Saturday, March 04, 2006

Treo 650, OSX, and Dial Up Networking

Today I was messing around with my laptop and this new telephone. I am often frustrated with hotel wireless networks not working well, or the broadband connection is down and so forth. Turns out that the 650 is enabled to allow connection to the Internet via bluetooth. I am currently sitting in my living room writing this using the bluetooth connection. On OS X.4 the steps are as follows if you are using Sprint.

1) Turn bluetooth ON on your phone but leave DUN OFF. This is critical. It took me a dogs age to figure this out. It isn't documented anywhere.
2) Go into your bluetooth menu on the laptop and setup bluetooth device.
3) Choose phone.
4) follow the instructions on the laptop. It will give you a passcode which you will enter into the Treo
5) Turn ON DUN on the Treo
6) Open Internet connect on your laptop
7) enter #777 in the phone number DO NOT enter a username and password
8) Hit connect.
9) BAM you should be on the Internet.

Very very cool stuff.

Friday, March 03, 2006

Treo 650 and ReplayTV

My Treo 600 has been getting sick over the last few weeks. I pay $3 per month insurance on my phone so if something goes wrong, gets broken, or otherwise falls apart I get a new phone of the same type, if available or the next closest upgrade. The poor phone was cycling in and out of the network constantly even in places that I should have had good reception.

All said and done, this meant that poor me ended up with a Treo 650. I was pretty happy when they announced that they couldn't repair it and out came a bright shiny yellow box. I've been using a bluetooth headset with my laptop for Skype for a year now. This phone has bluetooth embedded.

When I got the phone home, I decided to see if I could get ReplayTV content onto this phone.

I recorded a short clip on one of my ReplayTVs--I only have a 128 card right now--and downloaded it via DVArchive. I then ran it through FFMPGX (the OSX version of FFMPG) which is opensource. I downloaded TCPMP (a video player that works on Palm). I put the re-encoded avi file onto an MMC card in my 650 and I must say that the picture quality is amazing. I had thought I was going to upgrade my iPod...but this may keep me from taking that step for some time.

This is some slickness.

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