Wow, Pandora on the Motorola Q

The Motorola Q smartphone is getting pretty old and crufty these days, and can't do a lot of the cool stuff that newer Android and iPhones can do but... apparently it still has a few tricks up its sleeve, including the ability to play streaming Internet radio using the free Pandora service.

How to encode video for the Sansa Connect using FFmpeg

Tarq (my BFF, yo) sent me some goodies in the mail... a bottle of fine Michigan maple syrup from Camp Daggett (his home away from home) and...

A Sansa Connect MP3 player!

Grudging props to Mac OS

So, Microsoft, Sony, and Apple are basically the only tech companies that I really loathe.  Microsoft and Sony are pretty much irredeemably awful.  Apple does some cool stuff (hint: not iPod) but they're surrounded by such an insufferably smug attitude and I hate the frickin' Steve Jobs personality cult.

Anyway... I'm at my grandparents' house for the weekend, and they have an iMac connected to a DSL modem.  No router.  So how the heck am I supposed to get my notebook online?

Pidgin, Google Talk, and XMPP

The Pidgin IM client supports just about every instant messaging protocol ever conceived, including many poorly-designed and undocumented proprietary protocols, such as those used by AOL, Yahoo!, and MSN.  It also supports  XMPP (aka Jabber), the open-standard protocol on which Google Talk is based.

There are some interesting technical and political issues surrounding the implementation of Google Talk's XMPP extensions...

How to tether your Moto Q as a modem *in Windows*

Previously, I figured out how to use a Motorola Q smartphone as a modem under Linux. I use Linux all the time, but for the benefit of others I got around to figuring out how to do it under Windows XP as well.

How to use your Moto Q as a modem

So, I have the awesome (and now-discontinued) Spring SERO phone plan, which basically gives me unlimited text/data/everything for less than I paid for Verizon's cheapest plan. The only problem I've had until now:

How to tether my Motorola Q phone to my computer, so that I can use it as a modem when I'm not in range of a wireless network?

I read a whole lot of stupid forum posts on this topic, mostly by seriously confused people, and I was under the mistaken impression that (a) it's really hard to do, (b) it requires special software, and (c) Sprint has removed the features enabling tethering from the phone.

Well, it ain't true. In the course of a few hours, I figured out not how to tether my Moto Q in two different ways: first, using a USB cable, and second, via Bluetooth. So I'm going to explain how to do it both ways under Ubuntu Linux 8.10. It should be pretty much the same under other Linux variants.