Community Matters

Here’s something I think is really missing. Some vendors (like RIM with their BlackBerry service) manage to offer you a basically global data rate that allows you to access your email in any country with a GPRS or EDGE network (which means all but Japan, Korea and a couple more countries) at an affordable price.

But no one seems to be able to offer something similar for EDGE modem service (either through a USB modem, or through a phone like the Motorola Ming or others that can offer data service via Bluetooth) so that you could use your computer over this service. The international data rates that AT&T or T-Mobile will offer you are just simply outrageous – checking email can cost you ten dollars if you are in a different country.

I’ll keep searching…

The rumors keep going back and forth. Der Standard (sorry, in German) writes that there will be a 10″ screen version next year, eeeuser (and several other sites) claim that those rumors are false.

While it’s clear that Asus has no interest in throttling interest in the current 7″ version, taking a close look at the case of the current model makes it very obvious why people think that this is the next step. A 9.3″ or 9.4″ display would fit perfectly. And there are a number of LCDs on the market in that size, resolutions around 1024×600 (or 800×480 – but that wouldn’t make sense). A 9.4″ 1024×600 eeePC 908 or even 916 (making up those model number… compare to 704 – 7″ with 4GB SSD) would be the absolute killer product. Asus, are you listening?

This is an update to an older post of mine that dealt with this same issue under Tiger. Since I wrote that post I have upgraded to Leopard and found out that things are once again different. So her are the instructions for Leopard.

Let’s start with something that has nothing to do with the OS your are running on your Mac. The Motorola Ming (or A1200) supports EDGE! It seems all phones shipped so far have this feature disabled, but there’s a detailed post that explains how to enable EDGE on Motorolahelper. Using EDGE appears to drain the battery even faster than using GPRS, but it does give you a nice speed boost (still nowhere near 3G speed, but at least now you are on par with an iPhone…).

But let’s get to the real story – making this work with Leopard!

Leopard changed the format of the Modem Scripts and brings many new configuration options. That’s all nice and well, except that the initialization sequence it uses for Motorola GPRS phones is simply wrong! So the first thing you need to do is to update the modem properties in
/Library/Modem Scripts/Generic GPRS.ccl/Contents/Info.plist. Double click it in Finder and the Property List Editor will open. Click on the little triangle in front of Root, then on the little triangle in front of CCL Personalities and then on the one in front of Motorola GPRS and finally CCL Parameters.

Now double click on the value that is there and replace it with &FE0V1&C1S0=0 and hit return. Click Save in the File menu and close the application.

Next you go through the steps to pair with the phone and setup the connection details.

1. Enable Bluetooth on your Ming (you can do this with the Bluetooth application that you can find in the Home folder or via the the status screen that you get when clicking on the status bar that includes the battery indicator and time). Make sure you set it to be discoverable.
2. On the Mac, open System Preferences -> Bluetooth.
3. Click on the ‘+’ sign in the lower left corner which opens the Bluetooth Setup Assistant. Click Continue, select Mobile Phone and again click Continue

You should now see your phone listed – if not, make sure it is still discoverable (that lasts only for 3 minutes) and make sure Bluetooth is turned on on your Mac.

4. With your Ming highlighted click on Continue again. The Mac is “gathering information on your device”. If this is the first time you pair the computer with the phone via Bluetooth you’ll be asked to enter a numeric passphrase on the phone. Once that is done once again click Continue.
5. On the next screen make sure that “Access the Internet with your phone’s data connection” is enabled and click Continue again.
6. Now you are at the “Bluetooth Mobile Phone Set Up” screen. Select Phone Vendor Motorola, Phone Model GPRS (GSM/3G) (that’s the one we just fixed). Username tmobile, Password tmobile, APN internet2.voicestream.com and CID 2. Make sure that “Show Modem status in the menu bar” is selected.

The screen should look like this:

Clicking Continue again gets you to the final screen that sums up your settings.

Now you can click on the little phone symbol in your menu bar, select Bluetooth and connect to the internet!

I like the eeePC that I got a couple of weeks ago. It’s light, it’s tiny. It has a neat little Xandros Linux based OS on it. But for what I want, that one has to go. I’m now running Fedora 8 on it and am really beginning to like it. There are still some oddities with getting the network to cooperate:

• Fedora recognizes the Atheros wireless adapter, but it isn’t able to connect to any of my networks (it sees them and tries to connect but then fails); I’ll need to play with the Madwifi drivers some more
• Fedora doesn’t recognize the wired network adapter at all, but there’s a kernel module available at the eeeDora project that gets that going

Other things that are hurdles right now are the limited space on the SSD (4Gig) and the not very trust inspiring touchpad that frequently needs “reminding” in order to cooperate…

But overall… we’re getting there!

Turns out that today Seagate acknowledged that there is a problem with their FreeAgent drives going to sleep. The suggested workaround? Attach the drive to a Windows machine, install the Windows driver, open the Seagate Tools app and adjust the drive sleep interval to “never”.

Besides being highly inconvenient to have to do this – what do you do if you don’t have a Windows computer?

I still recommend staying away from these drives, especially when planning to use them with a TiVoHD. My sub-30-dollar external enclosure works brilliantly with the “liberated” drive that I extracted from the FreeAgent.

Since TiVo switched to software release 9.2 and enabled external eSata drives on the Series 3 and the TiVoHD I had been playing with the idea of throwing out my horrible Motorola HDDVR that we got from Comcast and instead put in a TiVoHD with two CableCards.

I finally bought one last week when I found a sale locally so that I could pick it up in person. And I got myself an eSata drive so I could extend storage to a more reasonable level. That’s where the problems began.

First, it takes Comcast a week to come by our house and hand us the CableCards. What a joke. And they’ll charge os for a “technician” coming here instead of just sending the card and allowing me to pluck them in. Argl.

Second, it turns out that while the more expensive Series 3 allows you to connect more or less any eSata drive, the cheaper TiVoHD only allows the one TiVo co-branded DVR Expander to be used – which of course is once again quite a bit more expensive than any other eSata drive.

There is a tool that allows you to “hack” the internal drive of the TiVoHD, so this is a problem that can be worked around. Still, it’s annoying. I used the Linux version, set up the drives and tried to connect everything and that’s where the real problems started. The TiVoHD didn’t find the external drive, but since I had modified the internal drive it knew that there was supposed to be an external drive and no longer booted.

Googling first got me to several articles that pointed out that there are two different types of eSata cables and that the TiVos only worked with one of them. So I got that. Still no success.

Some more searching (and observing of the behavior of the external drive when connected to the TiVoHD) got me on the right track. It turns out that the new Seagate FreeAgent (no link, they are evil) external drives try to do smart things with power management. They don’t have a real on-off switch and rely on a special Windows driver to do the right thing to keep them running. Which of course the TiVo doesn’t do and therefore fails to talk to them.

So I cracked open the case (there’s no way to open it – you literally have to destroy it with brute force), extracted the drive, put it into a cheap external enclosure with a real on/off switch, connected that to the TiVoHD an everything worked…

Hope this helps some others in a similar situation. And if you read this before buying the eSata drive: get one with a real on/off switch – or even better, get a cheap enclosure and a SATA drive and build your own – almost certainly cheaper and much more likely to work in the end.