I have a Three 3G Dongle that I occasionally use when on the road. Now that I have a NetBook with Mac OS X I plan to use it even more. The problem with this Three 3G dongle (Huawei E156G) is the software that comes with it. It’s bloated, replicates standard Mac OS X behaviour, and worst of all it disables your WiFi when you’re on 3G (because God forbid that you share your already slow 3G with another).

So a while ago I figured out how to use the 3G dongle without using the Three Mobile Manager software, but instead using the Mac OS X network manager. I decided to write it up now because I noticed a few more people with the same issues. This tutorial is based on a Mac Mini and Dell Mini running Mac OS X 10.6.2 and 10.6.1.

Step 1: Install the Mobile Manager

We’re not going to use the Mobile Manager, but this is the easiest way to install the drivers for the dongle.

• Just stick in your dongle into your Mac and wait for the 3Connect disc to show up.
• Run the 3Connect Installer.app
• When the installer is done, ignore any “new network adapters found” for now.
• Instead go to your Applications folder, and trash the 3Connect folder

Your drivers have now been installed but your OS X doesn’t know what to do with the dongle yet.

Step 2: Setup your network preferences

• Go to the Network panel in your System Preferences
• You should have a HUAWEI Mobile device in the list on the left, if it is not unplug and plug in your dongle until it does
• Click Advanced, and in the modem pane set the details to:
  • Vendor: Generic
  • Model: GPRS (GSM/3G)
  • APN: Three.co.uk
  • CID: 1
• Under DNS set the following two DNS servers:
  • 4.2.2.4
  • 4.2.2.3
• Then (I’m not sure if this is essential) go to the PPP tab:
  • Uncheck Send PPP echo packets
  • Check Use verbose logging
• Click OK to save your changes
• Finally, set the telephone number to *99#
• Hit Apply

Now when you hit Connect you should be able to connect to the network. Tick the Show modem status in menu bar to have a handy little menu in the menu bar that allows you to see how long you’ve been connected and much more.

Caveats

There are some downsides to this method. The main one being that you loose the ability to check how much data you’ve sent/received this month. I guess you can use My3 for that instead. You also lose the ability to sent SMS messages, which is why it might be wise to leave the 3 Mobile Manager in your applications if you ever use that function.

Finally I have to note that this hasn’t been thoroughly tested. I used to run this same method under Leopard and it worked fine, it now works fine under Snow Leopard too, but any weird hardware or software upgrade might break it, I’m just not sure.

We got to see the 15 minute preview of Avatar, the new James Cameron movie (Director of Titanic, Alien, and many more classics). The movie has been in the making for over 10 years now and there has been a lot of hype surrounding the buildup to it’s premiere on the 18th of December.

The reason for all the hype around this movie is because of the technologies used in this movie. The movie relies a lot on computer generated content and many of the characters are fully computer generated. On top of that the movie will be shown in (IMAX) 3D. Normally when a director makes a movie like this, he would not be able to see the full product until after the post production. In Cameron’s setup though, he was able to preview something that resembled the final product on a screen while shooting the real actors, and change anything he wanted.

Now, before I go on I want to point you at this trailer. Have a look at it and I’ll continue my rant afterward.

We saw a 3D version of some of the scenes that were in this trailer, and a few more. All and all it was quite impressive, and I can imagine really enjoying the experience in the IMAX, and I will probably do so in December.

I don’t think it lives up to the hype though. The acting (mainly Sam Wortington’s main character) is a bit mediocre, and the story line seems to be very predictable. I don’t necessarily want to say that we have seen this story line before in a movie, but anyone who has ever played a 3D shooter must feel like this is a cheap and predictable story line. Even worse is the fact that because the movie relies so much on CGI that it almost looks like a really long trailer or cutscene for the next FarCry.

The added idea of 3D projection doesn’t work for me necessarily either. It is cool in the slow scenes, but in any of the fast ones my eyes simply can’t keep up with the image. I’m not sure if that’s me because I wear glasses, or because I’m simply turning old, but it takes away from the experience. It also makes the movie feel more gimmicky that it needs to be.

I do have to say though that the 3D experience is a lot better than what I saw in Harry Potter 6 where it really felt like I was looking at one of those old ViewMasters. I will write an article soon on why I do think 3D is the future of cinema, but why it simply isn’t there yet.

The movie premieres in the UK on December 18th and I think I’ll probably go and see it in the IMAX within a week of release, simply because I am a sci-fi geek and I do like these kind of movies.

What do you think? Discussion in the comments.

I was talking to the Hodge today about web development and how I think nobody in his right mind should ever make a web app that’s not based on some kind of rapid development framework. We agreed on this, but it made me think: what if you’re 100% new to web development? Should you try making your own plain 100% hand-made PHP/Python/Ruby scripts because it shows you all the underlying technology? Or should you instead start off with a framework and just read up on the underlying details later?

Discussion in the comments.

So we were at the first London Music Hack Day this weekend, held at the beautiful Guardian offices where we held BarcampLondon6 a few months back. I’ve been to a few hack days before, mostly organised by Yahoo and the BBC, and sice the last one I promised myself to always at least prepare some hack and present it. The first few times that I went to Hack Days I didn’t, and it never felt right. My track record so far on these last two hacks is pretty good, with the last one getting an article on the Guardian blog, and this weekend’s one actually winning a price. But before that let’s look at some of the other hacks.

Some of the cool hacks

There was an amazing amount of hacks put together over the weekend, leading to a presentation session of well over 2 hours. A full list can be found on the Music Hack Day wiki but I handpicked a few that I really liked.

Percussion machine by @alistair

Alistair and Mr Duck set off to make something pretty crazy and play with Arduino boards and servos. They created a percussion machine that made most of us laugh.

Music Bore

I’d like to describe Music Bore as the death to Radio DJ. Powered by IRC and Mac OS X’s text to speech API they created a DJ like experience.

Lonely Harps

The dating website Lonely Harps helps you find potential partners based on matching Last.FM profiles.

Last.FM events on iPhone

Handy little iPhone app that gives you a map with all the upcoming Last.FM events in your area. Very handy if you’re stuck ina  foreign city looking for a party.

My hack

My hack was really simple. I had the idea to map song lyrics onto locations around the world per decade, but discovered most lyrics actually don’t have that many place names in them. Instead I decided to go along the same route and explore other ways of visualisation musical culture shifts.

I decided to go for analysing the lyrics of the top 10 songs per decade an give them multiple visualisations. I only ended up doing a Wordle visualisation in the end, but I think it’s pretty cool. Go ahead and have a look at http://zeitgeist.cristianobetta.com/ and have a look at the different decades.

The hard part of this little app wasn’t actually the visualisation, but actually getting a top 10 list of UK songs per era. There is simply no API for it so I had to opt to make my own API (JSON) for the EveryHit site. For now it’s just JSON and only the cumulative decades (not the single years), but if anyone’s interesting I might write the rest too and maybe add a SPARQL layer too.

I’ve been using Site5 for years now and I love them: they’re cheap, reliable and have great service.

But using a shared hosting service can sometimes be a pain. Yesterday I wanted to install Bugzilla on Site5 and couldn’t initially figure it out. The wiki and forums were not of much help and most of the Google search results pointed me in the wrong direction.

Eventually I did figure it out though with the help of some bloggers.

The trick is to start of with the instructions by kmcital in his blog post. He runs you through most of the steps which are pretty strait forward. Halfway though he advises you to mail the lunar pages support, but instead I just opened a ticket on the Site5 backpanel and requested the modules I needed. I got reply within minutes which proves that Site5 is awesome.

Then I followed the rest of the instructions and ended up with a big 403 Forbidden page. I did a quick Google search and discovered that this is easily solved by either setting the right ‘$webservergroup’ in your localconfig file, or alternatively by manually setting some access permissions correctly as described in this post.

I hope this helps some of you, as it sure would have helped me.

I knew that someone must have made a video of my presentation on ShouldIBackupMy.com, and this is the first one I found. It only shows a little bit, but I think it’s the best part probably.

For those who don’t get the joke regarding GeoCities: read and shiver.

I had to update my histogram service a little bit because apparently it wasn’t handling files  with spaces in it properly. I have to thank Jeroen Kluft for notifying me about this. Go and have a look at his site to see how he has been incorporating my histogram service into his own photo album. I think it’s pretty awesome!

Want to use OpenID but not clear on what provider to use? Already have a Wordpress Blog up and running? Then why not use your Wordpress blog as your OpenID provider?

Since version 3.1 the WP-OpenID plugin comes with it’s own OpenID provider. Before 3.1 the plugin served as a consumer of OpenID for login and commenting on a Wordpress blog, but as of this version you can use your blog to login to other OpenID consumers. Just install the WP-OpenID plugin and make sure to enable the “Enable OpenID” option for your level of user (probably only administrator). This will allow you to log in to any OpenID enabled site with your blog url, or if you are not the blog owner with the author URL. In my case I can log in with http://blog.cristianobetta.com or with http://blog.cristianobetta.com/author/admin.

Delegation

I already had an OpenID with delegation setup on cristianobetta.com, with the OpenID being delegated to MyOpenID. I wanted to now delegate the OpenID instead to my blog but ran into some issues when searching for “wordpress openid delegation” on the internet. Most articles were on how to delegate from a blog to a different provider like MyOpenID, which was not what I wanted.

So here is the scoop. To delegate from any other url to your Wordpress blog, first install the XRDS-Simple plugin. This plugin will allow for XRDS discovery of all the relevant OpenID URLs on your blog. Then add the following meta tag into the header of the URL that needs to be delegated:

<meta http-equiv=”X-XRDS-Location” content=”http://blogdomain.tld/?xrds” />

or if you want to link to a specific user (admin in this case):

<meta http-equiv=”X-XRDS-Location” content=”http://blogdomain.tld/author/admin/?xrds” /> 

This line of code will tell any OpenID consumer to get the XRDS from your blog, and then process the OpenID transaction according to the details found in the XRDS response.