Mobile

CyanogenMod on HTC Desire on Orange UK

2011-06-05
I installed CyanogenMod on my HTC Desire about a week ago in an attempt to get rid of some of the crapware that Orange UK are notorious for installing, and get a snappier, cleaner phone. I won’t repeat the excellent CyanogenMod install instructions, which you can find here. However, here are some points that might help you if you’re doing something similar: The OS (Android) firmware and the radio firmware are two separate things.

Orange/T-Mobile Roaming

2010-10-16
I recently started using Orange’s new roaming service that allows you to roam on T-Mobile’s network, in the same way as you might roam around networks when you are abroad. So far experiences are very positive. The phone remains on Orange most of the time, which is fortunate as 3G/HSxPA signals are only available via the Orange network. However, when a signal isn’t available, it seems to roam fairly quickly and efficiently onto T-Mobile’s network.

Huawei K4505 with Ubuntu 10.04

2010-07-30
I just acquired a new Vodafone Mobile Broadband modem to replace an aging ExpressCard version I had that wasn’t working too well. It came in the form of a Vodafone-branded Huawei K4505 USB stick. It didn’t work completely out-of-the-box with Ubuntu 10.04, at first appearing unrecognisable. After some hunting, I discovered that these sticks initially present themselves as USB Mass Storage to allow you to install the Windows drivers. You have to give a few magic incantations on Linux to make them switch into modem mode:

Vodafone 3G - Position Your Card Right!

2009-02-13
I’ve written before about how poor the Vodafone 3G Mobile Connect client is, and the alternative in Windows. However, it’s also worth mentioning that the card itself is far from perfect. It is very sensitive to the position of the SIM Card - having it off by even a few millimetres can mean it doesn’t connect, and it’s not always obvious what is wrong. The crucial thing is to have it poking out of the top, but only by half a millimetre or so.

Avoid Vodafone Mobile Connect client in Windows

2009-01-15
If you’re anything like me, you _hate _the Vodafone Mobile Connect client - it’s buggy, unstable, and requires frequent reboots/restarts/taking-the-card-out-and-putting-it-back-in-again to make it work. What I only discovered today - although I should have known from ancient dial-up modem connections years ago - was that you can just use the regular ‘Network Connections’ facility of Windows. Just locate the ‘Vodafone Mobile Connect’ entry, right-click and select ‘Connect’ (I think this will only appear once you’ve installed the Vodafone software):

New Delicious - For Mobile Once Again

2008-08-07
Used to be, I employed a cunning trick I found on the web to create a quick ’n’ dirty homepage for my browser on my mobile - all the delicious bookmarks I’d tagged with mtag. Then delicious went and released a new version and this trick broke. After a bit of fiddling, I’ve found a reasonable alternative. feed.informer will take any RSS feed and turn it into fairly plain HTML. So take your RSS feed, which might look something like this: