Andrew Ferrier

I installed CyanogenMod on my HTC Desire about a week ago in an attempt to get rid of some of the crapware that Orange UK are notorious for installing, and get a snappier, cleaner phone. I won’t repeat the excellent CyanogenMod install instructions, which you can find here. However, here are some points that might help you if you’re doing something similar:

• The OS (Android) firmware and the radio firmware are two separate things. The phone was at the latest Orange-approved firmware level before the upgrade (Android 2.2, which comes with the radio at version 5.10.05.30). I had read elsewhere that Orange network-lock the phone and that this sometimes causes problems when installing CyanogenMod; so I deliberately removed the SIM card during the upgrade process as suggested. Whether this circumvented the problem or whether it simply wasn’t an issue I can’t say, but certainly I haven’t seen any network-lock problems. I didn’t upgrade the radio at all, as this seemed risky; I simply left it at the 5.10 level and skipped over that section in the install instructions.
• After the upgrade, I was initially nervous that the 3G had stopped working, as sitting in my house I simply couldn’t cause the phone to roam onto 3G or HSDPA; however, it seems that it simply has different criteria for roaming onto 3G – it will keep a stable slower signal in preference to a poor faster one. In fact, so far I seem to get a more reliable data signal, and the phone uses 3G and HSDPA just fine when it can find a good signal.
• Update 22:30 I found I needed to apply this workaround in order to be able to install large applications such as Google Maps.

As a result of upgrading it, the phone is a lot faster and smoother. Much of the jerkiness has disappeared from the user interface – even third-party apps such as Twitter work more smoothly. The most astonishing thing is the battery life, which seems to have almost trebled – whereas previous the phone would struggle to last a day, it now lasts over two. This is quite impressive – I’m not sure what was dragging down the phone before (HTC Sense, perhaps), but kudos to the guys at CyanogenMod.

In summary, CyanogenMod seems like a way of getting a clean, modern, Android build onto your phone. Some of the menus do stuff from a plethora of options, but the defaults are fine, so it’s a great way of getting a “plain” Android phone. Recommended.

I recently started using Orange’s new roaming service that allows you to roam on T-Mobile’s network, in the same way as you might roam around networks when you are abroad. So far experiences are very positive. The phone remains on Orange most of the time, which is fortunate as 3G/HSxPA signals are only available via the Orange network. However, when a signal isn’t available, it seems to roam fairly quickly and efficiently onto T-Mobile’s network. The phone sees this as a roam: the same “R” symbol appears on my Desire‘s screen. Charges are allegedly exactly the same as via Orange, so in theory it shouldn’t cost anything extra (although I’ve yet to see a bill since I’ve had it turned on).

The only potential disadvantage I can see is that in order to get data service on T-Mobile’s network (which is GPRS only), I have to switch off the protection on my Desire that stops it using the data on a roamed network. This does have the slight danger that I might forget to turn this off when travelling to a foreign network and being charged large sums. However, I’m prepared to take this risk/inconvenience for the benefit of being able to do the roam.

In general, a great new service from Orange, assuming they keep up the same quality of service. Now, if only they’d stop piling on crappy “added value” apps via their phone, and innovate on network features (of which this is a great example).

I just acquired a new Vodafone Mobile Broadband modem to replace an aging ExpressCard version I had that wasn’t working too well. It came in the form of a Vodafone-branded Huawei K4505 USB stick. It didn’t work completely out-of-the-box with Ubuntu 10.04, at first appearing unrecognisable. After some hunting, I discovered that these sticks initially present themselves as USB Mass Storage to allow you to install the Windows drivers. You have to give a few magic incantations on Linux to make them switch into modem mode:

sudo aptitude install usb-modeswitch
sudo usb_modeswitch -v 0x12d1 -p 0x1521 -M \
 55534243123456780000000000000011060000000000000000000000000000

Once the modeswitch command is executed, the USB stick will present itself as a modem and you can use the standard Ubuntu NetworkManager mechanisms to define your service provider and set up the connection. The stick should remember its state, and so you should only ever need the above utility (and command) once.

I’ve written before about how poor the Vodafone 3G Mobile Connect client is, and the alternative in Windows. However, it’s also worth mentioning that the card itself is far from perfect. It is very sensitive to the position of the SIM Card – having it off by even a few millimetres can mean it doesn’t connect, and it’s not always obvious what is wrong. The crucial thing is to have it poking out of the top, but only by half a millimetre or so. Don’t push it in all the way! This photo shows what it should look like:

It’s a shame Vodafone themselves don’t bother making this clear. This wasted about an hour of my time when  I first got the card.

If you’re anything like me, you hate the Vodafone Mobile Connect client - it’s buggy, unstable, and requires frequent reboots/restarts/taking-the-card-out-and-putting-it-back-in-again to make it work. What I only discovered today – although I should have known from ancient dial-up modem connections years ago – was that you can just use the regular ‘Network Connections’ facility of Windows. Just locate the ‘Vodafone Mobile Connect’ entry, right-click and select ‘Connect’ (I think this will only appear once you’ve installed the Vodafone software):

Easy-peasy connectivity. You can still track how many bytes have been uploaded/downloaded in the current session by turning on ‘Show icon in notification area when connected’ from the Connection’s Properties dialog. You’ll then see an icon in the system tray with a pop-up showing usage. Sadly, this is only for the current session, not the month as a whole – haven’t yet found a decent bit of software to do that (surprisingly).

Used to be, I employed a cunning trick I found on the web to create a quick ‘n’ dirty homepage for my browser on my mobile – all the delicious bookmarks I’d tagged with mtag.

Then delicious went and released a new version and this trick broke.

After a bit of fiddling, I’ve found a reasonable alternative. feed.informer will take any RSS feed and turn it into fairly plain HTML. So take your RSS feed, which might look something like this:

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/andrewferrier/mtag?count=100

(the count increases the maximum number of items in the feed to 100)

Now plug it into feed.informer, and edit the options to make the result look how you want (hint: I modify the template, and set the Per-Item Template to <a href=”%URL%”>%TITLE%</a><br />, leaving the rest of the template blank – this prints one bookmark per line). You’ll also need to sign up and create a feed.informer account whilst you’re doing this (assuming you don’t already have one).

Once done, just view the ‘HTML’ version of the digest you created, and set that as your mobile homepage. Bingo.