My latest post on O'Reilly's Inside iPhone is A Glimpse of Our Tethering Future where I recount my experiences working with a Nokia E71 and an application called JoikuSpot that turns the E71 into a 3G-powered ad hoc WiFi access point that you can carry in your pocket.

My use of the Nokia E71 is courtesy of the Nokia Blogger Relations Program.

After a solid week of 3G phone use with laptop (and iPhone) tethering, I've convinced myself that my concerns about iPhone battery consumption while running an application like Netshare from Nullriver are overblown. This can work and any increased battery use can be managed.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I haven't really talked about AirCell or its Gogo inflight Internet access service since it first became available on American Airlines. But Andy Abramson turned me on to a little experiment with the service that he and Laptop Magazine's Joanna Stern did yesterday that is absolutely worthy of mention.

Andy reports that he and Joanna were able to carry on a voice conversation via Aircell Gogo while Joanna was on an American Airlines flight to New York. The service was designed to make voice communication "impossible" at the airlines' requests, but Andy concluded that it would be possible if he used a Flash-based voice application like Phweet and he was right.

Joanna liveblogged the flight. Her post goes through all the different communication services she tried over her five-hour flight, and how they performed.

Kudos to Andy and Joanna for their persistence. They proved once again that "impossible" is a hard claim to make about any aspect of technology. This is proof of the old saying, where there's a will, there's a way.

Andy likes to tell people that he's not an engineer type of person, but he has an encyclopedic knowledge of the wireless services and applications that are available.

I reached out to Andy over this past weekend to ask what he thought the best way to access the Internet was from a moving train along The Northeast Corridor. Before speaking to him, I was lead to believe that I needed a wireless data card for my laptop, a $60 per month service plan, and a two-year contract.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

There's been a lot of discussion on Mac-related websites about whether the iPhone 3G should support tethering to a laptop or desktop computer. For those of you who aren't familiar with the term, Wikipedia defines tethering as follows:

Tethering in cellular wireless is the connection of a non-mobile device (e.g. desktop computer, notebook computer, laptop computer), to a mobile device (e.g. cell phone) PDA like Palm Treo, Motorola Q, BlackBerry or Air Card for the purpose of wireless Internet access by the non-mobile "tethered" device.

Several phones already on sale on the AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint networks already support tethering. The unlimited data plan rates charged by the carriers for devices that support tethering are significantly higher than the proposed data plan rate for the iPhone 3G. As a result, some people who are planning to buy an iPhone 3G say that they will pay a higher data plan rate if they are allowed to tether their new iPhone to a laptop.

I don't think iPhone 3G owners would be happy with the performance of their iPhones if tethering were allowed. The reason is that tethering would consume a great deal more of the iPhone's power than most people realize.

I've made several trips from Trenton, NJ to New York Penn Station on the New Jersey Transit Northeast Corridor rail line over the past month. Each time I arrive in Manhattan, I am surprised that the battery level on my iPhone is low. The reason is that there are dead spots on the AT&T network that overlap the Northeast Corridor right of way, and the iPhone boosts its signal to stay connected when in those areas.

Continue reading "Why Tethering an iPhone 3G to a Laptop Doesn't Make Sense" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 3:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

In the aftermath of the iPhone 3G announcement last Monday, a lot of people who are considering purchasing an iPhone for the first time are looking for information about AT&T rate plans that cover the iPhone 3G.

I've had an iPhone for a year, so I am very familiar with AT&T's total charges. Although iPhone 3G rates will be structured similarly, there are a few increased charges.

At the end of this article, I estimate that my monthly charges for using an iPhone 3G will be about $86. That's up $15 to 17 dollars per month from what I pay today.

Read on for the rate details and my complete monthly service cost estimate....

Continue reading "iPhone 3G Rate Plan Estimated Monthly Costs: About $86 for 450 Minutes and Unlimited Data" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)

Once iPhone 3G lands in customers' hands, I think AT&T is going to have some never-before-experienced issues with saturation of the backhaul supporting its mobile phone network infrastructure. A great example will be what happens at the Moscone Center next January when the Mac user community convenes for Macworld Expo 2009.

At yesterday's WWDC keynote, everybody was worried about the resiliency of services like Twitter and Yahoo! Live which people were using for live blogging. But the mobile data bandwidth needed to support the hundreds of iPhones in the room is a fraction of that which will be required for the iPhone 3Gs that will be present in the same place seven months from now.

I'm not the only one who thinks this is an issue. Over on Gigaom, Om Malik raised this issue in his article Is 3G Ready for the iPhone Stress Test?. Om said:

...With the 3G iPhone, there is little desire to wait for a Wi-Fi connection and hitting the high-speed 3G connection directly for whatever you want to do. It has happened to me: Once I got EVDO, I stopped looking for a hot spot to connect my Lenovo X300, which has a built-in Verizon connection... A flat-rate 3G data plan on iPhone would mean that the usage would start to shift from Wi-Fi to 3G...

Most of the problem, if any, will crop up at the backhaul level. At present, the current 3G networks have a backhaul capacity of between 10-to-15 megabits per second, which is enough for the very short term, but it could become a big issue as more and more 3G iPhones and other new 3G phones go online....

There are some excellent charts in that article that illustrate the potential problems, and compare the per user bandwidth use of EDGE, UMTS, the three flavors of HSDPA (which is what AT&T is calling 3G), and something called LTE which supposedly supports 100 Mbps.

If AT&T has 10 to 15 Mbps backhaul capacity in most places that are 3G capable right now, I'm guessing that 20 concurrent iPhone 3G users consuming an average of 500 kbps could make the wireless data service appear sluggish to everybody using it including iPhone EDGE users, BlackBerry users, and data card users. Not everybody will use the network that intensely, but I'm convinced that quite a few people will find a way to do it.

See the problem? Let me know if you think I'm off base.

The places I think that are going to see this stress first are:

• Sports arenas, stadiums, and other venues where public events take place in a confined area,
• Shopping malls and shopping centers designed to look like traditional downtown areas,
• Office buildings,
• Certain neighborhoods in cities where lots of technologically savvy people live or work.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the things that I was wondering when watching Steve Jobs' keynote at the Apple WWDC yesterday was, "How much will AT&T charge me for data if I upgrade from my current iPhone?"

Note to Readers: This article is about the rates AT&T will charge for data service on the iPhone 3G. If you need a total monthly service estimate, look at iPhone 3G Rate Plan Estimated Monthly Costs.

At first it appeared that the data plan price would increase from $20 to $30 per month. That's what AT&T plans to charge iPhone customers for unlimited 3G data. However, I subsequently read Om Malik's interview with Ralph de la Vega, the president and CEO of AT&T Mobility. What de la Vega said in this interview made me revise my monthly data plan price estimate from $30 to $35 per month:

Has there been a change in the cost of data plans?

The data plans are different on the 3G iPhone vs. the 2G iPhone. Consumers will pay $30 a month every month, while enterprises will pay $45 a month. This is what you pay us on other PDA devices such as BlackBerry Curve. The SMS messages are not bundled anymore, and you pay for what you want. Again, the prices are based on what you buy.

Continue reading "The iPhone 3G Rate Plan for Data is Probably $35 Per Month If You Still Want 200 SMS Messages" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Before I hit the hay on Friday night, I want to point out Jonathan Greene's blog article Nokia N78 - Feature Pack 2 and plenty to love. This is a great first look at the newest N-Series phone and includes a nearly 20 minute long video of him putting the N78 through its paces.

He has a lot deeper knowledge of the Nokia N-Series handset line than I do. I can tell this because he talks in depth about the new features in the N78 that stem from Symbian S60 Feature Pack 2. He explains that the software is more user-friendly than that which has been included on phones like the N95. He's right.

He also points out correctly that the N95 is intended for a technology-savvy person, while the N78 is aimed at someone who wants many of the same features but with fewer controls and complex options.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over on Wi-Fi Net News, Glenn Fleishman pointed out the release of a 13-minute documentary on the Wireless Philadelphia Project.

Change is in the Airwaves: A Documentary about the Philadelphia Wireless Initiative from George Rausch on Vimeo.

Wireless Philadelphia is a city-wide WiFi project that began in September 2006. The leading provider to the service, Earthlink, has decided to shutdown the network on June 12, 2008.

This is a partially-finished documentary, which is appropriate considering the fact that Wireless Philadelphia is a partially-finished network that never achieved its goal of providing digital inclusion to the city's under-served communities.

As somebody who spends a fair amount of time in Philadelphia, I am sorry that Wireless Philadelphia hasn't taken off. Its primary goals are noble. However I think Philadelphia doesn't have the critical mass of home web users in the service areas who were willing to depend on this Wireless Philadelphia for access. Earthlink also made some huge mistakes in estimating the infrastructure needed to provide WiFi access over such a wide area.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On Wednesday, I visited the Panera in Levittown, PA to sip a diet soda and use their WiFi. This is supposed to be an amenity for customers. I had never taken advantage of it before.

I saw a Twitter post (aka "tweet") from someone I am following in my Twitterific window, and I wanted to know what they were talking about. I clicked on the URL that was embedded in the tweet and saw this {see the first screenshot}:

SonicWall CFS Blocking TinyURL.com:
This makes Twitter almost unusable, in my
opinion. [ Screenshot: Dave Aiello on Flickr ]

For the record, the URL depicted resolves to a YouTube copy of a Cheetos commericial. I didn't find that out until I got home and had time to look, probably 12 hours after the situation I'm describing.

At the time I thought, "There's pretty much no way I am going to remember this later today. I'll have to reread all the tweets on my 'with friends' timeline and hope that I remember this specific one." I was sure I wouldn't remember because I had a meeting with a potential client in Center City Philadelphia scheduled for around lunchtime, and those types of meetings have a tendency to clear my head of previous ancillary thoughts.

Twitter is basically unusable in this environment from a followers perspective if SonicWall decides it's not going to allow requests for any URL issued by TinyURL.com.

I considered my options and none of them looked good. I guess I could have written the tweet down and some information about the context if that was important, but I didn't think of that.

Submitting a URL Rating Request:
"... It's unfair to assume that tinyurl used in this
context is a means of obfuscation." [ Screenshot:
Dave Aiello on Flickr ]

I decided to take SonicWall's advice and submit a URL Rating Review request. In the HTML form shown in the second screenshot, I made the case that access to TinyURL should be allowed. My complete statement is as follows:

"URLs in the tinyurl.com domain are utilized by services such as twitter.com in order to minimize the total length of messages transmitted on their service. There is no way to determine what the content or nature of the ultimate destination site is. It's unfair to assume that tinyurl.com used in this context is a means of obfuscation."

I went about my business of researching my potential client and forgot about the situation until I got home. Now that a few more hours have passed, I have a couple of questions:

1. How many other actively-managed content filtering systems ban TinyURL just because it can be used to mask nasty things?
2. How does this affect penetration of Twitter into Corporate America and institutions such as schools?
3. What happens in more restrictive countries such as China? Do they ban services like TinyURL because of its potential to undermine the authority of official sources of information?

I guess it takes an experience like this for me to realize how fragile freedom of access to services on the Internet is. What I'm illustrating here is clearly a side-effect of an overly restrictive policy, but you can see the potential for this access hurdle to exist in its present form indefinitely.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On our trip to Buffalo this weekend, Kathleen, Jimmy, and I stayed in two Marriott properties that had public WiFi networks. The thing I didn't like about them is that they are wide open networks which means anyone can join and do pretty much anything they want locally.

I have my MacBook Pro setup the way I want to use it when I am on my home office network. This means that I have iPhoto and iTunes sharing enabled, and a public folder available so that my wife can grab files from me or give me files without my intervention. I don't want these services to be advertised an available when I'm on a foreign WiFi network.

I turned off iPhoto and iTunes sharing manually when I went on line at the hotels. This only took a minute or two, but I don't want to have to remember to do it or to think about it. I'm almost positive that I'll forget to turn these services back on in many cases when I get home.

In order to batten down the hatches on my Mac, I need a couple of discrete pieces of software:

• Software to make my Mac "context-aware". The leading choices seem to be Marco Polo and Home Zone. My personal preference is for Marco Polo at the moment.
• Rules to identify when my Mac is at home and when it isn't at home. The easiest way to do this is to detect the MAC address of our Airport Extreme base station.
• Scripts to turn on and off the iTunes, iPhoto, and networking services, based on the context. I probably also want to step up the aggressiveness of the software firewall running on my Mac.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Big hockey weekend: This weekend the USA Hockey Women's Nationals are taking place in West Chester, PA, the USA Hockey Tier III Junior Nationals are in Marlboro, MA, and the NCAA D-I Men's Hockey Regional Tournaments are on in four cities around the country. More hockey tournament info on rinkatlas.com/blog.
• Yes, Running Can Make You High - New York Times in The New York Times: "Researchers in Germany, using advances in neuroscience, report in the current issue of the journal Cerebral Cortex that the folk belief is true: Running does elicit a flood of endorphins in the brain. The endorphins are associated with mood changes, and the more endorphins a runner’s body pumps out, the greater the effect." [ via Lifehacker ]
• New Jersey Apple Store ready to open on TUAW: "Doesn't 'Cherry Hill' sound lovely? It will sound even sweeter for Cherry Hill, New Jersey-based Apple fans this weekend when a new Apple Store opens {at Cherry Hill Mall}, next to A|X Armani Exchange and M•A•C Cosmetics (that's right, a Mac store next to a MAC store). The doors will open at 10:00 AM on Saturday, March 29th." Cherry Hill will probably be lovely again, as soon as they finish building the Nordstrom's.
• Wi-Fi Networking News: Sebastopol, Calif., Looks Gift Wi-Fi in Mouth, Declares Harm on Wi-Fi Net News: "The northern peninsula town of Sebastopol gave up free Wi-Fi in favor of fear mongering...."
• Are CIOs Losing Influence? on The Wall Street Journal Biz Tech Blog: "...And in a sign that CIOs may know that fighting the influx of consumer technology into the workplace is futile, only 36% of CIOs say the computing environment they offer employees at work is better than the ones workers have at home." [ Thanks Martin O'Donnell ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Stuff We Like: The Dave Laptop Stand on Lifehacker: "The Dave (oh Ikea, you and your names!) features adjustable height and angle, and can double as a TV tray or simple end table when you're not computing. If you've been looking for a better way to surf the internet from the comfort of your couch, the $25 Dave might be just the ticket."
• Optimizing File Sharing on Your Home Wi-Fi Network on Web Worker Daily: "A lot of people who have successfully put in a Wi-Fi network neglect to optimize the way files are shared between computers in a home or workgroup. You can choose ways to organize shared files, and ensure that files are shared securely or not visible to other users on your Wi-Fi network very easily...." Good instructions on how to do this whether you have Windows or Macs
• StrechCordz Short Resistance Training Belt on Cool Tools: "The StrechCordz resistance training belt makes expensive, complex, "endless" pools obsolete. At one end of a 4-foot, black rubber tube is a nylon belt with a simple plastic snap-clip that slips around my waist. On the other end is a loop I attach to the deep-end ladder of our modest home pool. That's it... just tether up and start swimming. Swim as hard and fast as you like yet stay in place."
• Cycling Photography Tips: Shooting Head On on Spare Cycles: "Shooting head on is both difficult and easy: difficult in that the rider is moving at you very fast so your margin for error is very little, but easy in that you don't have to move your camera very much at all."
• Easter's early this year. Deal with it. on God Plays Dice: "...the cycle of Easter dates repeat themselves every 5,700,000 years. The cycle of epacts (which encode the date of the full moon) in the Julian calendar repeat every nineteen years. There are two corrections made to the epact, each of which depend only on the century; one repeats (modulo 30, which is what matters) every 120 centuries, the other every 375 centuries, so the air of them repeat every 300,000 years. The days of the week are on a 400-year cycle, which doesn't matter because that's a factor of 300,000. So the Easter cycle has length the least common multiple of 19 and 300,000, which is 5,700,000." [ via Slashdot ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Top 7 Web Applications for Sending Large Files on Geekpreneur: "If you’ve ever had to send a large file to someone, you know the hardships that arise. Email services keep strict limits on attachment sizes. What’s more is that it’s often hard to send more than one attachment at a time. This kind of disservice has made email quite unpopular for sharing files- and thus, we have entered the age of hybrid email. The premise is simple: cut out the bulk, and just give us an easy way to send files over the internet!"

• Torvalds: Leopard file system "utter crap" on MacNN: "Linux creator Linus Torvalds recently blasted Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard for having a file system that is 'complete and utter crap' at a Linux conference in Melbourne."

  The Leopard file system, technically known as HFS+, has been around in some form since the last time I was a Mac developer-- 1992. Of course Apple would like to move to something more robust. They've been building up to switch to ZFS, or some other sophisticated file system, for some time now.



• Turn Your Nokia Phone into a Wi-Fi Hotspot with JoikuSpot on Lifehacker: Who needs tethering when you can make your Series 60 phone into an ad hoc WiFi base station for your laptop? Wow.


• How to record a kickass podcast between two macs — and cheap! on A Whole Lotta Nothing: "A lot of people ask me how I do the MetaFilter Podcast.... I know they ... mean... 'what software and hardware does it take to make a decent sounding podcast?' After almost a year of regular podcasts and trying out different software and equipment, I’ve gotten the workflow down cold and I wanted to share the my way of making a good sounding podcast on the cheap. This works perfectly well for me being in Oregon and talking to my friend Jessamyn in Vermont over Skype, recording at both ends, then tossing it all into Garageband to complete the podcast." [ via 43Folders ]


• Nike SPARQ Parachute Makes You Run Faster, Eventually on Gizmodo: "The Nike SPARQ Parachute is designed to create drag 'to force athletes to push themselves harder to achieve speed' and look like a moron in Central Park." Can I use this thing on the ice sometime?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• RPI Plays Princeton tonight in the 31st Annual Big Red Freakout. RPI needs the win. In other news, the White beat the Red in the Alumni Game 9-8.
• Kipkay's Video Tips & Tricks on Instructables: "Here are 5 easy and cheap tricks for anyone who uses a camcorder. Total cost for all 5 is under $10!" [ via Lifehacker ]
• New Devices and Applications on the Wi-Fi Front on Web Worker Daily: "While many Mac-based users already have next-generation, draft 802.11n Wi-Fi technology in their homes (because they use Apple’s Airport Extreme routers) lots of other folks still use slower 802.11g Wi-Fi. This year is when official certification of 802.11n Wi-Fi is supposed to arrive, and the month of January brought some product announcements that point to what the widespread arrival of 802.11n technology might mean...."
• Review of the Nike Amp+ iPod Control Watch: "... the Amp+ isn't designed to be an all-around running or fitness watch. It's specifically designed for runners who already have the Nike + iPod kit. Similar to the Timex iControl we recently reviewed, the Nike Amp+ is a remote control for your iPod Nano, however unlike the Timex, the Nike Amp+ uses the existing Nike + iPod gadget that plugs into your iPod, so you're actually adding the iPod remote control to the Nike iPod system." [ via TUAW ]
• Crazy Apple Rumors on Hiatus on TUAW: CrazyAppleRumors.com is a site I just found out about recently. It's articles are what you might read in The Onion if they covered Apple more aggressively. Sorry to see it go dark.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I expected to be wowed by Steve Jobs' 2008 MacWorld Expo Keynote a lot more than I actually was. However, I was doing other things while the event was going on (real work), and the products that I was most interested in (mainstream Mac laptops) didn't get addressed in this keynote at all.

Bummer for me. I could have bought my MacBook Pro two weeks ago if I had known that the Penryn upgrade wasn't immediately forthcoming.

Here are my comments on the other aspects of the keynote:

• iTunes Movie Rentals / AppleTV Take 2: Clearly the announcement with the most business disruption potential. I agree with one of the commentators on MacBreak Weekly who suggested that Apple is making a play to be the digital media hub in the house, usurping services like Netflix, as well as Television services providers such as Comcast and Verizon FiOS.
• MacBook Air: This is a machine aimed at people who travel a lot or who want a portable machine that is a shadow of their desktop Mac. I could see some very well off Mac users owning the big iMac and a MacBook Air. The MacBook Air is incredibly thin. It's hard to believe a machine with a laptop-like display and keyboard could be any thinner than this and still be usable.

• Time Capsule: This is an interesting extension to the AirPort wireless base station line. Time Capsule is an AirPort Extreme with a 500G or 1T hard disk in it, functioning as Network Attached Storage (NAS).

  My first reaction was, "Bummer. Kathleen just bought me the AirPort Extreme." But then I realized that I would prefer NAS that used RAID 1 or RAID 5 storage anyway. It also costs more than we want to spend on network appliances at this point.



• iPhone 1.1.3 Update: There's some good stuff here. I loaded it on my iPhone already. The cell tower triangulation in the Maps application works pretty well. That feature makes the iPhone version of RinkAtlas viable. Expect an announcement from me on that front soon.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

At The Home Office, the week of gadget craziness continued. On Sunday night my son Jimmy wanted to watch Teletubbies on FiOS Video On Demand before he went to bed. (Kathleen suggested it and Jimmy got excited about the idea, so that was the plan.) Anyway, we brought up the FiOS VOD subsystem on the television in the living room, and a message says that On Demand isn't available at this time. Try back in a few minutes.

Kathleen said that this happened a couple of days ago, and I should put a call in this time. I called Verizon and was walked completely through a testing process and a set top box reboot by an automated voice response system. It said that my set top box would reacquire the program guide and all would be well again in a few minutes. But, if for any reason the problem wasn't resolved, my call and the details of what was done would be noted in my account to expedite the process of speaking with a live support person.

"This is progress," I said to Kathleen.

Thirty minutes later, the program guide and our DVR functions hadn't reappeared. Jimmy was watching a DVD instead. Kathleen wanted me to call Verizon back and get the problem straightened out.

When I made the call, the computer estimated that I would be on hold for 41 minutes. The alternative offered was for the system to call me back in 41 minutes when a support person became available. That would have been too late for me, so I hung up.

The set top box didn't reacquire the guide all day on Monday, so I called support at about 9:00pm. The wait was much more reasonable. It turned out to be under five minutes, although the computer's initial estimate was longer.

I went through a guided reboot of my router and my set top box. Eventually the set top box reacquired the guide, so I ended up being happy that the problem was solved.

A new problem developed with our Local Area Network. Apparently the process Verizon used to reset my router and set top box blew away my router's configuration, including its password. I had to troubleshoot my LAN to determine that the LAN's IP address range changed, then I realized that the password on my router changed. Eventually I realized that the router had just been reset to the default settings. So I reconfigured it to the way the network was before the problems occurred, and now I hope that everything is working once again. (I know that the Internet is working, otherwise I wouldn't be writing this article right now.)

The lessons I learned from this process are:

• Don't use FiOS' automated voice response system to troubleshoot your TV while someone is watching it. You will probably temporarily lose additional services for at least as long as an automated system test takes.
• Document your LAN configuration in case Verizon decides to reset your router to its initial state.
• Keep that LAN configuration at your fingertips when calling Verizon FiOS support even if the call is about TV or telephone.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Kathleen gave me an Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station for Christmas. I installed and configured it tonight while we were watching ER on our DVR.

I was impressed with the improvement in the performance of our wireless network that immediately occurred when the AirPort Extreme started working. Configuration of the AirPort Extreme was by far the easiest of any wireless network base station I've ever installed.

I got the impression from articles I read on the Internet that it would be complicated to bridge the FiOS router (an Actiontec MI424WR) with the AirPort Extreme, but it was as simple as:

1. plugging the AirPort Extreme into the FiOS router using a Category 5 cable,
2. letting the FiOS router assign the AirPort Extreme an IP address using DHCP,
3. logging into the FiOS router and shutting off the integrated wireless base station on it.

(Note that I had earlier determined that the Actiontec MI424WR had to stay on the network because it serves as a bridge between coaxial cable and Category 5 cabling in our FiOS installation, and it also acts as a receiver for FiOS TV guide information and FiOS Video On Demand. Therefore, I never attempted to attempt to fully replace the router Verizon gave us, just to beef up the wireless network we're running here in The Home Office.)

I didn't spend much time using Kathleen's MacBook with the new router, but I'm sure they will perform better together than the MacBook did with the wireless network provided by the Actiontec router itself.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

• Bills return to Buffalo by bus after loss in Cleveland, The Associated Press on ESPN.com: "Mother Nature sure had it in for the Buffalo Bills this weekend."

  "Bad enough that a blizzard contributed to Buffalo's loss at Cleveland on Sunday, ending the team's playoff chances. Then, following an unscheduled overnight stay because of bad weather, the Bills were forced to bus home Monday after their charter plane got stuck in mud off a runway in Cleveland...." [ Thanks Julie Howson ]



• Who's #1? on ESPN.com: ESPN Classic's "Who's Number One" show will be running down the most important technological advances in sports on ESPN Classic, 10:00pm ET, Dec. 19, 2007. This is definitely something I'll have to TiVo if I can't watch it live.


• Why Wireless Isn't Wide Open on BusinessWeek.com: "Even as the wireless industry chants a new gospel about opening mobile-phone networks to outside devices and applications, some of the biggest U.S. carriers are quietly blocking new services that would compete with their own...." [ via Andy Abramson on VoIP Watch ]


• Canadian surprised by $85,000 cell bill on SeattleTimes.NWsource.com: "Piotr Staniaszek normally pays $147 a month for his cell phone. So he was more than a little surprised to learn his November bill had ballooned to $59,000. And then it got worse. When he called to inquire about the high figure, he was told that his bill this month was $83,000." [ Thanks Martin O'Donnell ]



• Verizon FiOS with only a Apple Airport Extreme {sic} on Elecktronkind.org: Excellent article on the things you need to do to replace the ActionTec router that Verizon provides to most FiOS users with an Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station. Something we hope to do in The Home Office in Newtown sometime after Christmas.

  One key fact to note from this article: You do need to keep the ActionTec router on the network if you have Verizon's digital cable service that's delivered over FiOS. Hopefully we can turn off the wireless capability of the ActionTec and put the AirPort Extreme Base Station behind it.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A couple of friends of mine asked me to what I thought of the Amazon Kindle at lunch before Thanksgiving. I said that I was aware of it, that reviews and comments from blogs that I read had been more negative than positive, but I would keep my eye out for interesting articles and blog postings. Here are a few of the things I've found:

• Kindle can light up your life by Andy Ihnatko in The Chicago Sun Times: Andy points out that the secret sauce of the Kindle is that EVDO access via Sprint is free and the Kindle has a serviceable web browser. As such he thinks it's worth the $400 cost without regard for its usability as an e-book reader.
• Amazon Kindle: the Web makes Amazon go bad crazy by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing: Cory Doctorow hates Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology. Keep that in mind when you read his comments: "Mark Pilgrim has a great, incisive post about the Amazon Kindle e-reader that sums up almost all of the reasons I won't be buying it -- it spies on you, it has DRM (which means that it has to be designed to prevent you from modding it, lest you mod it to remove the DRM), it prevents you from selling or lending your books, and the terms of service are nearly as abusive as the Amazon Unbox terms (and worse than the thoroughly dumb-ass Amazon MP3 terms)...."

These comments are pretty much polar opposites of each other, with every other review falling somewhere in between.

My friends also suggested that I discuss another e-book reader called the Iliad from iRex Technologies. More on that product later.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Back on January 10, I asked Is OS X the Key Component of the Apple iPhone? The first point I made in that article was about multitasking:

Elegantly-implemented multitasking on a handheld device: Windows Mobile handhelds have this capability already, but none devices I've seen have a UI that comes close to what Jobs demonstrated. Treo handhelds from Palm running the PalmOS don't do multitasking at all. It isn't clear to me whether RIM or Nokia have true multitasking OSes on their smartphones, and I've used both quite extensively.

I'm pointing this out for two reasons:

1. I've got an iPhone, and I'm more impressed with the multitasking capabilities of the iPhone after actually using it.
2. Marc Hedlund from O'Reilly Radar brought up multitasking on the iPhone last week as a "new-ish" thought about the iPhone. I'm not sure it qualifies as a newish thought anymore.

I think Hedlund's article is very insightful for some of the other points he makes. He compares the iPhone to several of the Treo's best features, and tells why the iPhone comes out pretty favorably. He's saying a lot of things that I haven't had time to say, probably better than I would have said them.

The only thing he doesn't mention that I think is a significant advantage to using an iPhone instead of a Treo is the $20+ discount you get on "unlimited" wireless data plans that AT&T gave me when I switched from my Treo 650 to the iPhone. I kid you not.

I think AT&T offers less expensive data plans for the iPhone because they realize that the iPhone will be in the hands of more individuals who pay their own mobile phone bills. These people will have a harder time expensing the monthly wireless bill than the average Treo or Blackberry user. That's my theory anyway.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It was possible to buy either iPhone model last night in Central New Jersey.

My iPhone moments after I purchased it at the
Freehold, NJ Apple Store on June 29. See more
photos of my iPhone in my Flickr photostream.

I bought mine at the Apple Store at the Freehold Raceway Mall in Freehold, NJ about 7:45pm. The Apple Store appeared to have plenty of stock at that time. That didn't surprise me because I had read that the 140+ Apple Stores around the country would be staying open until midnight. Why would Apple bother doing that if they thought that they would sell out at most of their locations?

First Stop: A Sold Out AT&T Store

Before I went to the Apple in Freehold, I drove to the AT&T Store in West Windsor, NJ. This is a small store that I thought might not attract a huge line. I have no idea how many people were in line before 6:00pm, but when I arrived there at approximately 6:25, the store was already sold out.

What blew my mind was the number of people who stayed in line after the store manager announced that they were sold out. (I had just arrived when he made this announcement.) He told the people in line that they were welcome to stay and his staff would take orders from them. Many of the people were staying in their place in the line when I hit the road for Freehold.

Continue reading "I Got My iPhone Yesterday, Maybe It Will Work Today" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

Let's face a few of facts:

1. A lot of media outlets are going to publish articles designed to provoke FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) in the hearts of iPhone fans.
2. This is going to continue and grow in intensity up to and beyond June 29.
3. The motives for publishing this type of article are not all evil.

A great example of an article that spreads FUD but isn't entirely evil is the article called Companies Hang Up on Apple's iPhone published Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal. This article claims that Apple is working to integrate the the iPhone into corporate email systems because IT management says that the iPhone isn't compatible with corporate email systems.

The truth of the matter is a bit different.

The Journal article pretty much says that the corporate email systems they are talking about are based on Microsoft Exchange. Exchange has the ability to support both IMAP and POP3 protocols, but support for these protocols was turned off by default in Windows 2003. Since a lot of people in corporate IT departments know little about non-Microsoft-centric infrastructures, many of them probably concluded that IMAP and POP3 are inherent security risks.

I sincerely doubt that Apple will make any attempt to integrate the iPhone by adding support for Good, BlackBerry Enterprise Server, or any other middleware that's been blessed by the CIOs of major companies. This is because the iPhone is aimed at individuals, not corporate users. Making the iPhone acceptable to many corporate IT groups would require too much variation in terms of the hardware configuration and the software feature set.

John Gruber from Daring Fireball wrote a great piece that makes many of these same points. His coverage on that website of the reaction to this Wall Street Journal article is well worth reading.

When you read articles like this one that appeared in The Wall Street Journal, consider the writer's perspective. The writers of this article are general business reporters that sometimes cover the technology industry. This article wasn't written by someone at the WSJ like Walter Mossberg who has a complete picture of technology products and how to use them productively. General business writers don't write about how to solve problems, they point out potential problems.

There are still a lot of questions about the iPhone's real world capabilities. The ability to seemlessly integrate with Microsoft Exchange isn't one of them. If all the other usability and performance issues that may limit the iPhone's usefulness turn out to be non-issues, working around the limitations of Exchange will be well documented because thousands of iPhone owners will develop workarounds for every conceivable Exchange configuration. [ Paid subscription required to read most articles in The Wall Street Journal. ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

WebWorkerDaily.com provides a great list of franchised businesses in the USA that provide reliable WiFi at all of their locations. According to the author, Judi Sohn, "Admittedly, these are franchises with locations in the Northeast United States." She goes on to describe the ambiance of the Panera bakery on Nassau Street in Princeton, so she must live and work around here.

Other businesses she points to as having reliable WiFi in some or all locations are Starbucks (obviously), Borders, Barnes & Noble, McDonalds, and Cosi. Note that she is not talking purely about places with free WiFi. In fact, most of these establishments charge for WiFi access in some fashion.

There's good reader comment here about other businesses where free agents and other business travelers can get online around the USA and the world.

Update: Andy Abramson expands on the information provided by Judi Sohn by telling which providers have good throughput in addition to basic WiFi access. Throughput is the name of the game. Who cares if you can get on a network if the responsiveness of the Internet is lousy from that network?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Nokia N93 produces DVD-quality video, has a
terrific MP3 player, and includes wireless
broadband and WiFi capability. It's great for people
who want a phone that can be used in relatively
serious video production. [ Photo: Dave Aiello ]
[ Check out my Nokia N93 photo set on Flickr. ]

A friend who works with Nokia chose me to be in the Nokia N-Series blogger program and has been sending me high end phones of all shapes and sizes for several months. The latest phone I've received is the Nokia N93, which I like to think of as the Swiss Army Knife of GSM / UMTS Multimedia Phones.

The N93 folds and unfolds in many different ways. Depending on which way you choose to hold it, it can be a video camera, a still image digital camera, an MP3 player, a wireless Internet access device, and a video phone. And I forgot to mention-- it can also be a plain old voice-oriented mobile phone.

The N93 has every feature I can think of for a state-of-the-art multimedia device:

• DVD-quality video with a 30 frame per second recording rate.
• 3.2-Megapixel primary camera with a 3x optical zoom and a Carl Zeiss glass lens. (0.3-Megapixel secondary camera for video calls.)
• 2.4-inch high definition color display.
• Adobe Premier Elements 2.0 video editing software.

On top of all of that it's a mobile phone with Bluetooth and WiFi. About all its missing is a full alphanumeric keyboard.

There are way too many features and dimensions to the Nokia N93 to cover in one article. I'm planning to do a small series of articles that will appear here on Operation Gadget, including as many samples of photos and videos as I think are necessary to demonstrate the features of this incredible device.

Technorati Tags: Nokia N93, N-Series, Adobe Premier Elements, UMTS, Bluetooth, WiFi, multimedia handsets, mobile phones

Posted by Dave Aiello at 3:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday Martin O'Donnell sent me an article that reported wireless broadband services offered by Verizon, Cingular, and Sprint Nextel are being adopted by some road warriors, but that adoption has been mainly limited to outside sales people, building contractors, insurance claims adjustors, and first responders.

There are a lot of other businesses where 3G data services for laptop users ought to be taking off but currently aren't. For instance, wireless broadband would be a great solution for journalists covering sports events like pro cycling. Cingular HSDPA wasn't deployed during the 2005 Tour de Georgia which I covered in person, but a service like that would have been really useful because I could have easily worked from my hotel room and restaurants when I was not in the media center. I would say that if I were to attend the race next year, a broadband wireless card would be a must.

If I had a job with a long mass transit commute, as I did prior to 9/11, I think high speed mobile data would be worth the estimated $60 per month expense. If I worked in Manhattan and had to commute via New Jersey Transit's Northeast Corridor Service, think of how much work I could do on Operation Gadget while sitting on the train?

I'd also be interested in broadband wireless service if I were a field engineer for a software or networking company. Why waste time at the beginning of a client visit acquiring WiFi or a hard Ethernet connection when you can just open up your notebook and be on-line. (Maybe you need corporate Intranet access, so that might be a reason.)

Beyond the estimated $60 per month cost, there are some surprising issues with buying wireless broadband service. It's really hard to find wireless broadband network cards on Amazon.com. These are still niche products, so maybe this is to be expected. However, it's even difficult to determine which notebook computers in Amazon.com's store have mobile broadband capabilities built-in.

For all the talk of Dell's commitment to wireless broadband, there still isn't a lot of clear information on the subject on their website. I had to delve deep into the options when specing out a notebook for purchase before I saw the words HSDPA and EV-DO for the first time.

Cingular, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint Nextel each have mobile broadband cards available on their websites, but again, they aren't very prominently featured.

So I guess my question is, how committed are the carriers to pushing this technology to the masses if they don't make a large marketing commitment to it?

Technorati Tags: mobile broadband, Cingular, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel, HSDPA, EV-DO.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)