Morphex's blogologue (Life, technology, music, politics, business, mental health and more)

Repurposing old devices (NOKIA Lumia and Samsung Galaxy tab) for mobile internet access

So, where I'm staying right now doesn't offer a wired connection, so I've setup a mobile internet solution instead.

The companies that offer wireless mobile internet also offer routers etc. that can be used to setup WiFi access to the internet, but I didn't opt for any of those as I had a couple of old devices that could be setup as WiFi hotspots instead.

Up until a couple of days ago, I was using a Nokia Lumia as a WiFi hotspot and used the computer as a power source via USB, but I found that it started giving a very poor speed (20-30 KB/s) when I was on Linux. So I dug up my old Samsung Galaxy Tab P1000 instead, and placed my mobile internet provider SIM card in there.

It didn't work though, it just gave a couple of bars on the network indicating that there was some sort of connection, but no internet access.

After googling a bit, I found the setup procedure on Netcom (the provider of mobile broadband) for one of the devices they sold if internet didn't work. After some adjusting of the APN settings, I found that setting the Server to internet.netcom.no and the APN-Type of connection to internet, the Galaxy Tab started working as an access point to the internet.

So there you go, if you've got old phones etc. don't throw them away, they can be put to good use later.

[Permalink] [By morphex] [Mobile (Atom feed)] [07 Jan 05:11 Europe/Oslo]

HTC One X running Netflix app with Media Link HD streaming to TV

Some months I suddenly felt the urge to buy a new smartphone, and got myself a HTC One X smartphone. I've been using it over months now and am satisified with how it works. If I use it a lot, the phone needs to get charged during the day, but I'm not sure what the reason for that is, might be many apps running polling and pushing over the network.

I've been looking for a TV-adapter for the phone, but couldn't find any. Looked around many places, and no-one had an adapter. So I was pleasantly surprised when one salesman said they had a wireless HD adapter (Media Link HD) that pairs with the HTC One X. So, OK, I bought it.

Setting it up (pairing the phone with the adapter) was as easy as plugging into the power adapter, connecting HDMI and swiping some fingers on the phone and they autoconfigured and were ready to go.

I've played around with the phone and adapter for a couple of days now, having struggled a bit with for example choppy playback of video, and sound lagging a bit.

Here's the phone streaming to the TV yesterday.

So I took a look at the processes that were running (task manager) and stopped a lot of them, Facebook, Maps etc. - all non-essential processes.

And that made a big difference, now playback is almost perfect, some minor hiccups once in a while, but nothing that can't be pragmatically overlooked.

Well, that's that. But I'd like to see an app that can instantly kill all non-essential processes, or a setup where some programs like those who display video and are a bit "heavy" can get maximum CPU priority so that other apps running don't disturb the playback.

Oh, and I would probably be good with an app that can diagnose things relevant to streaming over Wi-Fi, such as network bandwidth, network latency, CPU used by background processes and so on.

[Permalink] [By morphex] [Mobile (Atom feed)] [25 Oct 19:08 Europe/Oslo]