Monthly Archives: June 2009

Packing up

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Finished the main packing phase: 21 boxes strewn all over the apartment.

Moving company will come tomorrow at 1pm. I will have to pack up all the camera gadgets and computers in the morning.

P.S. If anything is strange with this post it's because I am typing it on my iPhone with the Worpress app.

Activate tethering on Softbank iPhone

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A friend of mine, @kuriburi, just sent me this to publish for him, so here you go:

So it was the news of the day: Someone managed to activate tethering on an AT&T iPhone 3G by means of a "carrier support file", a.k.a. "ipcc". Here in Japan, the story was a bit more tricky : Softbank declared that they would not support tethering on their network and had no plans to do so in the future either.

softbank-tethered

Nice! So, with those brand new Macbook Pro without any pc express card slot, how are we supposed to use Softbank's data cards? This bothered me to no end thus I went on a search for a Softbank carrier support file that I could modify somehow. I stumbled onto this very interesting post on a Japanese blog that talked about the same thing, but with a beta version of the iPhone OS 3.0.

OK, well, doesn't hurt to try with the official release, right?

Now I need to get my hands on that damn file. Turns out, it was right on my hard drive at work since August 2008. So I went to work and modified the file (which incidentally is just a bundle in a zip archive with a special extension) and tried to update my iPhone with it. The steps are simple :

  1. in the Terminal, execute defaults write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE
    on windows, execute C:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.exe /setPrefInt carrier-testing 1 in a DOS window
  2. plug your iPhone to your computer via the USB cable
  3. in iTunes, display the summary page of your iPhone
  4. while pressing the "alt" (option) key, click on the "check for update" button
  5. you will be presented with a finder window. Locate the Softbank_jp.ipcc file, select it
  6. iTunes will now update your iPhone with the modified carrier settings
  7. Once finished, unplug the iPhone, go see into Settings>General>Network, and voilà! screenshot

Oh, before I forget, if Apple or Softbank issues an update through iTunes, wait a bit before updating... you never know...

Update: I updated the link with the latest file from @kuriburi that activates both tethering and MMS. よろしく！

Update: This IPCC file does not work with 3.1 update. If you value your tethering, do not upgrade yet.

WWDC Keynote on MacBidouille.com with App Engine

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No bandwidth, no servers, no infrastructure, no money required. Just a bit of python and a tad of javascript and you can live stream an event to 10.000 people concurrently (theoretic figure, Analytics said the live-blog site had 30.000 visits in all) within Google App Engine's free quotas.

keynote requests per second

This is the graph taken from my App Engine dashboard the morning after the WWDC'09 Keynote after MacBidouille.com live-blogged the event in French through my application. We always had scaling problems while Google's infrastructure was in beta and we were bound by smallish quotas, but since they opened fully the service a couple months ago, the sky is the limit.

iPhone battery upgrade

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For iPhone owners who are non-plussed by the iPhone 3GS and are not ready to fork out an arm and an eye for the upgrade (and who would blame you?), there is still a solution to get your old phone almost up to par with the new version:

iphone battery upgrade

Amazon.co.jp has on shelf a battery upgrade kit which will enable you - if you are ok with thrusting an exacto knife into your iPhone's entrails in cold blood - to change your battery with a new 1600mAh one (compared with 1150mAh for the original).

Meanwhile, I am still iPhone-free and will happily stroll to the Softbank shop on June 26th - or maybe a week later since I will probably be too busy packing my apartment move to wait in line for a phone - and get myself a 16GB 3GS for ¥11.520 (^o^)v