N900 Tethering Via iPhone 3G

I had to take a quick trip to Virginia today. It's about a 3 hour drive and once I got there I was going to have about an hour of downtime. Always preparing for the worst, I brought my iPhone (with SIM) and N900 (w/o SIM) to tinker around with while I waited.

I first scanned for wifi connections and there were plenty available. Many of them were open as well which would make things easy, but the easy road isn't always challenging. I wanted to try something different.

My iPhone is jailbroken with PdaNet installed. For those who don't know, PdaNet is a shareware application that allows you to tether your iPhone's Internet connection. There are two modes available: WiFi Router Mode and USB Mode. USB Mode wouldn't work for me since that requires PdaNet desktop installed on a PC. WiFi Router Mode requires the connecting device, in this case the N900, to create an ad hoc wifi network. This happens to be very simple to setup on the N900 much to my delight.

On the N900 go to Settings > Internet Connections. Click on the Connections button and click New. A prompt will come up asking you to tap Next to continue. After doing so, we finally get to the Connection Setup. For the Connection Name I entered N900, but you can enter anything you like. Click Next and the N900 will ask you to scan for WiFi networks, click No. The next series of questions go into more detail:

Connection Setup: Wi-Fi
Network name (SSID): pdanet
Network is hidden: Unchecked
Network mode: Ad hoc
Security method: None

Save your settings and return to desktop. Click the Battery, Clock, Time in the top bar and click Internet Connections. Your new connection will appear as N900 (if you named the new wifi connection that). Be sure to click on it and return to the iPhone.

On the iPhone, open PdaNet and check WiFi Router Mode and click Done. PdaNet will scan for a connection in which your N900 will appear as it's SSID, pdanet (if you followed my example). Press the name once it appears and PdaNet will connect. Now you can return to your N900 device and do whatever tinkering you need to do using your iPhone's 3G connection. Fulfilling and satisfying, isn't it?

PdaNet is one of many tethering apps for the iPhone. I chose it because it was the only one that worked when I was looking to tether my phone. But feel free to use similar settings with the other (free) tethering apps out there. Finally, be sure to turn off PdaNet WiFi Router Mode when you are done surfing on your N900 to conserve battery on your iPhone.

N900 Bluetooth DUN on AT&T

I'm very happy to see apps like Philip Langdale's Bluetooth Dial-Up Networking V1.0-2 available at maemo.org. Simply put, this app allows you to share your cell phone's connection to the Internet with your PC or Mac over Bluetooth.

Setup is easy. On the N900, download and setup the app via Application Manager. Done.

Pair your phone with your Mac which makes available Bluetooth PAN and Bluetooth DUN network adapters. Using the Bluetooth DUN adapter enter the settings shown in the screenshot below. The Password is CINGULAR1.



In Advanced Settings I have the following options under the Modem tab:



Press Okay after making your changes and press Connect. Voila! You're connected and surfing through your N900.

Nokia N900 Review

It's been a week now since I got my Nokia N900 and I want to record my initial thoughts on the device.

Speed

Unfortunately, when I bought my N900 I just expected it would work on AT&T's 3G network in the US. I was wrong and should have checked the N900's specs. Nokia really missed the ball on this one if they intended selling these in the US. I'm hoping they have something up their sleeve. While 2.5 isn't terrible I find my iPhone's 3G loads browser pages slightly faster, which is to be expected. The only option for US users is T-Mobile if they want the 3G experience. YMMV when it comes to T-Mobile's coverage.

Wireless setup and speeds are similar to any other device. I set mine up in a few seconds after finding the Internet Connection option under Settings.

The N900 scores an A if you're on T-Mobile, B for AT&T.

Touchscreen

As we know there are two types of touchscreen most common in handheld devices, capacitive and restrictive. A capacitive touchscreen recognizes touches using the electric impulse from your finger, i.e. iPhone or iPod Touch screen. A restrictive screen uses the pressure of your finger or stylus (yuk!). In my opinion, restrictive screens are passe. It's unfortunate that the N900 has one. I find it unresponsive compared to what I am used to with the iPhone. However, I have found a happy medium in that I can use my finger nail to achieve rather accurate touches. I refuse to use the stylus since it's not 1999. Do Treo's still exist?

All-in-all, I'd give the screen a B-.

Keyboard

You have two options here. One is the onscreen keyboard. While it's effective using the fingernail technique, it doesn't always popup when you enter a text field. Annoying! Which leads me to the slide out keyboard. The full query keyboard is nicely laid out and the custom keys are very intuitive. I find typing on it somewhat difficult when attempting to strike keys on the first row. I have large, not mutant large, but large hands and struggle to strike those keys with any consistency. I would have preferred another 1/8 inch or a slide out similar to the n97.

I think this the slide out is another just-miss for the N900 and give it a B-.

Camera

The N900 hit gold with the cameras. Not only do they work well they are highly configurable. 5MP in high resolution and 3MP in widescreen with integrated flash plus all the modes you would expect from a pre-SLR digital camera appear to be there.

The video camera in the N900 is excellent as well. I found the videos to be quite smooth and crisp. The good news is theres also a camera in front of the camera. While Nokia does not support that camera yet, one of the upcoming firmwares are sure to. Does this mean video conferencing is coming to an N900 near you? I hope so.

This score is simple, A+!

Apps

The app count just hit 100 as of New Year's Eve, but this device is still very new. The open Linux-based Maemo OS has lots of promise but let's hope we get some robust applications and not hundreds of small console-based niche apps I see in most Linux repositories. The best thing to do is to turn on the dev-extras repository under Application Manager. With this repo you can browse dozens of apps still under development.

I can't put a score on this one so I'll have to check back and see where we are with apps after Q1 2010.

Happy New Year!

Lua Code Completion for Notepad++

I am 90% finished with a code completion XML file for the Lua 5.1 programming language. The XML is complete with functions and parameters, but I am still working on return types. I will release a beta version soon with installation instructions.

Canceling MySpace Account

I never use MySpace and never real had an attraction to the site. Tom, you made your money, but now it's time to clear the way for Facebook and Twitter. I enjoyed the three levels of confirmation I had to go through to cancel. It's interesting that even after multiple confirmations I still have check my email to finish the process. This is the Columbo of account cancellations.

iPhone post

I don't know everybody does this, but if just seems appropriate when you're 3Gizzin.

CSS Horizontal Menu with Submenu

I was playing with some CSS code over the weekend. My goal was to make a cross-browser compatible horizontally tabbed menu using HTML's unordered list tag. This concept has been beaten into the ground pretty well on the web, but none of the solutions I found fit my needs.

• CSS menu file: menu.css
• Sample HTML: cssExample.html

The code here has been successfully testing in Internet Explorer 6.0 and Mozilla Firefox 2.0. Notice I did not need to use CSS conditionals for IE compatibility. I though that was a nice touch :)

CSS Code:

#menu ul {
border-bottom: solid 1px #336699;
font: normal normal bold 14px verdana;
margin: 0;
margin-top: .1em;
padding: 4px 0; /* This typically corresponds to the padding-top value in '#menu li a' */
text-align: left;
}
#menu li {
list-style: none;
display: inline;
margin: 0;
}
#menu li a {
background: #EFEFEF;
border: solid 1px #336699;
border-bottom: none;
color: #336699;
margin-right: 0em;
padding: 4px 6px;
text-decoration: none;
}
#menu li a:hover {
background: #FFF;
}
#menu li a.last {
border-right: solid 1px #336699;
}
#menu li a.selected {
background: #FFF;
border-bottom: solid 1px #FFF;
}
#submenu ul {
height: 1em;
list-style: none;
padding: 3px 0;
margin: 0;
border-bottom: solid 1px #336699;
}
#submenu li {
display: inline;
}
#submenu li a {
float: left;
padding: 3px 7px;
margin: 0;
font: normal normal bold 10px verdana;
border-right: solid 1px #EEE;
color: #336699;
text-decoration: none;
}
#submenu li a:hover {
text-decoration: underline;
}
#submenu li a.last {
border-right: none;
}

HTML Code:

<div id="menu">
<ul>
<li><a href="#">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Client</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Download</a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="selected">Support</a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="last">Forum</a></li> </ul>
</div>
<div id="submenu">
<ul>
<li><a href="#">Live Chat</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Phone</a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="last">Email</a></li>
</ul>
</div>

Consider this the base code. You can easily manipulate the functionality with PHP, C#, and JavaScript.

cssExample.html

Web-based Chat, AMPchat 2.0!

I created a web-based chat utilizing Web 2.0 technologies. It's the latest incarnation of the highly successful AMPchat platform which started over 7 years ago with it's initial release, AMPchat 1.0. Initially we used lots of Javascript and Javascript Remote Scripting to create a refresh-less web-based chat. Using .NET 2.0 technologies we were able to create a more robust, responsive, and reliable application. What's more, there is a .NET 3.5 version utilizing features like Linq and SQL Server 2005. Unfortunately, .NET 3.5 is still a bit too "green" for us to trust its security, hence the 2.0 version... for now ;)

If you would like to try AMPchat 2.0 while in BETA for free. Please leave a comment and we'll get back to you.

Video Sharing Application

PugClips.com is a video sharing application developed using PHP5/MySQL. It is intended to act as a YouTube clone and utilizes opensource technologies like Smarty, mencoder and ffdencode. It also uses the excellent JW FLV Media Player 3.14 located at jeroenwijering.com.

Some of the features include "bumping" videos (a rating system), leaving comments, creating user profiles, sharing videos with friends, and more.

Leave a comment if you would like to beta test the application for free, of course.