Entry tags:
outlet grounding hack
Qiao showed me something neat. If you have an ungrounded outlet, but have an HVAC vent nearby, often the vent or vent screws are grounded. So you can connect a wire from the outlet to the vent to ground it.
2009-09-27
Tokio Hotel
I stumbled across a German music band named "Tokio Hotel". (Okay, I clicked the Random LJ link, and what I got must have been a fan page because it had a bunch of photos of an intriguingly gorgeous looking person, so then I googled...)
In the first video of theirs I watched, I thought the lead vocalist was an androgynous boyish seeming female person.
Monsoon
Then I looked at the band's Wikipedia entry, and was surprised to read that the band has identical twin brothers, one of whom (Bill) is the lead vocalist.
In this video, his (?) voice sounds more masculine:
Scream
I also found this video, which isn't the band's music, but it's a cute dancy song that someone combined with clips of the band. I'm amazed at how feminine / androgynous Bill looks. I was wondering if he might be MTF, but I found no mention of that. Maybe intersex? Or maybe just unusually pretty?
He looks like a young new Boy George. And the band is like a new Culture Club, with the media attention on the handsome lead singer, and apparently with a large following of teenage girls.
Pretty picture. Looks like Vanyel.
In the first video of theirs I watched, I thought the lead vocalist was an androgynous boyish seeming female person.
Monsoon
Then I looked at the band's Wikipedia entry, and was surprised to read that the band has identical twin brothers, one of whom (Bill) is the lead vocalist.
In this video, his (?) voice sounds more masculine:
Scream
I also found this video, which isn't the band's music, but it's a cute dancy song that someone combined with clips of the band. I'm amazed at how feminine / androgynous Bill looks. I was wondering if he might be MTF, but I found no mention of that. Maybe intersex? Or maybe just unusually pretty?
He looks like a young new Boy George. And the band is like a new Culture Club, with the media attention on the handsome lead singer, and apparently with a large following of teenage girls.
Pretty picture. Looks like Vanyel.
Tokio Hotel - more
They sing in German too. Here's a version of the Monsoon video in German. The bandmembers look so young in that one... the copyright is 2005, so the twins must have only been 14 or 15 back then. I was wondering if maybe they started out as a boy-band, put together by some producer, but the Wiki entry says that they started the band on their own.
I like this song/video a lot...
Don't Jump
That one's available in German too, but the English one sounds better to me.
Another cute fan-created vid. Culture Club didn't start out that young.
Clips from a Geman interview with little Bill when he was only 11 or 12 years old, when he performed on a German Star-Search type show. (The page says he was 13, but that is wrong.) In the clip, he sings a bit of "It's raining men" - LOL, such a cute youngster.
You know, it's weird, but it's like with Hansen... it seemed neater to me when I thought the boy was a boyish girl... that seemed so much more cool... now it's just a cute-looking boyish boy.
I like this song/video a lot...
Don't Jump
That one's available in German too, but the English one sounds better to me.
Another cute fan-created vid. Culture Club didn't start out that young.
Clips from a Geman interview with little Bill when he was only 11 or 12 years old, when he performed on a German Star-Search type show. (The page says he was 13, but that is wrong.) In the clip, he sings a bit of "It's raining men" - LOL, such a cute youngster.
You know, it's weird, but it's like with Hansen... it seemed neater to me when I thought the boy was a boyish girl... that seemed so much more cool... now it's just a cute-looking boyish boy.
Entry tags:
Boostmobile cellphone tethering and i465 cable problem
On my desktop computer, I basically tried to follow the instructions on this page at www.booststuff.com.
However, it did not work exactly as described, because
1. I already had the USB drivers installed.
2. (more importantly) On my cellphone, I had the USB Reader mode enabled. So when I connected the phone to the computer, it was just acting like a USB drive instead of a modem.
Because of #2, the network connection I had created based on the instructions kept trying to use my regular dial-up modem instead of using the cellphone as the modem. So I temporarily disabled the dial-up modem, and manually added a new modem entry for "Motorola IDEN USB modem" under Control Panel - Phone and Modem Options. But when trying to connect with that modem entry, it still wasn't working. I kept getting the error "Error 692: There was a hardware failure in the modem (or other connecting device)".
To correct #2, on the phone I had to open the menu item Settings - Memory Card - USB Connection and change the selection from "Reader Enabled" to "Reader Disabled".
Once I had done this, then when I reconnected the phone to the computer, I got the popup "Found New Hardware (Motorola iDEN USB Modem)" and XP did whatever was necessary so that the phone could be used as a modem.
Note: With this tethering, the cellphone is not used as a dial-up modem, rather it provides the connection to the internet which is already available on the cellphone.
Then I still was getting the same error, because the modem entry I had set up manually was using COM2 (since I didn't know which port to select when I set it up). Once I changed it to COM3, the tethering worked fine.
On my laptop, getting the tethering to work was much easier. However, based on how I had done it on my desktop, I thought I had to set up the modem manually on the laptop too. That presented a problem, as the wizard didn't have any ports listed for selection. So I wasn't able to add the modem manually. The thing to keep in mind is that once you have the drivers installed, when you connect the phone to the computer (with the phone *not* in USB card reader mode), the modem entry gets added automatically - you shouldn't have to add the modem entry manually. The Motorola driver download page makes it sound like the driver installation will prompt you to connect the phone to the computer. But I didn't get any prompt. So once the drivers are installed, you just connect the phone to the computer and let the device be discovered.
As I mentioned before, the internet speed on Boost is relatively slow - as slow or slower than dial-up. So I'm not planning on using the tethering except on rare occasions. But I tried out Opera 10 with Turbo enabled on my laptop, and it worked well. It's still like dial-up used to be though, where you have to wait a while for the pages to load.
.
Now, with Q's cellphone, a Clutch i465, we had a different problem. We were trying to install Opera mini on it. That phone doesn't even have a USB card reader mode. But when we connected the phone to the computer, we didn't get the sound you get when you connect a USB device. Turns out that the plastic part of the plug on the Rocketfish universal USB to micro-USB cable we had bought was too big - it was preventing the micro USB plug from going all the way into the phone socket. So it looked like it was connected, but it wasn't really.
Q tried another cable which had the same problem, so now we've ordered one which is made specifically for the i465.
However, it did not work exactly as described, because
1. I already had the USB drivers installed.
2. (more importantly) On my cellphone, I had the USB Reader mode enabled. So when I connected the phone to the computer, it was just acting like a USB drive instead of a modem.
Because of #2, the network connection I had created based on the instructions kept trying to use my regular dial-up modem instead of using the cellphone as the modem. So I temporarily disabled the dial-up modem, and manually added a new modem entry for "Motorola IDEN USB modem" under Control Panel - Phone and Modem Options. But when trying to connect with that modem entry, it still wasn't working. I kept getting the error "Error 692: There was a hardware failure in the modem (or other connecting device)".
To correct #2, on the phone I had to open the menu item Settings - Memory Card - USB Connection and change the selection from "Reader Enabled" to "Reader Disabled".
Once I had done this, then when I reconnected the phone to the computer, I got the popup "Found New Hardware (Motorola iDEN USB Modem)" and XP did whatever was necessary so that the phone could be used as a modem.
Note: With this tethering, the cellphone is not used as a dial-up modem, rather it provides the connection to the internet which is already available on the cellphone.
Then I still was getting the same error, because the modem entry I had set up manually was using COM2 (since I didn't know which port to select when I set it up). Once I changed it to COM3, the tethering worked fine.
On my laptop, getting the tethering to work was much easier. However, based on how I had done it on my desktop, I thought I had to set up the modem manually on the laptop too. That presented a problem, as the wizard didn't have any ports listed for selection. So I wasn't able to add the modem manually. The thing to keep in mind is that once you have the drivers installed, when you connect the phone to the computer (with the phone *not* in USB card reader mode), the modem entry gets added automatically - you shouldn't have to add the modem entry manually. The Motorola driver download page makes it sound like the driver installation will prompt you to connect the phone to the computer. But I didn't get any prompt. So once the drivers are installed, you just connect the phone to the computer and let the device be discovered.
As I mentioned before, the internet speed on Boost is relatively slow - as slow or slower than dial-up. So I'm not planning on using the tethering except on rare occasions. But I tried out Opera 10 with Turbo enabled on my laptop, and it worked well. It's still like dial-up used to be though, where you have to wait a while for the pages to load.
.
Now, with Q's cellphone, a Clutch i465, we had a different problem. We were trying to install Opera mini on it. That phone doesn't even have a USB card reader mode. But when we connected the phone to the computer, we didn't get the sound you get when you connect a USB device. Turns out that the plastic part of the plug on the Rocketfish universal USB to micro-USB cable we had bought was too big - it was preventing the micro USB plug from going all the way into the phone socket. So it looked like it was connected, but it wasn't really.
Q tried another cable which had the same problem, so now we've ordered one which is made specifically for the i465.