In NZ, like many places there is a GSM based network (run by vodafone) that now offers UMTS and HSDPA. These are often called ‘3g’ technologies, but I must admit it is reasonably confusing. However, the data costs of using these technologies in NZ is very very high. It’s basically pointless unless you’re in business or very wealthy.

However, recently I’ve been doing some work in Australia and for whatever reasons the place where I was staying did not have broadband (they did have broadband, but the ISP they use seems to require them to have no ADSL for up to 20 days while they plug and unplug some cables for naked DSL. Go figure). Given that I need broadband to do my work, I organised a loan of a 3g router. Basically a little box (called ethermax I think) that contained a 3g modem and some sort of ethernet router. I just plugged in a flylead, turned the thing on and I had broadband. It was connected to Telstra’s NextG network.

I was quite impressed by how good this really was. Sure latency can vary enormously, but in general doing the usual stuff of web surfing, send/receive email, ssh sessions, even VNC sessions worked very well. If anything a badly running ADSL connection in NZ has far worse latency than this thing. I didn’t really test download speeds or anything like that.

I ended up returning the 3g router, and bought myself a Telstra Prepaid Samsung A411 phone. It’s locked to Telstra which sort of sucks, but it was cheaper (AU$149) than the cheapest 3g modem I could get, and so far as data charges on prepay go in Aus (all the other options seem to be 24 month contracts … and I’m only in Aus for a month or two) , it’s sort of a least worst option. Telstra lets you buy ‘data bundles’. In my case I bought a 1GB bundle that lasts 30 days. For that ‘luxury’ I pay AU$89. Sure if you’re on a 24 mth plan then you pay less than that, but that’s not an option for me. I was bit confused by how these data bundles work. First you have to put $89 of credit on your prepay balance, then purchase a ‘1gb plus pack’ using your credit. This would have been much easier if Telstra accepted my NZ credit card, but sadly I had to run down to the shops and buy some prepay vouchers.

Anyway, this phone works really well. It’s a bit vague what the max transfer speed is supposed to be as it only does UMTS. I thought I saw somewhere that it only goes to 1.8Mbps, but I’m sure other countries have 384kbps as the max for UMTS. Confusing. Anyway, it works great for what I need it to do. It came with a USB cable, and I only use the phone as a modem. In fact, as a modem the phone just shows up as a USB serial device and is dead easy to get going under linux. I found this note on the whirlpool forums describing how to set it up. The USB cable also charges it which is good if you’ve ever had nokia phones where they won’t charge via USB.

Of course, you really need to be careful about your usage with a 1GB limit. I’ve never had such a low limit on any kind of internet connection that I can remember. I did some simple math and thought 1000MB is about 33MB a day, so I try to limit myself to under 33MB each day. That is a real struggle. If all I did was SMTP/POP mail then it would be easy. That stuff uses hardly any traffic, but modern websites chew through the traffic. I’ve now even tried turning off image downloading to cut back. You also need to be careful of pages that constantly reload themselves (eg. a Big Brother status screen) and if you’re using windows, make sure it doesn’t try to download any updates. The initial view of a VNC screen will suck some traffic, but so long as you don’t have much activity in theVNC window, the traffic use is quite low.

This phone has reminded me of my dialup days and the AT command set, as you basically use AT commands when talking to the phone’s modem. One oddity I discovered is that when you power the phone off, you can still talk to it via the USB serial interface. Odd.

Computer-wise I haven’t been up to too much. The T42 is still going, but it’s feeling quite old now. I’m still using dwm on Slackware 12.0 on it. dwm is mostly OK if somewhat eccentric. If you like keyboard shortcuts and don’t want too many shortcuts to remember then its great. Some apps such as Skype really don’t like the tiling approach, but most apps are fine.

The most noticeable slowdown on the T42 is when you try to run a virtual machine. Lately I’ve installed Solaris 10 x86 and the old Pentium-M 1.5Ghz does push itself (I have 1GB of ram). I have vmware workstation and the new (1.6) version of VirtualBox running on the T42. I’ve used VirtualBox before, but now that Sun has bought the company it looks like they’ve pumped up the development progress on it. It should be interesting to see where it all ends up. Sometimes VirtualBox feels faster than Vmware but its hard to tell. Vmware has very easy to set up networking, whereas VirtualBox encourages you to play with linux bridging (which I am fine with) which is definately a bit more complex if you’ve never set it up before.

So a newer laptop would be nice, so I’ve been googling doing some research (as you do). Naturally, I started looking into getting a newer Thinkpad. I like their keyboards (generally brilliant but getting worse and worse) and I prefer using the trackpoint. I trawled through the forums at thinkpads.com and I get the impression that the T60 and T61 really aren’t as well built as the T42. The T61 sounds like the better choice out of the two. However, I’ve also been researching Mac laptops as well. I’ve had the Mac Mini for a while now. I don’t use it as much as my linux systems here, but it is an OK Unix platform and there aren’t that many things about OS X that are annoying. On linux I often find there is a lot tinkering and research that goes into ‘making something go’, whereas with the Mac, the software already goes … so you just get in and do the creative thing you wanted to do in the first place (admitedly you could say the same about Windows … but I just hate Windows).

The Macbook is reasonably light and actually weighs almost the same as the 14 inch T42 (about 2.3kg). However, if you trawl some apple forums you find lots of people complaining about stains and cracks on the white macbooks and grease marks and smudges on the black ones. You get the impression that Apple have fixed or perhaps lessened some of these issues over the years … but its difficult to tell. There there’s the new Macbook Air.

The Air is quite a bit more expensive, but lighter and has barely any ports on it. I hate wireless networking so I’d probably always have to use the USB ethernet adapter which is not ideal. There are also lots of forum posts regarding core shtudowns … which appears to be less so now or can be resolved by undervolting.

So definately some choices to think about until next time.