What a busy day for communications it is in iNode-land! I think the recent Fring and Vodem successes have gone to my head a little …
In a couple of weeks time the whanau and I will be moving from Wellington to Dunedin; I'll have to lose my TelstraClear cable connection to the net :-(
Is it time to go wireless? Vodafone are now selling their Home Phone Plus service, which promises $40 per month and unlimited calling (they don't actually say “free” but that's what they must mean) for NZ land-line phones. It's physically portable, which will be useful.
I need international calling too; but SIP may be the way to go there (last time I researched prices, VoIPBuster was one of the cheapest for the UK, €0.01/minute but closer to me in the Internet is Xnet, who reputedly have a great service in VFX, and 5 cents per minute to the UK)
There doesn't seem to be a very good 3G Broadband service in the areas of Dunedin that we'll probably end up in, so there's no point bundling up the Vodafone data services (plus, under vodem I get horrible ping times; that'll break my BZFlag habit) … but WIC might rescue me there, even though their setup isn't as portable as a mobile phone … but they also offer a local (03) number on their SIP service at $25 per month, but I don't know what the call-out rates are …
Interesting times ahead, I think!
Fring have released their first beta for the iPhone. Being connected to Google Talk while at the bus-stop (via Cafenet, of course) was very very useful (mostly because I'd just missed my bus and needed to sort out a pickup from the alternative route) … so useful that I actually switched on EDGE connectivity for the first time just to keep chatting!
I wish that Fring supported generic Jabber/XMPP as well as just Google Talk, but that's a start. I also will start to play with SIP, which I've been meaning to look at for ages. Now that the AIM/ICQ protocol is published (see http://dev.aol.com/aim) I could consider appearing on those networks, but I can't really see the point … I'm not going to be on Yahoo! or MSN any time soon, either, and I'm also considering dropping my very occasional use of Skype, too.
Anyway, Fring on the iPhone seems to be f'ringing excellent, and although there are a few niggles, it's still an early beta and can only get better :-)
At the end of last year, I got a Vodem for my team to use, for away-from-home support connectivity purposes. In theory we all have broadly the same version of Windows on similar Dell laptops, but while it worked just fine on some machines, on mine it refused to register reliably.
Once or twice I saw the storage device it offered, and ran the install software on there; but it always just left me in a repeating grey-bar land (actually a blue bar …). I'd tried downloading the fuller VMC software from the Vodafone website, but that didn't recognise the device at all.
So last night I tried to hook the vodem up to one of the Ubuntu laptops at home; downloaded the latest .deb from Vodafone Betavine Forge and everything worked first time; the SMS application and the 3G connectivity (including usage metering). Thanks Linux!
This morning I took far too much time to uninstall everything Vodafone-related on my Windows machine, grab the latest version of VMC from the Vodafone website (the download looks like it's the Vista version, but that's just the misleading text around the download link), reboot, reinstall, reboot, see the storage device again at last (hooray!), watch VMC fail to detect the vodem as a PC card, try the software on the vodem itself (to be greeted with a message saying "this installer is corrupted" and another infinite looping greybar), reboot, uninstall everything, reboot, install VMC, reboot, and then … VMC detects the vodem as a “mobile phone” at last!
So, it all seems to be working under Windows at last. Considering the number of Linux distributions and the number of Windows ones, what does it tell us that the Linux install these days is the easier one?
The button in my iPhone headset has failed …
This is the headset that came with the phone; I've had it for about 2 months. The microphone still works, but the click is only registered one time in 10 or thereabouts.
This isn't a big problem; I already have an iPhone headset adaptor from the nice folks at iGeneration, but the Apple unit is of course smaller and neater. I bought the adaptor to use with a cassette adaptor for the car (have a look on TradeMe for these) which works a treat and is good-enough quality for my car and it's default stereo system.
I considered raising an Apple support request; after all it will still be under warranty. But the amount of trouble I'd have to go to seeing as I'm not really in the US seems disproportional compared to similar units being sold for $1 on eBay … they're not as slick as the original, but that's really not a problem :-)
So now I can open the old one up without risking anything … I'll wait until I have a decent camera to do that, in case it's really interesting :-) The iPhone camera just won't hack it – the target item is too small and I can't get focus and zoom at the same time …