Kirk Petersen

I’m selling my 8″ Dobsonian telescope. I’ll probably be asking about $150 and might make it $100 if any friends are interested. It is a great telescope if you have an SUV to haul it around in. It’s about 4 feet tall and the base is very bulky. That’s the downside of a telescope that gathers that much light for that price. I’ll just be using a set of 15×70 binoculars for the 2-3 times a year that I actually look at stars (worked great last weekend).

I’ll probably sell my 15″ Macbook Pro. I just bought one of the new aluminum Macbooks and really don’t need two machines (rather, my iPhone has become my second machine).

Also selling my car (in order to buy a new/newer one). I will probably sell my motorcycle, too. I didn’t ride for a couple years and really felt like getting back into it. But I just don’t ride it enough. Part of that is the bike (not as fun as I thought it would be) and part of that is simply having a million other things to do.

I’m at Vivace right now and their WAP isn’t working so I’m using my BlackBerry as a GPRS/EDGE modem. I figured I’d write down the steps I took to set this up. This only applies to Mac users with T-Mobile accounts.

1. pair your BlackBerry and Mac (System Preferences -> Bluetooth)
2. copy blackberry8100.txt to /Library/Modem Scripts
3. go to System Preferences -> Network
4. select Bluetooth
5. click on the PPP tab
6. enter “guest” as both the account name and password
7. enter “wap.voicestream.com” as the telephone number
8. click on the Bluetooth Modem tab
9. select “BlackBerry 8100″ as your Modem
10. open the “Internet Connect” app
11. click “Connect”

The bandwidth isn’t bad but the latency is between 500ms and 1.5 seconds. It makes for a barely-usable network experience.

Update: it has been a couple months and I find the EDGE network to be fast enough for checking email once in a while, when there isn’t an open WAP around. I use it probably once a week.