Tony Blews

Last Tuesday (August 4th, 2009), The Sun printed a story about Claire Haver, and how she was reunited with her family after running off with some bloke she met on Bebo.

The story also had a sidebar entitled “Helping kids to be fine online”, which gave 10 handy tips on keeping the kiddywinks safe on t’internet. Point 8 was particularly interesting:

“8. The internet can be accessed from many devices – including mobiles – so make sure kids’ phones are registered as such with the provider and filters are in place.”

Fair words, but illustrated with a poorly chosen picture (versions from the printed copy, and The Sun website):

Ah, the good old Nokia 3310, that well known internet capable phone from 2000. But not only is it possibly the most internet-useless phone of the century, it is also the most dangerous.

I don’t mean that the Nokia 3310 in general is a dangerous phone, just that one in particular. It was, after all, the one used by terrorists, as shown in The Sun’s story of December 17th, 2008.

Clearly The Sun either don’t know anything about phones, or have a really rubbish picture researcher. Or this particular phone is cursed.

Just found a GPS track of my trip last month from The Shrewsbury Arms in Stafford to The Stanley Arms in Chester. If you zoom in, you’ll see that it is quite accurate, even showing the bit where I missed an exit and went round a round-a-bout. If i’d set the logging to use small time intervals then the “road holding” would have been better.

Here is the map:

View Larger Map

Download the file

For some time now I’ve been toying with the idea of buying a GPS logger, for no other reason than that I like gadgets. However, as I’m tight fisted, paying £50 for one from Maplin is out of the question.

So, how cheaply can I bodge one together?

Well, using a my long suffering Skypephone and a Bluenext BN-906GR (£25.44 incl VAT and P&P from BlueUnplugged.com), I think I’ve cracked it.

Software wise, I’m running TrekBuddy on the phone, which needs some fiddling with to get working. I’m using v0.9.83 (download link), and this is what I did:

Firstly, download TrekBuddy from that link above, and copy it across to your phone. You might as well do this by plugging the phone in via the USB connector and using it as a mass storage device, as you’re now going to have to create some directories.

On the phone, create the directory TrekBuddy, and in that directory create some more called:maps, resources, sounds, tracks-gpx, tracks-nmea, ui-profiles and wpts.

Now, go and get a map. I’ve been using GM2TB to get google maps. If you go for a map of the whole country then you’ll not be able to see your location very well, so I’ve just grabbed a map of the Stafford area. I’f I go somewhere else, I’ll make a map of that area first.

Anyway, get your map from GM2TB, and save the .tar file in your TrekBuddy/maps directory.

Now install the trekbuddy.jar file, and run the application. It won’t work properly.

Enter Settings, then Basic. Change the name of the default map to file:///Memory%20card/TrekBuddy/maps/stafford.tar (assuming, of course that your map file was called stafford.tar), and change the Data Dir to file:///Memory%20card/TrekBuddy/

Now save the settings, exit the application.

Pair your GPS reciever with your phone as per the makers instructions.

Now start TrekBuddy again and go through the menus to start a tracklog. All should be good.

To view you track in Google Earth, you’ll need to copy the .gpx files on to your PC (either by using the phone as a USB memory device or by Bluetooth), and convert them using something like Routeconverter.

Then hey presto, you can see where you’ve roughly been. I say roughly because despite a claimed accuracy of 2.5m, a test track of me walking home from work shows me walking down the middle of the River Sow for 100 yards.

My phone, the AMOI WP-S1 / 3 Skypephone is almost dead. Specifically it has cooked my SIM card and is under a suspended death penalty. If 3 can issue me a replacement SIM with the same number, I might let it live, but if they can’t it is getting the chop. A pity really, as I really liked the phone when it worked.

I might try a Skypephone 2, or an INQ1. But I’ll be really pissed off if they develop the same problem.

EDIT: After half a day of arguing with 3 that they CAN issue me with a replacement SIM, they’ve finally agreed to do it. At no charge. Still, I’ll be using it in another phone until they can also fix the Skypephone.

EDIT2: Got the sim card and the phone back. It seems to work now, lets see for how long.

In the past I bought a ‘phone that did proper internet access. I even reviewed it here and here!

Well, now I’ve gone and bought a 3 Mobile Internet dongle thing. Specifically, the Huawei E220.

So, what do you get for your 50 quid?

Apart from the device itself, the DVD style box contains a SIM card, a manual that I didn’t bother even opening, two USB cables and some padding that I didn’t bother to eat.

No installation CD? Nope. The clever little chappy installs all it needs from an built in memory stick type thingummy which pretend to be a CDROM. Take a not, USB device makers: This is the way forward.

One of the USB cables is a standard 6 inch one, which works ok but means that the modem is hanging about where I usually have my mouse (never having got used to the crappy touchpads that most laptops have). The other is a much longer affair with two Type A connectors at one end, just in case your computer can’t push enough power out from one socket. This is fairly useless to me, as the added cable length means the device needs the two plugs to be connected, and the two USB sockets on my Dell are on opposite sides of the case. It works great if I have my “media slice” connected, as that gives me 2 extra USB sockets on the back, but it also triples the weight of the machine, so I usually leave it to gather dust.

I’m using the long cable to connect to my telephone instead.

What you probably can’t tell from the photo, is that the sim card holder is held in place with sellotape. It won’t fall out during normal use, but did pop out a few times while in my bag. Hence the classic British engineering fix.

So, how fast is it?

Firstly, here is what I got through my phone on a good day:


And here is what the new dongle gives me:

A bit faster, as you can see. I managed to get up to about 2900kbps by standing outside the house and getting a clear line of sight to the nearest transmitter, which is about 300 yards away.

With this “proper” internet modem connected, rather than the mobile phone, Three aren’t restricting what I can access. So now I can waste my time on b3ta, and won’t get an electronic telling off if I accidentally try and watch some young flibbertigibbet shaking her udders on YouTube.

So what does it cost to run?

Well, you have a choice: £10 for 1gb, £15 for 3gb or £25 for 7gb.

A nice range of prices for you there. Being a bit skint, I opted to only spash out a tenner, and my 1gb lasted a week.

Luckily, you can stick on as many addons as you have the money for, and don’t need to wait until with end of the month. Next time, however, I will be getting the £25 top up (assuming that I get hold of some money).

I’m quite happy with it, currently. When I get the chance, I’m going to have a wander in to the countryside, and see how well the modem (and indeed the AMOI phone) function when quite far from a transmitter.