Freeing my V3xx phone from Cingular

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After getting ATT/Cingular to take the subsidy lock off my phone, I decided to flash it with the generic International Motorola firmware. The advantages:

  • The Motorola firmware is not “branded” and gets rid of all of the “Shop Cingular” links, menu items, etc.
  • The quadband firmware claims to support all 4 GSM bands (instead of the 3 that the Cingular firmware supports).

The downsides:

  • The Motorola firmware is not “branded”, and I had to re-configure any Cingular specific settings that I like, such as the MediaNet connectivity settings and Cingular Video bookmarks.
  • The Cingular version of the phone has a slightly different button layout than the Motorola generic version (the Clear key is swapped with the Cingular Video key) and I had to remap those keys back to match the custom key layout.
  • Because I flashed the phone, all of my previous SEEM edits and java fixes were lost, so I had to repeat them.

As daunting as the downside list is, I have to say that getting rid of all of the Cingular branding was like a breath of fresh air. You really don’t notice how bad the branding was until it’s gone. Then you just notice all of the extra room in the menus, bookmark lists, etc.

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3G is better than EDGE for me!

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Some idiot makes the claim that EDGE is just fine and you don't need 3G for web-browsing. The author claims that pure bandwidth doesn't matter, and that latency is more important to the user experience (which I totally agree with) but then goes on to state that 3G has worse latency than EDGE, which is completely bogus.

I can't imagine the author had ever used a (working) 3G network, because in my experiance (using a Motorola Razr V3xx on AT&T/Cingular), the 3G network has ping times of 200ms, while the EDGE network has 800ms ping times. This means that when you click on a link using EDGE it takes about a second for the page to start loading, but if you are using 3G the web pages respond much faster! 

Using my phone's WAP/HTML browser is MUCH more responsive on the 3G network than on the EDGE network. (I switch to edge in some subway stations). The same thing applies to Google Maps (J2ME on the phone) which is much more usable on 3G, so this applies for apps that do intelligent caching as well as web browsing.

Bottom line, if you can get 3G instead of EDGE, do so!

Unlocking my Cingular / AT&T phone

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AT&T Death Star

AT&T allows some customers to "unlock" their phones. This allows the use of a SIM card from a different provider (for example, VodaFone) while traveling. (It also allows you to use the phone with another GSM provider in the US after your AT&T contract is finished, which is one reason AT&T and other carriers lock the phones they subsidize.) 

I don't know exactly what makes a customer "eligible" to have a phone unlocked, but I suspect that you have to have made several payments on time and be in good standing. When I am under a new contract with a subsidized phone I typically wait a few months (in this case, about 6) before calling in to ask to have my phone unlocked. I've had T-Mobile unlock three phones (under 2 different contracts) for me in the past, but this was the first time I tried it with AT&T.  

I suspect that AT&T has an official policy of making it difficult to unlock your phone. Here is my experience:

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D-link DWL-G122 with WPA under Linux

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The D-Link DWL-G122 USB 802.11g (revision B1) wifi adaptor works great for open or WEP encrypted networks and is supported by Ubuntu out of the box. Unfortunately, the open source driver doesn't support WPA2 (and only supports WPA via non-standard iwpriv settings, and even then, the support is flaky).

I was able to get it to connect to a WPA network once, following Jermey's instructions. But the network connection was not reliable (as in, I never got it to connect again).

To make it work with the standard wpa_supplicant package, I had to break down and use ndiswrapper to wrap the windows XP drivers. (I also had to blacklist the default rt2570 kernel module). Hopefully the Open Source rt2x00 kernel module will start to support this device (and others based on this chipset) in the future for WPA/WPA2 security.

Even after I used the ndiswrapper, it would only connect to a WPA Personal / TKIP access point. (I could not get it to work with the AES or AES+TKIP settings on WPA or to work with WPA2 at all.)

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Screen Scraping Amazon Album Art for MythTV

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mythtv icon

I wanted to get Album Art for all of my (newly ripped) songs on my MythTV box. 

Thierry has a nice perl script which finds album art on Amazon and automatically downloads it, but unfortunately for me the music plugin for MythTV has upgraded their database schema and the script no longer worked.  I am using the trunk SVN code, so it's a bit more up-to-date than the latest packaged release, but this means that scripts designed for the packaged versions may not work. (This specific script had a problem finding the correct directory to store the album art, so all the album art was stored in the root directory, overwriting itself with each album.)

Luckily, I know just enough SQL and Perl to be dangerous, so I whipped up a few changes to his code that fixed my problem (after exploring the new database format). The updated script is here if anybody needs it.

UPDATE: I also added features that allow you to run the script multiple times (if an albumart.jpg file already exists, it will skip that album) and improved the searching (if "album by artist" is not found, it will try searching by "album" name only).

Updated New File: amazon_album_art_scraper.txt (Thanks to Mike Wilson for updates to Amazon’s HTML!)

OLD FILE: Amazon Album Art Scraper Script

Saving a mms streaming video to a file using mencoder

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Copying a streaming video to a file using mencoder.

I wanted to watch Randy Pausch's last lecture on my home media PC as opposed to my laptop. It has MythTV, which can be used to watch any file on the hard disk. Unfortunately, you can't just download the a file, as his lecture is hosted by a streaming server. The specific URL is:

mms://wms.andrew.cmu.edu/001/pausch.wmv  

wget won't work, so I had to use mencoder to download the stream and copy it to a file on my hard disk. The command line I used was:

 mencoder mms://wms.andrew.cmu.edu/001/pausch.wmv -o randy.wmv -oac copy -ovc copy

(The -oac and -ovc are the output audio and video codec specfiers, and I have set it to just copy. If you would prefer the file be transcoded to a different format, you could specify a specific codec (xvid with ogg vorbis sound, for example) and mencoder would transcode the file (possibly losing some quality) at the same time. 

 

Encrypted home directory under Ubuntu linux 7.04 & 7.10

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Lock on doorUsing directions from Felipe Alfaro Solana, I set up an encrypted home directory in Ubuntu 7.04. I only had one problem, that exhibited an error message as follows:

Command failed: Incompatible libdevmapper 1.02.08 (2006-07-17)(compat) and kernel driver

This was caused by the dm_mod module not being loaded. I fixed it for the session by issuing a  modprobe dm_mod command, and fixed it forever by adding dm_mod to my /etc/modules file.

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Listing of Atlanta/Decatur Digital OTA Channels

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transmission tower A list of the channels easily avaliable with a small amplified Radio Shack antenna from the Decatur Area:

  • 2-1 -WSB-DT – ABC
  • 2-2 (Blank, no signal)
  • 5-1 WAGA – Fox HD
  • 5-2 WAGA – Fox SD
  • 11-1 WXIA-D NBC-HD
  • 11-2 WXIA-D (NBC Weather, All the time!)
  • 14-(1,2,3,4) – Ion subchannels.
  • 17 – WTBS-HD – TBS
  • 30-1 – PBS
  • 36- WATL-D -MyATL
  • 43-1 WUPA – CW
  • 46-1 – WGCL-HD CBS

RadioShack HDTV antenna, Catalog #: 15-2186

    Parts for a MythTV box

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    I've built a MythTV home media PC, attempting to keep the costs down. It's already cost $539, which is more than a Tivo HD ($299), and very close to a Tivo Series 3 ($575). The advantages over buying a TVIO include:

    1. DVD / CD playback and archiving to HD.
    2. Cheaper subscription costs (Free over the air, or 20-40$ a year from Schedules Direct).
    3. Automatic commercial detection.
    4. Open Platform, which allows for easy network mounting of file-systems, administration, and customization.

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