Charger Doodad

Due to an error on my part and a lack of preparedness, my phone had the camera application running all night and I neglected to bring the charger. Needless to say, my phone was almost dead. Thankfully due to packing a spare phone for the invasion I could get comms.

This morning, on a hunch I tried V’s USB battery charger thing. He got it as part of a deal with 2 camera batteries. The device is a clamp with a folding USB socket on one end and has two pins that can be moved to make contact with the battery terminals.

When connected correctly to the battery, a green LED on the USB plug lights up. A red one comes on when charging so you know it is working.

Writing on the bottom:

Input DC 5.0V +- 0.25V

Output DC4.8V +- 0.05V MAX 500mA

Suitable for charging original mobile phone batteries from manufacturer

Neat little device. Contemplating creating an urban possibles pouch of sorts with a few bits of useful electrical nicknacks like the charger.

Call me

If folk want, I will give out my mobile phone number so that you can contact me in a more direct manner. Only folk who I have a prior relationship will get the number though, not gonna give it to random folk. Comment here or find me some other way. This is open to folk outwith the UK though I’m not sure if you would be willing to pay for the long distance calls.

I love my phone

Found an awesome application for my N95. ExtGPS lets you take the gps data received by the phone and pipe it to another device over bluetooth to use.

Instructions for Linux (shamelessly ripped from the site, Instructions for Os X and Windows also available)

05 November 2007, 20:17 – ExtGPS
Posted by Jarno Heikkinen: To make our series complete, here are the instructions how to setup ExtGPS for Linux applications, using Bluetooth serial port.

Unlike the other howtos, this one is command line based. Probably suits better for Linux enthusiasts

Make sure ExtGPS is up and running and your phone is discoverable. In the following dumps, aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff should be your phone’s Bluetooth MAC address.

Perform a scan for “Serial Port” services:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sdptool search SP
Inquiring ...

Searching for SP on aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff ...
Service Name: Symarctic ExtGPS
Service Description: Share phone's built-in GPS ...
Service Provider: Symarctic Solutions
Service RecHandle: 0x10016
Service Class ID List:
  "Serial Port" (0x1101)
Protocol Descriptor List:
  "L2CAP" (0x0100)
  "RFCOMM" (0x0003)
    Channel: 5
Language Base Attr List:
  code_ISO639: 0x656e
  encoding:    0x6a
  base_offset: 0x100

(... continues with other services...)

Create /dev/rfcommX device for ExtGPS, by “rfcomm bind” command. Note the parameters, “1″ is the id for /dev/ entry, mac address and the last one is RFCOMM channel ID from service, in my case it’s channel 5 (chanel no. 5 ?):

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo rfcomm bind 1 aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff 5

When application connects to /dev/rfcomm1, it’s opened to ExtGPS. You can test the connection, e.g.:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ cat /dev/rfcomm1

After this, the connection icon on ExtGPS should be green and device name shown next to it. If the satellite icon is also green (meaning a fix), you should now see raw GPS NMEA data on your terminal. Issuing Ctrl-C should break the connection, turning the connection icon back to red.

I also found a utility called JoikuSpot which links the 3g network to wifi letting you use your phone as a mobile broadband modem. Very sweet.

Where’s my goggles, I wanna go gargoyle…