Cocoa Crusty

With the ever increasing release of Bluetooth® enabled cell phones and good friends like Troyz R Us, nothing is impossible… Well, almost nothing. Some things are still impossible but you know what I mean.

This morning I called Troy extension-to-extension and asked him if he had any ring tones that I might be interested in. Troy sent me “Throw Some D’s” by Rich Boy through the wall. Troy’s on one side of the wall, I’m on the other in a different office, and we still were able to send files via Bluetooth®.

What a great technology for close range (20-30 feet) networking and file transfers. Bluetooth® can communicate through walls, trees, people, small children, furry woodland creatures, professional recording studios, across buildings, car-to-car, rooftop-to-rooftop, house-to-house, whatever. As long as you’re in range, you’re good to go! Nice!

Until next time…

First of all, let me just ask, is it 11:54PM or 10:54PM… My mind and body can’t tell. The time change last night appears to have taken place already on all of my physical clocks, computers, etc., but my mind hasn’t really caught on yet. Just to be safe I have ironed my clothes for tomorrow and have already shaved my head and face. I don’t expect that my alarm going off at 6:35AM (5:35AM “my time”) tomorrow morning will have a very nice effect on me and I just might get up a little late… We’ll see.

I should also let everyone know (you know who all 3.234 of you are) that I didn’t ever get around to creating my giant poster (or was it a huge poster?) this weekend. I ended up doing some things around the house, working on a couple of projects for FS, and went to work today with Chris.

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I recently posted an entry titled “Using a Nokia E61 for internet Access in OS X” that discussed, you’ll never guess, how I got my Nokia E61 working with my Apple MacBook for Internet access when no WLAN or LAN is available.

I think the combination of the Bluetooth® phone and the MacBook works pretty well. I mean, think about it, this isn’t your primary Internet connection. When you’re out and about and need access to something on the Internet like e-mail, directions to a location, etc., it works great. Of course, with my phone, I can access this type of information directly from the Symbian OS based web browser, but when you want to sit down and use something a little more comfortable and familiar, this setup is more acceptable.

So, I did some preliminary testing of the data speeds using Speakeasy’s Speedtest site to see what kinds of speeds I am getting when using my phone as a modem with my MacBook. I figured this information would come in handy for anyone looking to use their phone in a similar fashion. It will also help you decide if the speeds are enough to warrant the extra money you’ll be forking out each month for an unlimited data plan with your cellular carrier.

Also, keep in mind that these data speeds are based on the cellular service here in the greater Texarkana area. Your performance will vary based on the coverage available in your area and the compression and speed options available through your carrier. Here comes the data:

As you can see, based on the testing that I did today from the house during lunch, I averaged 116.2 kilobytes per second down and 78 kilobytes per second up. That’s not too bad. It’s better than dial-up. It’s pretty close to a bonded ISDN line. However, when I was working at that client site the other night, which is located in the center of Texarkana right off of the Interstate, I had downstream speeds up to 212 kbps and upstream speeds nearing 114 kbps.

I think it is all going to depend on where you are in relation to the cell towers, what type of equipment you have around you that might be interfering with the Bluetooth® connection and the cellular reception, where your phone is located in relation to your laptop, and what type of data quality your carrier provides.

As for me, this will be a great alternative for accessing the Internet when a decent broadband connection is not available. I also look forward to using this type of connection in hotels when traveling. You don’t know how many times I have tried to get a hotel’s “free wireless Internet” service to work and have been unsuccessful, left with no connection to the digital extension of myself that is the Internet. I have to stay connected!

Until next time…

Last night, while working at a client site, I started messing around with my Nokia E61 and my MacBook so I could get Internet access while working at the client’s office without having to jack in to their local network. My phone and laptop are both Bluetooth® enabled so I figured why not give it a shot.

I did some quick research and found that it would be extremely easy to set this up within Mac OS X. When I first paired my phone with my MacBook I remembered it asking me if i wanted to use my phone for Internet access. At the time I said no but last night I kind of changed my mind.

The first and last site I stumbled upon was Ross Barkman’s home page. This site has a number of mobile phone scripts available for use within the Internet Connect software but I was unable to get any of those to work in my situation. I used the built-in Nokia Infared script and it worked like a champ. I did use a section of Ross’ site, located here, that has a lot of information for different carriers in multiple countries for the connection settings to use when logging on to the Internet through my cell phone’s GPRS connection.

If you’re using a newer Bluetooth® enabled phone and want to set it up as a modem for your Mac laptop or other machine, I say just give it a try. Find your carrier’s information in the link provided above, or here, and go for it! I think you’ll be impressed with how easy and painless the setup is within Mac OS X.

Until next time…

I used Apple’s iChat instant messaging application today. I have seen a lot of people singing the high praises of this chat client ever since I got my MacBook in October of 2006. I didn’t have any friends or otherwise who used a Mac so I haven’t had a chance to try it out until this morning.

I stumbled upon a previous reader of the average admins blog recently on Flickr and sent him a message, he added me as a Flickr Contact, I saw he used ICQ, added him to my Adium contact list, and then we started chatting. He (Jesús) lives in Spain so we were just kicking it, talking about “regalo whatnots” when he asked me if I had ever used iChat. Of course, being the honest person that I am, I said no.

We fired up iChat, added each other’s .mac accounts to our clients and started chatting. Jesús started showing me the ropes of iChat. The video and voice quality of this chat client is phenomenal. He would move his mouth to speak, I saw it and heard it at almost the exact time. Little to no latency with the video and voice syncing up. Pretty impressive.

Jesús then showed me how to drag and drop files into the chat window for transfer or viewing and how multi-person video conferencing worked. This chat client is pretty impressive. Of course, it was developed and distributed by Apple, so what do you expect?!

Anyway, I’m glad Jesús offered to show me the ropes of iChat. It is a very impressive instant messenging client as well as video and voice over IP client. Thanks for the class in iChat, Jesús!

Until next time…