t get to do it often enough.
  18. It’s easy to gain my trust, and it’s easy to lose it. Getting it back is near impossible.
  19. I’m generally open about myself, but there are many things that I am extremely reserved about.
  20. I am essentially blind without contacts or glasses.
  21. I don’t drink coffee. This tends to surprise people.
  22. I have been on fire. Literally.
  23. I often say things without thinking. Hilarity ensues.
  24. I’m not big on talking on the phone. This probably has something to do with #23.
  25. I love living in California, but it’s made me soft when it comes to fluctuations in the temperature.

Now for the folks I’m tagging. List of names ordered randomly by my computer. For the record, 25 people is a lot of people.

(If you want your last name removed from my website, just let me know.)

January 31, 2009 | Filed Under Personal | Comments Off 

Finer-grained Controls for Clearing Private Data

I semi-recently did some work to add a nice new feature for Firefox 3.1. The feature is “Forget About This Site,” and is a nice addition to our Clear Private Data and Private Browsing features. Any time you view a history entry (in the history sidebar or in the Library) you get a handy context menu item:
Forget About This Site Screenshot

That’s right! You can now selectively clear data from a domain (and all of it’s sub domains) with two clicks of the mouse! This tries to clear everything we know about a site, with the exception of bookmarks. There are still a number of issues pending with this to make it even more powerful (help wanted!), but as it stands, it’s pretty nice. I am, of course, biased.

All this work made it in for Firefox 3.1 beta 2, but I’ve been lazy and am just now getting to it.

December 16, 2008 | Filed Under Mozilla, Personal | 9 Comments 

Artistic Blog Representation

I wanted to see what I was writing about looked like after reading KaiRo’s post about his site. So, I jumped on over to Wordle (which sadly uses Java), and generated this:


Click to see full image

Clearly, I write a lot about Mozilla, and as of late, performance has dominated that topic. It’s funny, because some time this week I was going to write another blog post about performance too…

Side note: It’d be really cool if someone made a WordPress widget that generated this.

December 10, 2008 | Filed Under Mozilla, Personal | 5 Comments 

WordPress Upgraded and a New Theme

I just got done upgrading WordPress again. I was a bit out of date, but no longer! I also got tired of iTheme, so I’ve gone and grabbed Whitespace by Brian Gardner. I’m not totally happy with it, so I expect to be making some modifications, but I like it a lot better than iTheme.

Let me know if anything seems broken…

December 7, 2008 | Filed Under Personal | 1 Comment 

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