JonCellini.com

Killing time at the MSP airport.

Today, I got my Nokia 3650 to work as a GPRS modem for my PC with surprisingly little hassle. Since the T-Mobile plan I have includes unlimited GPRS data services using the phone as a modem incurs no airtime or bandwidth consumption charges. It is also faster than a traditional dialup connection as GPRS connections connect up at 115.2 Kbps. From what I have read online this should work with any T-Zones account as they include unlimited GPRS data services. This is much more convenient that having to deal with a traditional dialup ISP like Earthlink and the price can’t be beat!

Making it work with my Windows XP machine was surprisingly simple:

1. pair up the computer and the phone via Bluetooth (for help see adventures with Bluetooth)
2. configure a new dialup connection using your Bluetooth modem
• use a blank username
• use a blank password
• dial *99#
3. enjoy wireless Internet access!

The connection isn’t as fast as broadband, but it is definitely usable.

Found in our front yard.

Today Heather and I went to the North American Specialty Coffee & Beverage Retailers’ Expo (NASCORE) that was being held here in Portland. Heather’s school was one of the sponsors of the Expo so we were able to get free tickets to attend and walk around the exhibit hall. I got a chance to sample a lot of good coffee, lust after some neat commercial espresso machines, and leave with a bunch of samples and swag. It was a fun way to spend the afternoon even though neither of us are in the “industry” per say.

Ever since I converted my blog over to WordPress I have been at a loss for a good moblogging solution. In the past I had been using a script found at Tokyo Tidbits which worked well and could be called easily from procmail. Unfortunately once I had converted to WordPress I found it would no longer work as it uses the metaweblog API to create blog posts. WordPress supports this API, however, the current implementation is lacking support for media objects making posting pictures problematic.

I spent a while looking for WordPress compatible solutions but the ones I found either didn’t work or were simply too cumbersome requiring a script to run periodically to check to see if mail was waiting to be processed. Personally I think the procmail method is a better way to tackle this problem as it doesn’t require the overhead of firing off a script that will 99% of the time find nothing to do and also avoids the added complexity of handing the mail interfacing.

A few weeks ago I came across Dr Dave’s WP-keitai-mail Plugin (a script actually) that can be used just like the Tokyo Tidbits script. I had some time to kill Saturday afternoon so I configured it and it works great. Since it is fired up from procmail it was trivial to change over to using it. It works great with my Nokia 3650 phone making posting as easy as sending an email message. I need to do a bit more experimenting with Heather’s phone as it is crippled to only be able to use the T-Mobile MMS relays which have the annoying habit of tacking on a bunch of extra crap to messages which causes the script to behave erratically.

We are off to the North American Specialty Coffee and Beverage Retailers’ Expo in the morning so if I see anything cool I’ll post some pics.

Pictures taken at the fighter’s green setup during the “Medieval Market” day at the Beaverton Farmers Market.