#freetethering would be it. I don’t know how long I’m already dealing with crappy USB-UMTS sticks, Dual-SIMs etc. I was hoping for free tethering on the iPhone to put an end to all that!. But now, one carrier after the other, starts either postponing it or charging extra for data traffic that I already pay for!

I don’t suggest we get extra traffic, just the allowance that is already included with my plan. I guess that the providers just granted these Gigabytes of traffic per month because they thought it looks nice and nobody will be able to use  it – so what – you were wrong, get over it.

E.g. T-Mobile had an especially funny idea: You are / have been entitled to use a second SIM (in a UMTS modem for example) on your data allowance, for free! I don’t see the difference between a Multi-SIM and tethering; maybe it’s just that tethering is not enough a hassle….

What about setting up a #freetethering day at/via Twitter, where all iPhone users interested in getting what they pay for start using their iPhone like mad (I guess downloading videos over the youtube app is the best way!?)? The idea is to motivate the providers to rethink their pricing-strategy and come up with something more customer oriented… (aka free)

Get in touch on Twitter @tomschlenkhoff or via comments here, I’ll start clogging the tubes on monday, every monday until they rethink their position!

I spent a few days last week on evaluating my options to get CabChap as an app in the Apple App Store. Right from the start I was betting on phonegap, a framework that basically offered to show a web page and exposed a few iPhone-API calls to the JavaScript of the page (Including latitude, longitude, contacts, vibration etc.).

But following a long discussion here, it seems to me that frameworks like phonegap do have a problem – Apple does not permit apps built with those into the app store. At least a huge majority of recently built apps didn’t make it into the store.

So I decided to pursue anothe route, at least for the IPhone (phonegap covers even Android and Blackberry).

Getting help from here it was easy and straight forward to build a native app, that exposes location information to my web app. Check it out, if you are focused on the iPhone and latitude&longitude this may be the way to go.

Using Leopard 10.5.7 in VMware Fusion 2.0.4 works great with a little bit of wizardry:

• sudo bash
• cd “/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/isoimages”
• mkdir original
• mv darwin.iso tools-key.pub *.sig original
• sed “s/ServerVersion.plist/SystemVersion.plist/g” < original/darwin.iso > darwin.iso
• openssl genrsa -out tools-priv.pem 2048
• openssl rsa -in tools-priv.pem -pubout -out tools-key.pub 
• openssl dgst -sha1 -sign tools-priv.pem < darwin.iso > darwin.iso.sig
• for A in *.iso ; do openssl dgst -sha1 -sign tools-priv.pem < $A > $A.sig ; done
• exit

This basically fixes a bug in Fusion that disables running Leopard Client by changing the required signatures of the ISOs. How nice. I stumbled across this great piece of information here: http://blog.rectalogic.com/2008/08/virtualizing-mac-os-x-leopard-client.html

Just found out another little caveat: To connect to GoogleTalk I had to configure the “Server” setting on the advanced tab in Pidgin for my GoogleTalk Account. Make sure you have “Require SSL/TLS” activated and “Connect server” to “talk.google.com”.

After this, all went smoothly: I was asked if I want to accept a certificate from talk.google.com. After accepting – it worked like a charm.

Thanks for all the work GNU/Linus/Debian/Ubuntu put into this marvelous piece of software – Ubuntu 9.04 is the first distro that I see as fit for the desktop or even a laptop!

Just a short notice for Ubuntu wannabe’s: I had trouble connecting to a FON router in our office.

After switching it to Authentication: “WPA2″ and Cipher: “AES” instead of “Mixed” Ubuntu 9.04 on my MSI Wind connected like a charm – right out of the box, now new WLAN-card necessary.