I recently bought an O2 Mobile Broadband ‘Pay & Go’ dongle. The Huawei E160 variety. Its a neat little dongle, which also has a slot for a MicroSD card.
A colleague of mine wanted to get some kind of mobile broadband solution for his netbook – an Acer Aspire One. Brilliant little machine. I fancy a Samsung NC10 myself, or maybe an Asus 1008HA Seashell.
Anyway, he’s running the standard Acer OS – Linpus. He already had the ‘Mobile Partner’ application installed, which is required if you want to connect using a Huawei modem. We plugged the dongle in, and it was recognised by the software within a few seconds, albeit as a Huawei E220 (technically identical to the E160). It picked up a perfectly reasonable O2 3G signal considering we were indoors. Next came the creation of a ‘profile’ for the connection. We set up a new one, called it ‘O2′, and attempted to enter the settings. Continue reading 'O2 3G Mobile Broadband on Acer Aspire One Netbook'»
My iMac broke a few months ago. Nothing too serious, but annoying nonetheless. The Superdrive decided that it would eat any disc that you put in the slot, and would not eject it. You could hear the mechanism whirring away, but then a nice stressful ‘clunk’, as the disc was eaten again. The disc never even making a minor appearance. So I decided to finally get it fixed while my AppleCare is still valid.
But what’s this got to do with UK Broadband, I hear you – imaginary guy that I’ve borrowed from Wil Wheaton – asking? Shh…I’m getting there…
As I have a lot of personal files on my iMac, I wasnt going to trust it as-is in the hands of my local Apple reseller, so I backed it up with SuperDuper!, formatted it and installed a fresh copy of OS X 10.4 Tiger (via a USB DVD drive). The iMac went off for repair, came back fixed, and then came the time for installing OS X 10.5 Leopard.
Still not seeing what this has to do with UK Broadband… Shhhhh!! I’m getting there!… Continue reading 'The State of UK Broadband Services'»
I’m on my second iPhone (contract) on the O2 network, and I’ve always noticed that the image quality when browsing sites over the cellular network has been quite shocking. Most of the time, this isn’t too much of an issue, and I’ve just become used to it. I appreciate that O2 would rather me use as little data as possible, and their on-the-fly image compression is their answer to that. However, sometimes, I really want to see images how they were meant to be seen. After all, I’ve invested in a pretty expensive phone with one of the best screens on the market.
So, I was pretty pleased to find (thanks to someone on twitter – I forget their name, sorry!) a way around this. In the iPhone settings app, select ‘General’ -> ‘Network’ -> ‘Cellular Data Network’, and change the Username from ‘vertigo’ to ‘bypass’. Suddenly everything becomes much clearer. Not the best examples, but here’s an original:
BBC Weather Image (Before)
…..Now without the compression:
BBC Weather Image (After)
EDIT 17/05/2009: I’ve been reading reports over the last few days that this doesnt work anymore. Leave me a comment if this is or isn’t working for you.
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