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.

My digital camera advice

A bunch of people are asking me what digital camera to get. So here are my suggestions (reliable reviews linked in bold, good prices in parentheses).

Alaska... is that for real??

Well, the Democrats won pretty big last night, with a few astonishing exceptions.

Did convicted felon Ted Stevens really keep his Senate seat, and equally sketchy Don Young his at-large congressional seat???

Apparently they both won... un-effing-believable, especially given that the polling seemed to strongly indicate that both corrupt politicians would lose to their Democratic challengers.

Looks like Oregon Republican Gordon Smith has also managed to keep his Senate seat, despite the long odds in a Democratic wave. He, of course, is a moderate Republican and hasn't been tainted by any scandals, so it's less shocking, but no less surprising given the polls going against him.

Palin gets pranked

From The Huffington Post, with the audio!!!

The AP reports that a Quebec comedy duo, posing as French President Nicolas Sarkozy, have successfully prank called Sarah Palin.

Okay, this is certainly not the highest form of political discourse we have, but it is so freakin' funny. My favorite parts are the incredibly, brazenly ridiculous pop culture references in French. So here's my annotated transcript with translations of the hilarious French bits.

I just donated money to a couple of political campaigns...

... for the first time in my life. Thanks to this nasty, nasty innuendo-filled ad by Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, against her rival Kay Hagan.

Who uglified iGoogle?

Awww, crud... who decided to change the iGoogle home page? It's now totally ugly and hard-to-read, with all kinds of tiny text coming from my RSS feeds.

Can anyone at Google make an option to re-enable the old format??

Surveying scientists' use of computers

Here is an interesting survey for all the scientists out there.

And here is an explanation of it:

Computers are as important to modern scientists as test tubes, but we know surprisingly little about how scientists develop and use software in their research. To find out, the University of Toronto, Simula Research Laboratory, and the National Research Council of Canada have launched an online survey in conjunction with American Scientist magazine. If you have 20 minutes to take part, please go to:

http://softwareresearch.ca/seg/SCS/scientific-computing-survey.html

We’d also be grateful if you’d spread the word through any mailing lists, blogs, or bulletin boards you have access to. Thanks for your help!