(I’m pretty sure that these directions will also work for older versions of ubuntu.)

You need to install a program on your Treo 650 that will let it become a USB modem like:
Treo USBModem or PdaNet
If anyone knows of any free / open source software for the palm that will do the same thing let me know!

/etc/chatscripts/USBModem:

TIMEOUT 5
ABORT '\nBUSY\r'
ABORT '\nERROR\r'
ABORT '\nNO ANSWER\r'
ABORT '\nNO CARRIER\r'
ABORT '\nNO DIALTONE\r'
ABORT '\nRINGING\r\n\rRINGING\r'
'' \rATZ
TIMEOUT 12
OK ATD#777
TIMEOUT 22
CONNECT ""


/etc/ppp/peers/USBDialup:

noauth
connect "/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/chatscripts/USBDialup"
defaultroute
usepeerdns
/dev/ttyACM0 115200
local
novj


You may notice that when you turn on the usbmodem software on the Treo and plug it in you may see something like this in dmesg:

[110049.340000] usb 3-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 5
[110049.508000] usb 3-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[110049.512000] cdc_acm 3-1:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device


That’s where you find out what tty port the USB modem will be communicating on: /dev/ttyACM0. And that’s the port used in /etc/ppp/peers/USBDialup.

The rest is easy…

pon USBDialup

And you’re gold! You can then tail -f /var/log/messages to ensure it’s connecting alright.

So I’ve had my MythTV humming along real well for the last 2+ months now. Dual PVR-150s, 1/2 Gig of RAM with a meager 60Gig HDD. It has really passed the wife test with flying colors. I have the audio folders remote CIFS (samba) mounted from my NAS box back in the office. I can stream audio files all day long with no problem, but when it came to video I just didn’t have the bandwidth (it seems) to get anywhere. Mplayer was studdering trying to play back the video file. I tried tweaking my WRT54Gs that help the network together, but I my WiFi signal was already around 80-90%. No help there. I dig around on the Knoppmyth wiki until I found an article about switching over to Xine (in this case for DVD iso - pretty slick if you ask me) I swicthed the default video commandline option to:
<code>
xine -pfhq –no-splash %s
</code>

For some reason xine does a better job of buffering the video signal across as slower network mounted drive. Props to Xine on MythTV

I should have had this tip in the SLC airport earlier this month:
ThinkingPHP and beyond » Hacking a commercial airport WLAN

… the WRT54G. I’m starting work on a Rails site for the WRT54G admin web-interface. It’ll be fun, AJAX-y and Web 2.0 it all it’s goodness. Why not?

It turns out the hardest part is getting rails and all it’s dependancies on the box!

I started with: http://handhelds.org/feeds/ruby/

After loading the ruby-large package, I’ll try to get GEM going.

[Hmm.. do people use CPAN when working with perl compiled for ARM? Should I screw GEMs and package up the rails code itself? Find out on the next episode!]

Instead of MySQL, I’ll throw in SQLite for the backend, thought it looks like I’ll have to compile the ruby-sqlite bindings for ARM myself if they are written in C (and I don’t have GEMs available.)

I’m a fan of great tech ideas and startups. This week’s great idea comes from FON.

It’s idea is this: You share free WiFi with others at home/office and they share it with you when you’re on the road.

That idea is cool - in and of itself - but there more “cool” to be found. All the technology is built into a Linksys WRT54G-type router.

Ah yes, the great WRT54G. One of the best examples of the rising importance of the “Make” culture. As soon as FON reaches the tipping point hardware hacking will really lead some to the $.