darkoshi: (Default)
I'm in Florida this week at a customer site for meetings. My hotel room is very nice. It is being charged to the customer, at the "special" rate of $119/night (I wonder how high the regular rate is). The meeting today at the customer's office went fine. Now I'm back at the hotel trying to connect to my work VPN, and the hotel internet connection is so slow that I haven't been able to connect. The speed is currently about 23 kbps - slower than a slow dial-up connection. (Hmmm, I wonder if my cell-phone's internet speed might even be faster than that...?) The front desk said it is due to them having a "full house".

It's disappointing to have a nice fancy hotel room - without a bad smell in the air (that's the most important thing); with real glass drinking glasses instead of disposable plastic ones; with little accent lights and nice wood furnishings; with a thin-screen TV; with a nice clean rug; with a nice desk - but without good internet access.

I've got work to do to prepare for one of tomorrow's meetings, but I'm not able to do it because of this.

ETA: I tested my cell-phone's internet speed, and it got 19.1 kbps. Now I have the hotel room's window open and am hearing an unusual calling sound. I wonder what kind of animal is making it. At lunch-time at the customer's office, I asked if there were benches outside, and they said yes, out back by the pond, but to watch out for the alligator that lives in the pond!

(no subject)

Saturday, August 14th, 2010 06:35 pm
darkoshi: (Default)
I'm sitting in the passenger side of the car, travelling homewards. The traffic conditions on I-95 in Virginia were a nightmare.

We have a DC-to-AC converter plugged into one of the cigarette lighters, so that we can charge both our cell-phones and our laptops while driving. Qiao has a little GPS unit which is plugged into his laptop via a USB cable, and we are using a map program on the laptop to navigate with. I have my cell-phone tethered to the laptop, for internet access. I've used it to look up vegan restaurants in the area, and am now using it to post to LJ. For a little while, I had both laptops out on my lap, in order to copy some files from one to the other with a flash drive. I'm using the Opera browser with turbo-boost enabled, as my cell-phone's internet is at dial-up speed. But it works!
darkoshi: (Default)
Strange. On 12/06/09, I got a text message to my boostmobile cell phone saying "We've successfully processed your Plan Change to Pay-As-You-Go." It was odd because my plan was already pay-as-you-go, and I hadn't changed anything. But now I just noticed Boost hasn't been charging me the 35 cent per day for web-access since then, even though the web is still working on my phone, and I've used it.

I wonder if this is some snafu on their end.
darkoshi: (Default)
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.
darkoshi: (Default)
Q's got a new Boost cellphone, and I've been looking up how to install Opera Mini on it like I did on mine.

I ran across a thread on tethering, which is connecting your cellphone to a computer and using it as a modem in order for the computer to connect to the internet. This is supposedly possible with Boost phones, and if you're paying for a plan which includes internet access, it might even be allowed by Boost's TOS - I found conflicting reports about it. I found a section in the TOS which seems relevant, but it isn't totally clear to me whether it disallows tethering or not, especially if you only use it once in a while, not as your main internet connection:

Specific Terms & Restrictions On Using Data Services
In addition to the rules for using all of our other Services, unless authorized by us, you can’t use our data Services: (1) with server devices or host computer applications, or other systems that drive continuous heavy traffic or data sessions; and (2) as a substitute or backup for private lines or frame relay connections. We reserve the right to limit, suspend or constrain any heavy, continuous data usage that adversely impacts our network performance or hinders access to our network.


Of course, the internet connection from Boost is rather slow. But hey, it could be better than nothing, right? And if for some reason using the browser on the phone doesn't suffice for something, being able to connect it to a laptop would be cool.

Opera 10 was recently released with a Turbo feature which speeds up browsing on slow connections by compressing the data that is sent to the browser. I think I'll try connecting my laptop to my phone, and try it out!
darkoshi: (Default)
Remember how ever since I got my Boost cell-phone last year, the voice-mail indicator has not worked? Last January, after activating the phone, I spent a couple hours on the phone with customer support, and they were not able to get it fixed, and finally said I'd have to contact Motorola, as it must be a problem with the phone itself.

Well. Last week was the first time I accidentally did not add money to my account prior to the expiration date. I was a few days late - not late enough that I lost my number or anything, just that my phone services were temporarily disabled.

Yesterday, after turning on my cell-phone, I was surprised by a message indicating that I had 4 voicemails! And a little envelope icon displayed at the top of the screen!

So, having my account expire must have fixed or reset whatever the problem was.

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