layout: post title: GPRS > Nokia 6630 > Bluetooth > Powerbook > Ethernet > iBook created: 1122862802 categories:

• Wireless, Cellular, and Mobile

That strange title is to indicate how I'm posting this. I'm on the road to OSCON, taking place in Portland. Roland is driving, Zak is working on his tutorial (something to do with dolphins and databases), and Darren is on the iBook on the other side of the Ethernet cable.

I had this set up once before, on a trip to New Brunswick, between Montreal and Quebec City. At best, once you've figured out the GPRS connection scripts (I use the Nokia GPRS scripts I got from Ross Barkman's home page) things pretty much work. It's certainly not zippy, but you can definitely hit refresh on your aggregator and grab your latest email. And even post to your blog (via MarsEdit, no less).

Actually, the story about the connection scripts is a good one. I was in the car back east, and thought I would try it out since I had just gotten my unlimited data plan. I used the Opera browser to search Google, found Ross's page and downloaded the script to my phone. I then used Bluetooth to push the script to my Powerbook, unstuffed it and installed. Then I connected back the other way through Bluetooth, and voila! I was online.

The connection sharing is the other thing of beauty in OS X. You can pretty much share from any interface to any other, so you just select Bluetooth as the connection to share, and then enable either a wired Ethernet connection or even WiFi. Darren was getting only between 2 - 4 Kbps per second, which is fantastic: basically as fast as a 33.6 dial-up connection.