Antics.

[reddragdiva]

• Forget eggs, someone needs to do this to Nick Griffin. A large black one by preference.

• NotN: Cabinet reshuffle puts Lords up front; Kim Jong-nam happy to stay well out of North Korean succession.

Australians: what pay-as-you-go 3G dongles work with Linux as bought from the provider there? Specifically on Ubuntu Netbook 9.04, which is what redcountess has. I don't mean "try this, it might work" but ones you know do work. Pointers most welcomed.

Freda went for a hearing test today and is apparently fine. Just a slow talker like her dad. We've discovered the low-bandwidth way to entertain her: play music on Windows Media Player with visualisations. She watches it like it's telly and tries to dance along to it, waving her arms to imitate the visualisations! No doubt sending subtle indoctrination to her brain.

arkady has been making silver doll rings and sold the tanzanite straight off that post! More buyers most welcome ...

Comments

[almadsfeika]

Well, of course somebody does. But it wasn't me :P

[zebee]

exetel.com.au is my ISP of choice. they have a $5/month and 1.5c/mb rising to 2.5c/mb after 1gb data plan, sim or sim and dongle. They have other plans too, but that's the one I use.

Worked straight out of the box for me using a 2nd hand vodaphone branded dongle on Centos 5.3 so it's going to work on a later Ubuntu.

They don't have a handholding helpdesk, you have to use their forums but those are helpful and plenty of linux users.

[jld]

$5/month and 1.5c/mb rising to 2.5c/mb after 1gb data plan

Reading this makes me want to weep for the state of the US telecomms market.

[zebee]

exetel is one of the cheapest ISPs out there, and one of the few that does things with no contract.

They have contract things too, but I prefer without.

The US does have unlimited data on broadband though.... I pay $75 a month for a phone (18c local calls, reasonably cheap STD/international) and ADSL 30gb between noon and midnight and 42gb (last I looked) between midnight and noon. I don't use a lot of that, but I keep not bothering to switch to a lower plan.

I might go naked because I don't use my landline and fairly soon I can put that number onto Exetel's very cheap VOIP. I use that with my N810 at home now.

Roll on the RX55/N900 with SIM slot. THen my life would be complete. Otherwise I might get drawn to an iPhone and that would be sad.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Well, the opening logo's suitably, er, militaristic! Time for a BNP revamp?

[mjg59.livejournal.com]

The one that Optus were providing at the start of the year worked fine. Looked like this. I believe it was a Huwai of some description.

[reddragdiva]

w00t! Thank you! Looks like this one. $149 with a 12-month lock on the modem.

[mjg59.livejournal.com]

Yes, that looks like it. The only thing is that the APN has to be explicitly set to "preconnect" - the modem will refuse to connect otherwise. Hours of fun, that was.

I saw advertising for lower rates on Virgin, but didn't investigate them or the modem. For light email and browsing 2GB is probably plenty for a month.

Note that Optus seem to bill 10MB per connection, even if you don't use that much. It's worth staying on for a while rather than connecting just to read one email.

Oh, they'll probably try to claim that there's some sort of activation stuff involved. I don't think we had any problem with that. It can be activated in store and then I think it just worked under Linux.

[redcountess]

Yep, ended up calling tech support this morning and was told about the "preconnect" setting, not so bad since I only bought the kit yesterday. Thanks for your help :)

[redcountess]

I've managed to use 40mb already today, problem is I'll disconnect and then think of something else I've been meaning to do online! Have to call to check my usage as well because the only other way is sending an sms via their client, which I can't open at all, even in Wine, Gnome's file manager seems to think there's no files on the stick.

[reddragdiva]

Heh. Make lists like you're on dialup in a house where the phone's in heavy use :-)

[bionicgeekgrrl.livejournal.com]

if thats the same model as sold by t-mobile (looks to be, t-mobile in the uk supply the E160) it should work fine with Ubuntu out of the box, even works on an AAO with a bit of tweaking.

[reddragdiva]

Turns out it does work out the box - Liz called tech support for the settings, it's working great!

The fun of course will be unlocking it when she gets back to the UK!

[bionicgeekgrrl.livejournal.com]

I wonder if those market traders would be able to do it? should be possible I'd imagine, or calling tech support might work on an off chance (highly unlikely).

[pir.livejournal.com]

I've used two different Huawei usb 3g modems on ubuntu variants. The E220 is usually more easily supported (usually by default these days), the E172 I have now does higher speeds but needs a bit of 3rd party support.

[redcountess]

This is an E190 but it set up fine in Gnome's network manager except for the APN setting which MJG had problems with, however I got that from Optus's tech support and it's working fine.

[redcountess]

Correction, it's an E160E.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

It may be worth looking at Exetel (http://www.exetel.com.au/) as a service provider. The guy who runs it is barking mad but the service itself is good. I believe they're shipping the same USB doovers as Optus, and it's access to the Optus 3G network at a vastly-reduced price.