• Samsung Captivate on at&t running custom Cognition 4.1.1 ROM.
• MacOS X 10.6.6

The standard disclaimers apply here: follow these instructions at your own risk. This may void your warranty. Discontinue use if a rash develops.

Getting started: Preparing Android

All we need to do on Android is turn on “USB debugging” – do NOT fiddle with any of the “USB tethering” options or anything else. So, go into Settings > Applications > Development, and check the box next to “USB debugging.”

After turning on “USB debugging” connect the device to your Mac using the USB cable.

Next, configure the Mac

After connecting the USB cable, your Mac should pop up a window saying that a device “SAMSUNG_Android” needs to be configured, like this:

This is a good sign. Click the “Network Preferences…” button, and find that device in your System Preferences’s “Network” section, which should look something like this:

The first thing to do is enter the values for this screen. Use the following settings:

• Telephone Number: *99#
• Account Name: wap@cingulargprs.com
• Password: cingular1

Next, click on the “Advanced…” button towards the bottom right of the window. That should bring you to a screen that looks like this:

First, click on “Generic” and select “Samsung” for the vendor. Next, click on “Dialup” and select “GPRS (GSM/3G)” for the model. Enter in “wap.cingular” for the APN. Leave the CID as “1″ which is the default. When everything is done, the window should now look like this:

Once that’s done, click “OK” which should bring you back to the previous screen. Next, click the “Apply” button to save all these settings.

Lets try connecting

At this point, you’re ready to try tethering! Go ahead and click on that “Connect” button. You should now see something like this:

If everything goes well, after 5-10 seconds, it should change to something that looks like this:

That’s it, now you’re tethered

Not terribly painful, no goofy software installation needed and hoops to jump through. And, here’s a speedtest for folks who are curious:

3.4 Mbit/s down, and 330 Kbit/s up on a 400ms ping isn’t fantastic, but it’s more than adequate for getting work done while out and about.

I hope you’ve found this guide useful and are happily tethered now. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to share them in the comments below!

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As I cling tightly to my early 2008-era 15″ MacBook Pro with 2.6 GHz Core 2 Duo chip and 4 GB of RAM, I look on with desire at the new line of Core i5 and Core i7 MacBook Pro’s [13", 15", 17"]. Even the slowest Core i5 machine outperforms the fastest Core 2 Duo machine according to Primate Labs.

Fortunately for me, Apple makes it really hard to impulse buy new releases as they inevitably make decisions that just don’t work for me. Lets go down the list:

• They removed the ExpressCard/34 slot from the 15″ model. It’s available on the 17″, but I’m not interested in the 17″. My laptop bag fits a 15″, but not a 17″.
• Still no eSATA on the MacBook Pro? This might have been acceptable if they’d waited and included USB 3.0 ports, but they didn’t do this, either.
• They removed the standard DVI connector and replaced it with Mini-DisplayPort. Ugh, why? If you’re going to switch, at least switch to a widely used connector: HDMI.

So, it looks like I’ll be waiting out this round of new hardware, too. My AppleCare runs out in 2011, so I’m hoping there’ll be another refresh of MacBook Pro hardware by then that incorporates USB 3.0, perhaps eSATA, and HDMI on the 15″ model.

I’ve also been thinking of replacing or at least supplementing our aging Series 2 TiVo with a Mac Mini, but again, I’m sorely disappointed with Apple’s decisions around the current version. The list:

• Mini-DVI and Mini-DisplayPort? Again: Where’s the HDMI?
• Only an analog audio out? S/PDIF, please! Not instead of, either, but in addition to.
• No out-of-the-box SSD configuration option? Sure, this is an easily remediable after-market upgrade, but still …

For the most part, these issues aren’t really a show-stopper for me for what I intend to do with the Mini, so I’ll probably be budgeting for it for 2010.

My one last gripe: why won’t Apple make a wireless keyboard that has a trackpad built in? Sure, their Magic Mouse is neat but for the home theater use of the Mini, having a keyboard with a trackpad built in is a lot more useful for couch surfing. This seems like such a no-brainer to me, so I’m really hoping that a future Apple wireless keyboard with built-in trackpad becomes available soon.

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Here’s what System Profiler says about my new battery:

Oh happy day!

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• System Preferences
  • Keyboard
    • Keyboard Shortcuts
      • Keyboard & Text Input
        • Full Keyboard Access: All controls.

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Many people have suggested the upgrade was smooth and painless for them, and I totally believe this to be the case for probably 98% of Mac users, but I’m a developer and have installed lots of third-party (non-Apple) applications. I was completely expecting a bit of work to get my system running normally again, but my first symptom that something was wrong totally puzzled me: the system would stop performing I/O to disk, causing every process to spin the shiny hypnodisk at me. Basically, I could boot the system, and after about 3 minutes, everything would hang. So, keep this in mind as I describe all the things I fixed, because getting through each step involved several reboots just to make the necessary changes.

Here’s the list of problems I encountered and fixed:

Checkpoint SecureClient VPN

This complained at boot-up that the SecureClient service wasn’t started. A known work-around is to binary edit two files, StartupItemsMgr and SecureClientStarter and replace the string “kextload -s” with “kextload -r“. This worked for me.

MacPorts

The old MacPorts compiled against dependencies that are no longer available on Snow Leopard, including MacPorts.dylib itself. Luckily, I just grabbed the latest MacPorts installer .dmg for Snow Leopard which enabled me to selfupdate and upgrade outdated and get things working again.

Soundflower

Periodically, a dialog box complaining about Soundflower.kext popped up:

I had Soundflower 1.4.3 installed, which was the most recent release before Snow Leopard was released. Now, Soundflower 1.5.1 is available, so I upgraded to it. This appears to be sufficient to get it working again, too.

Oh, the agony …

At this point, my system appeared to be stable enough to use — no spurious errors being logged to /var/log/system.log and no more annoying hangs. I’m sure I’ll discover a few more annoyances next week when I start dealing with work stuff again, but for now I can at least use the machine again.

Was the upgrade worth it? I guess I’ll find out.

Tags: Apple, MacOS X, Snow Leopard

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But, wait … AOL launched its MusicNet offering as early as February 2003, you say? Beating Apple didn’t make much of a difference, after all, right?

I wasn’t directly involved in any of that work at AOL so I’m just speculating here, but I know a lot of effort went into rights management systems and DRM. I’m willing to bet a lot more effort went into getting all that stuff working than actual work on making the product–the music store–kick ass. I kept complaining that AOL should take advantage of its then-800-pound gorilla nature and spend its budget and manpower to invent and pioneer a business model that was DRM-less, rather than spend all that time trying to satisfy everyone’s wacky demands trying to implement DRM.

At the time, I kept hearing responses that all boiled down to: it’s not going to happen. I’ve learned that nothing happens unless someone makes it happen and AOL certainly could have been one to make it happen. This reminds me of a quote I love: “People aren’t resistant to change. Matter of fact, people will change just about anything in order to maintain the status quo.”

Fast-forward five years to 2008: Amazon, Walmart and even Apple (through iTunes Plus) are offering completely DRM-free music downloads. Somehow, things are changing from “not going to happen” to “it’s happening” to “it’s happened.” What makes me sad is that instead of rendering itself irrelevant, AOL could have pioneered this.

Regardless, I’m happy that we can finally start saying goodbye to DRM for real. Now, companies can start focusing on really innovating where it counts–identifying, funding, producing and distributing quality digital content–instead of on meaningless technology like DRM.

Tags: digital content, DRM, AOL, Apple, music

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Not the “high speed 3G EDGE” I was expecting. Is this really the height of technological achievement for 2008? Where’s my flying car? Jeez.

Tags: mobile, BlackBerry, Mac, Bluetooth, tethering

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But, what if the remote filesystem you want to mount is actually a mounted SMB share? You would think it should “just work,” right? It kind of does, sorta. But, only sorta.

I start out by using sshfs to mount the remote filesystem:

dossy@shiny:~$ sshfs foobar:/share x -o volname=x

Nothing surprising: this just works as you’d expect. I’m mounting the subdirectory /share on foobar to my local mountpoint named “x” as a Mac volume named “x”. Lets make sure we can write to it:

dossy@shiny:~$ cd x
dossy@shiny:~/x$ ls -la
total 8
drwxrwxrwx  1 root  wheel  4096 Sep 13 20:40 .
drwxrwxrwx  1 root  wheel     0 Sep 13 18:23 ..
dossy@shiny:~/x$ echo "This is a test." > test.txt
dossy@shiny:~/x$ cat test.txt
This is a test.

There, we can write to this remote filesystem just fine–this is great! But, this was all from the shell, what about from the Finder? Ahh, this is where things start to suck hard. I create a small test file called “suckage.txt” and try to copy it to the sshfs mount:

Attempting this copy operation results in this error dialog:

Say what? I don’t have sufficient privileges? Finder, you’re crazy. Watch this:

dossy@shiny:~/x$ cp ~/Desktop/suckage.txt .
dossy@shiny:~/x$ ls -la
total 16
drwxrwxrwx   1 root   wheel     0 Sep 13 21:49 .
drwxr-xr-x+ 35 dossy  staff  1190 Sep 13 20:57 ..
-rw-rw-rw-   1 root   wheel    20 Sep 13 21:51 suckage.txt
-rw-rw-rw-   1 root   wheel    16 Sep 13 20:45 test.txt

Looks like I had privileges just fine–why couldn’t Finder copy the file? I suspect it has a lot to do with the crazy AppleDouble nonsense that Finder messes with, none of which happens when I just copy the files in a shell.

I’ve spent at least an hour playing Configuration Option Bingo (you know, when you try turning on and off all the various configuration options until you get the permutation that solves your problem, at which point you want to jump up and shout out “BINGO!”) … with no luck. I’ve tried “-o noappledouble” and the other obvious things. I’m now giving up and blogging this, hoping that someone out there has figured this out and might share their secret; I sure couldn’t turn up anything useful by Googling, that’s for sure.

Tags: Apple, MacOS X, MacFUSE, sshfs, Samba, smb, fail

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Part of switching to a Mac means looking for new blogging software. I previously used BlogJet 2.0 on Win32, but now I’m trying out ecto 3 beta for MacOS X. I definitely think it’s going to take some getting used to but I can already tell it’s much better than BlogJet was. However, I can definitely see needing to customize ecto to my liking before I can feel really comfortable using it.

Have you switched recently? Got any good tips that I might want to know about? Things to avoid? Tell me about it in the comments …

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