Keiron's daily take on life, the internet and the world around us!

You may have read recently about comparing of battery sizes, capacities and the like when I was looking for a rechargeable battery pack for my phone, I took the advice of @ZuuMediaSwindon and bought the PINES Rechargeable Backup Battery Pack

I’ve now had a chance to use it in anger and at least five people have asked what it is and where I got it from, so here it is!

Boxed:

PINES Rechargeable Battery Pack - Boxed

It comes with an array of manuals and handy, carry case (about the size of an old style Nintendo DS):

PINES Rechargeable Battery Pack, Carry case and Manuals

Opening it up, for charging the battery you have:

1. A mains charger
2. A car charger
3. A USB charger

And charging “tips” for such a variety of things I can’t even imagine what some of them are for!

PINES Rechargeable Battery Pack - Carry case contents

PINES Rechargeable Battery Pack - Pack contents

And finally here it is charging my Motorola Milestone/DROID (which I get a days charge out of at the most!)

PINES Rechargeable Batter Pack - Charging the Milestone / DROID

So, it’s had quite a few outings now and it’s been great for a top up charge whenever I’ve needed one (I just carry the USB tip that fits both of our phones and the iPod tip). It did drain itself quite heavily overnight the other night as I left it plugged into my phone. I’m not sure that my phone wasn’t charging, running down a little bit on the data network and then charging again throughout the night though!

All that said it’s a fantastic purchase for anyone who has a couple of USB devices, it’s £34.90 on Amazon at the moment:
PINES Rechargeable Backup Battery Pack

Sorry, I simply couldn’t resist the title having watched this epic video on YouTube today!

The author of this video clearly thinks that traceroute tells you how many people are looking at a site! Worryingly this continues to the point where he tells you that less than twenty people are currently viewing google.com (if that’s the case they’ve seriously lost some popularity!!).

The funniest part is that he does all this with so much authority.

For those that don’t know (and that’s fine so long as you’re not broadcasting the fact by pretending you do know, and being wrong), tracert (or traceroute) is used to determine all the IP addresses you pass through on your way to a server, usually there are a few “hops” within your own ISP, followed by some across the internet and then a few in the server’s datacenter, before hitting the server itself.

We use traceroute to check that packets of data are getting through to a particular server and if any of those packets are taking considerably longer than others, essentially it’s a diagnostic tool – NOT a way to view the amount of people logging on to Google!

Two posts on the same day and both techie – don’t be put off, normal ranty service may well be resumed soon…

I’ve used my Windows Mobile in the past as a tethered modem for me eee pc when out and about without WiFi or o2 mobile broadband, it’s not always been easy but has been handy to have around!

I reinstalled my eee today, and was looking around for how I’m going to achieve this same functionality with the Milestone on Android, almost everything screamed “root your device” at me. I’m not a fan of rooting it for a lot of reasons the biggest being I don’t want to brick the device – so that’s a non-starter.

Then I spotted a handy guide from linux magazine on Tethering Android, it didn’t work straight off which was a little disappointing. So a little more digging on the Android forums, produced some additional instructions. I’m producing them here for my own benefit as well as yours – as I’m bound to forget.

1. Install “Proxoid” app from Marketplace.
   
   
2. Turn on USB debugging mode on your phone:
   
   Settings – > Application -> Development -> Enable USB Debugging
   
   
3. On your Ubuntu machine create a 90-android.rules file:
   
   gksudo gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/90-android.rules
   
   
4. Add the following to it (note this is the difference from the linux magazine tutorial):
   
   
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0bb4", ATTRS{idProduct} =="0c01", MODE="0666", OWNER="*insertyourusername"
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0bb4", ATTRS{idProduct} =="0c02", MODE="0666", OWNER="*insertyourusername"
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="22b8", ATTRS{idProduct} =="41db", MODE="0666", OWNER="*insertyourusername"

   * insert your username as appropriate!
   
   
5. Download and unpack the latest release of the Android SDK: http://developer.android.com/sdk/
   
   
6. Connect the phone to the Ubuntu machine with your USB cable and start Proxoid on the phone.
   
   
7. Open a Terminal, navigate to the tools directory in the Android SDK folder and run the following command:
   ./adb forward tcp:8080 tcp:8080
   
   

The proxy server should now be running, but to be able to use it with Firefox, you have to modify the browser’s proxy settings:

1. In Firefox, choose Edit -> Preferences and switch to the Advanced -> Network section.
   
   
2. Press the Settings button in the Configure how Firefox connects to the Internet group.
   
   
3. Select the Manual proxy configuration option, then enter localhost in the HTTP Proxy field and 8080 in the Port field. Press OK to save the settings and close the window.
   
   

Now you can browse the Web using the created connection.

Given that I’ll need to remember how to do this, when I don’t have a connection. Here’s a handy PDF with the above guide to tethering android to put on your android device!!

I know I haven’t posted in a while – but I’ve had lots going on…. Then my first post back is a techie one, I apologise (well for some of you I do anyway!).

I want a backup battery for my Motorola Droid/Milestone, I’ve already got one for my iPod Touch and it’s invaluable – but I figure if I get one with a straight USB out it can charge almost any of my devices with the right cable! This makes far more sense to me, so today I went hunting. Would you believe how hard these things are to find?

I’ve been offered rechargable batteries, battery chargers, spare batteries for the phone all sorts of things – none of which were quite what I wanted, I think this boils down to not knowing what to search for – generally most of what I found was listed as:

“Rechargeable Backup Battery Pack USB”

I’ve found to, one by an unknown manufacturer (PINES) and one by Kensington, so I start doing a little comparison on them, the features I need are:

• Small
• Light
• Capacity

Shouldn’t be that hard really, nobody can play with dimensions or weight (although there will probably be trade-offs for capacity!) but they’re pretty much standard:

Almost sold then, Kensington tell me lots of information about their pack and it’s 7wH capacity, compared to Pines 4800mAh?
Wait a minute…. Are we comparing apples with apples and beans with beans here?

What are wH and how do we convert them to mAH?

I found a useful link on camerahacker with conversions, so let’s crunch the numbers.. It’s probably easier to convert the Pines product so it is also in wH

watt = amp * volt

So,

Wh = 4.8Ah * 5.5VDC (Note we've converted the mAh to Ah by dividing it by 1000)
Wh = 26.4

Compared to the Kensington device – that’s huge! 26.4Wh vs 7Wh (and it’s cheaper!)…
Have I got something wrong here?

Most people know I’m a big rugby fan… My father-in-law sent me this today, it surely has to be one of the best tries ever?

Most people that know me know that I love my mobile phone, and it has to be a good one – simply because I run the business from it!

I rang Orange the other day to enquire what was currently on offer, and as usual they don’t have a single phone that interests me… The HTC Touch Pro 2 I did fancy is available, but not as an upgrade. I’m not convinced I want an iPhone as I’ve got my iPod Touch and it really does lack a keyboard that I need. Even if they had got a phone I’m not sure I’d upgrade because every contract is 18 or 24 months – what happened to 12 month contracts?

Locking in for 24 months on a contract seems ridiculous to me, Orange did tell me that I’d had my current phone for nearly 2 years! I had to ask them what phone they thought I’d got, they were wrong – that one has been in a box for at least a year! Technology changes so quickly that I want a bit more freedom than a 24 month contract.

So I’m in deep discussions with them at the moment about moving to a low contract Business SIM-only probably with 30 day rolling contract for £15 and a huge data bolt-on, from there I can always upgrade with them at any point I choose…

However, to make sure I have a phone I want I’ve gone SIM Free and ordered the Motorola DROID (yes, I know – for those that know me they’ll know I’ve only just left the company!). So here it is…

More posts to follow on this subject I’m sure…