Tech travails

How to connect Nexus 7 3G android Tablet to Tata Docomo Photon Plus internet dongle in India

2014-08-09T21:50:00.001-07:00

This tutorial will show you how to connect your Tata Docomo Photon usb CDMA dongle to an android tablet. I have a 2012 Nexus 7 tablet (3G version) still running jelllybean 4.3 and wanted to connect it to a 3g data card/dongle in India. I know there is the option of using a micro sim card, but since I had access to a 3g usb dongle (Tata Docomo Photon Plus) I did not want to go through the hassle of getting a mobile sim-card just for a few days (There are a lot of formalities and documents needed, like address proof, id proof, passport photo, local reference who must be an existing user, etc. before you can get your pre-paid or post-paid mobile connection in India).

The first requirement is that your tablet should be rooted (there are a number of tutorials on how to root/unroot your tablet in many forums I personally used wugfresh nexus root toolkit) and you should have the ppp widget which you can download from the google play store. PPP widget will not work without rooting your tablet, if you're worried about rooting, don't be, but do your research first before doing it. I'm assuming you have access to wifi internet and can download stuff from google play and like me, you just need basic internet on the go.

The other important part of the connection is a USB OTG (on the go) cable, which is basically an adapter that will connect your normal size USB device to your Nexus 7 tablet. you can get this on ebay or amazon for about £1 or one of the many, roadside mobile accessories shops in India .

Once you plug your USB internet dongle, the ppp widget should fire up and start setting up your device. after that is done the two options 'connect' & 'configure' will be available to you.

At this stage if you try to connect, it will most probably not be able to log in as you will have to feed in some connection details. To do that tap on configure and you will be presented with a number of options.

At the top of the list is the APN settings. This was where I got a lot of conflicting information when I searched for a solution. I again stress that the instructions here are for the Tata Docomo (CDMA) usb dongle I was using in India.

APN settings - leave blank, I mean do not fill any values here.

username - internet

password - internet

dialling string - #777

(The dialling string I have given above is for the CDMA version of the dongle I was using)

Exit the configuration window by hitting the back button

Tap on connect in ppp widget and it should display 'connected' after a few seconds of dialling in.

The speed you get will vary depending on the coverage area and the subscription you have for the dongle. Photon Plus is faster than Photon Whiz. For me it was kind of ok to check mails on the go.

Transferring contacts from Nokia E63 to Samsung running Android

2014-03-13T00:18:00.001-07:00

I finally decided to get another phone after having used my faithful Nokia E63 for the past 6 years as my primary phone. I have been procuring, testing and troubleshooting other phones like the Iphone 4, 4s and 5 as well as different brands running android, for friends and family. I have stubbornly ignored the idea of buying a new phone, for the simple reason that my phone is in good working order, is trouble free and does 'most' of what I want from it. The keyboard is great, it fetches my emails, I can use whatsapp to send pictures and messages with other contacts, and it of course can make calls and send sms, it also has a great battery life and I drop it or it slips out of my hand, at least 2 to 3 times a day on an average, even serious drops to the floor that sent the back cover and battery flying have not managed to do much damage. I have also forgotten it inside my jeans pocket when I put my pair of jeans in the washer, but luckily could pull it out before serious damage was done, after a day of drying in the sun in disassembled state, it has soldiered on.

However, in spite of the many good things about this phone some of the not so good parts is the lack of a good camera, lack of GPS and the general lack of good apps. Nobody is writing any new apps for this platform anymore (that whatsapp is still being supported in this model is a wonder).

I really felt the need for a decent camera on my mobile, on a day when I saw a girl child not more than 7 to 8 years performing on a tightrope in an Indian street, when I was not carrying my camera with me. The matter of fact look on her face, coupled with the knowledge that she was putting herself in mortal danger, while she was doing a tightrope walk roughly three metres above the ground without any safety measures to talk of except for the guy who I assume was her father waiting down to catch her if she falls, was something that still haunts me today. In addition to doing the tightrope walk she was performing a balancing act with some cups and saucers which she most definitely cannot even think of dropping. It was very moving to see someone so young making a living in such a dangerous way and maybe if I had a better camera on my phone I could have shown you how bad it is. The lack of GPS support and maps is also a big disadvantage when travelling and it is something that has been bugging me for quite sometime since googlemaps has made its appearance on smartphones, added to that, the small screen is becoming a bit too cramped when reading newspapers or magazines not to talk about watching the occasional youtube clip. Although, I should add, I have never had a problem sending short emails with the excellent keyboard.

Having decided to go for a new phone the choice before me was mindboggling in terms of brands, handsets and operating systems. Since, my wife already has an Iphone 5 I have had the opportunity to check out IOS in operation, The Iphone build quality and IOS combination is very impressive but its not really what I need. I decided to get an android device which would be way cheaper and would also give me the option to root and customize. I did not consider the Nokia/windows option mainly because I have been living with Nokia for more than 10 years now and I basically just want a change. I narrowed my choice down to Samsung as it seems to have the maximum number of offerings in the market, decent after sales support and relatively cheap prices, price being a major concern for me as I don't believe in spending too much money on a phone anyway.

To cut a long story short I got a Samsung Galaxy S Duos 2 or the S7582 which seemed like a pretty decent model running a dual core processor with 768 MB of ram, 4 Gb internal storage, micro SD card option a decent 4"+ screen and decent enough looks. The downside of this phone is that it does not allow you to install apps directly on the micro SD card and all apps are by default installed on the internal memory, so if you want to install games on your phone this is not the phone for you. I don't play games so its not a deal breaker for me. I got it online for about $ 145 and the build quality and responsiveness is good enough. I am not going to review the phone's working right now as there are already a ton of reviews about this phone. I will however, start documenting the basic stuff that is needed when getting a new phone.

The first thing I had to do was to move my contacts from my old Nokia E63 to my new Samsung running android. After a bit of fiddling around I found there are different ways of doing this, one is to use the nokia suite software on the PC connected to the phone to import the contacts. After selecting all the contacts it will give me the option to convert all the contacts to .vcf files to be stored in a folder of my choice. One thing to be aware of is that all the contacts will be registered in individual .vcf files so if there are 500 contacts there will be 500 .vcf files that will be created in the chosen folder. These files can then be transferred to the android phone's internal storage or micro SD card and copied to the android device from there. This can be done by batch importing everything.

Another option is to copy the phone contacts from the Nokia to the external micro SD installed on the nokia, followed by copying these to the new android device

The simplest way to transfer contacts from the Nokia E63 (I'm assuming this will work for other Nokia models like E71 and others) to an android phone would thus be

> Open contacts in the Nokia phone

> Options > Mark/Unmark

> Mark all

> Copy

> To memory card

The contacts will be copied and if contacts are already stored in the memory card it confirms before replacing those. I just went ahead and allowed it to replace the files. I had around 594 contacts(some of those I have no idea who they are). When its done

> Go to menu

> Office

> File manager

> Switch to memory card

> Go to folder named 'Other'

> Open 'Contacts' verify that .vcf files are there.

Take out memory card from the Nokia phone and insert it in the android phone

> In android tap on contacts which should be available on the bottom line of the home screen

> Tap on menu icon next to and on the left of the home button to get the options

> Tap on Import/Export

> Tap on Import from SD card

> Import all vcard files

> Save contacts to device

You're good to go, all your contacts are in your android phone now.

I will be documenting my experience with this phone in future posts.

connecting a nokia with symbian os to the eduroam network

2012-05-02T15:23:00.006-07:00

Have you had problems connecting your nokia phone running the symbian os to the eduroam network?

I remember trying to connect my nokia e63 to the eduroam network and struggling with it for days, there was a very detailed manual on how to set up the symbian os for the eduroam network and at one glance it seemed fairly easy.

However, it was a big headache getting it to work. I tried in vain a number of times and I knew something was missing. I will try to list the steps below on how to get connected. In my case I found that it was the AddTrust certificate that was missing, the trick is to get the correct certificate and upload it to your phone and get your phone to accept it.

First, update your phone software to the latest version and that should include all the certificates you need, if the relevant certificate is missing you will have to find, download and manually load that on to your phone.

Connect your symbian phone to your computer and update it using the nokia ovi suite or pc suite whichever version you are using. A note of caution here, make sure your phone is fully charged before you do this.

After this is done follow the instructions on the eduroam setup page of your university, these instructions are mostly the same, in case you need to go through them again, I am listing the instructions here, please check if there is any difference with your university's instruction page.

Go to your phone menu

open tools

go to settings

go to connection

open access points

click on options and open 'new access point'

change 'connection name' to Eduroam
change 'data bearer' to wireless lan

change 'access point' name to eduroam
change the 'WLAN network name' to eduroam
Set the 'Network status' to Public

Set the 'WLAN network mode' to Infrastructure
Set the 'WLAN security mode' to WPA/WPA2
Select 'WLAN security settings' to open the next menu

Set 'WPA/WPA2' to EAP .Set the 'WPA2 only mode' to off

Select 'EAP plug-in settings' to open the next menu
Using the 'Options' menu, disable all the EAP types except EAP-TTLS (so that only EAP-TTLS has a tick next to it.Select 'EAP-TTLS'

open the 'Options' menu, and choose 'Configure'
In the 'EAP-TTLS' screen, on the 'General' tab:
Leave 'User or Personal certificate' as not defined
Select 'CA certificate', and choose AddTrust Global Root (it was at this point that I found out that I did not have the AddTrust Global Root certificate, if this is the case with your phone you will have to download the certificate from the link given at the bottom of this post or here and here and add it to your list of certificates)
Set 'User name in use' to User-configured or user defined

Set 'User name' to to your username in the following format: yourname@abcd.ac.uk or yourname@admin.abcd.ac.uk (replace abcd with your university's address)
Set 'Realm in use' to User-configured or User defined
Leave 'Realm' blank

Change to the 'EAP' tab, by moving right
In the 'EAP-TTLS' screen, on the 'EAP' tab:
Using the 'Options' menu, disable all the EAP inner types except MSCHAPv2 (so that only MSCHAPv2 has a tick next to it

Select 'MSCHAPv2', open the 'Options' menu, and choose 'Configure'
Set 'User name' to your university username with @abcd.ac.uk appended, e.g yourname@universityname.ac.uk
Set 'Prompt password' to No
Set 'Password' to your normal ISS password (remember, it is case sensitive)

Press the 'Back' button
In the 'Cipher' tab you can leave everything at the default settings

Now press the 'Back' button as many times as is needed to return to the main menu
Open up the 'Web' browser application, and try to visit a web page such as google.com
When prompted to 'Select access point', choose eduroam from the list. The device should connect, and then the web page should load!

Download the certificate file in .cer format from here and in .crt format from here these links will take you to my skydrive and you can download using the download button on the right. Alternatively you can download the .cer file from fileden here

you can use your computer or phone to download the files. If you are using your computer you will have to transfer the files from the computer to the phone memory and click/open the file to load it to the list of certificates.

The screenshots were from my Nokia e63 phone, I hope you are able to connect now, if you are still having problems, you can list the details of the connection problems you are having in the comments section below and I will try to work out a solution.

My next effort is to connect the kindle to the eduroam network :)

How to crimp an RJ45 network connector

2012-05-01T14:34:00.003-07:00

Although wired networks are fast becoming obsolete, with the proliferation of wifi routers and modems having built in wifi routing capability, there are still many situations where a wired network still makes sense, especially if you are concerned about hackers snooping on your network or if you just want a plain old wired network. So if you are setting up a network at home one of the important parts of your network would consist of that small nondescript component connected to a wire known as an RJ45 connector. Connecting the connector to the CAT5 or CAT6 cable is quite simple once you get the hang of it, but you have to keep in mind the sequence of colour code, I am going to highlight the basic – straight and crossover - crimping method and colour code here. This is a topic that has been covered in many sites, I just want to include the basic pictorial info without too much technical jargon.

You can buy pre crimped network cables, but you won’t get the exact length that you may want. If you want to crimp your own or if you just want to know how it should be done, read on.

You will need:

1). A pair of RJ45 crimpers, don’t buy the cheap ones unless you plan to use them only once or twice, get a good quality pair and you won’t regret the small investment.

Crimping tool for RJ45 (network) and RJ11 (telephone) connectors

2). RJ45 connectors

A pair of RJ45 Connectors

3). CAT5 (or CAT5E or CAT6) Unshielded Twisted Pair (UTP) Cable (the length will depend on how far away is the network hub from your workstation)

Cut the wire to the desired length then strip off about half an inch to expose the twisted pairs of wire there should be four twisted pairs making a total of eight different colours of wire. Do not strip off too much of the wire

After you have done this, untwist the half inch exposed pairs, flatten them and cut them with a wire cutter so that they are even at the edges.

Do not expose too much of the wire, this will result in data transmission problems, the picture below shows you how it should NOT be done

DO NOT make this mistake

For straight crimping, i.e., if you want to connect a desktop or a laptop to a network hub port, you will have to follow the 568B standard or more technically TIA/EIA-568-B standard. On both the ends of the cable the crimping has to follow the same colour code

568B Colour Code

For crossover crimping,

i.e., if you want to connect one computer with another

or link one hub with another hub

or link an adsl modem to a network hub, you will have to adopt the 568A or TIA/EIA-568-A standard on one end and the 568B or TIA/EIA-568-B standard on the other, so the ends of your wire should be connected like this

568-A to 568-B Crossover crimping

This is the pin position on the RJ45 connector

This is how the end product should roughly look like

I hope this helps you with your network!

The importance of data backup

2012-04-30T12:18:00.000-07:00

If you have been thinking of backing up your data do it now!

Its been quite a while since I posted anything here, fact is I had completely forgotten about this blog. It was from the days when I would blog about anything, but the pressures of work were just too much to allow me to even think about writing anything interesting. Since this blog brings back some memories from the past, I recollect an incident that reinforced the idea of always backing up your data. When my laptop crashed with a whole lot of important data that had not been backed up.

Today with all kinds of storage solutions available and prices coming down on a daily basis, its so easy to just store your data in your computer and forget about it, cloud computing is also opening up a totally new avenue of computing. But, I cannot overemphasise the importance of backing up your data.

If you have about 1gb of important data minus the music and the movies, back that up in a dvd or a pendrive and make sure you store them properly in a safe place. The price of a dvd or pendrive is ridiculously cheap now, and if you are not paranoid about privacy you can even store your files in your email as attachments, that way you will always have access to them (provided of course you are connected to the net). Gmail offers more than 7GB of free storage space, download and install a utility named 'gmail drive' this will show up as another drive on 'my computer' and of course you have to be online to be able to download or upload files from this drive.

With 1TB being the standard hard disk on home computers today, there is plenty of room to store anything and everything, but an average home computer user would not have more than 1GB of important data, in the form of word processor documents, spreadsheets, presentations or some other file format. The rest of the space is usually taken up by music, movies and other kinds of multimedia files. Always back up your important files and by important I don't mean music or movies that you can purchase again, but the critical files that would cause you a great deal of trauma and harm if they were lost.

I remember by Toshiba Satellite MX111 with a 40gb hard drive, 256mb ram, running winxp home, I was using this machine to edit a magazine. All the pictures that had been taken and edited were stored in the hard drive and were deleted from the camera, all the articles had been typed from hand written notes or transferred from cds and pendrives and also stored in the same hard drive and the work was almost complete. Those were the days of pagemaker and photoshop and eveyrthing was painstakingly compiled on pagemaker. I remember thinking that I should back up the data just in case, but I shrugged the thought away. Since the work was almost done I decided to take a break and started updating spybot an anti spyware programme I had installed, after a few minutes i remember a friend who was in the office asking me if he should restart the laptop as the update was complete, I told him to go ahead and then I heard him saying that, its not responding, after it failed to respond to all efforts the only obvious solution was to press hard on the power button and do a hard reset, never expecting that it would fail to start. Well that was what it did, then the panic started. The OS had crashed and there were too many system files missing, the recovery dvd that came with the laptop was designed to wipe everything and reinstall a fresh copy of xp which would not serve my purpose at all. To cut a long story short, I worked through the night and finally was able to carve out a 3gb partition from the 40gb hard disk using 'bootit ng' an excellent partitioning utility which I still use today. A fresh copy of windows xp was installed on the new partition which was used to access the files on the other partition and recover the all important unbacked-up files. I cannot explain the anxiety and fear of having lost everything, its definitely something that is to be avoided at all costs.

We've come a long way since xp but an OS will still crash, so if you are reading this, go ahead and backup that data, at least the important ones and save yourself the trauma and hair tearing.

THE BEST FREE APPLICATIONS FOR WINDOWS XP

2009-05-06T10:11:00.000-07:00

Throughout my experience with the various windows operating systems i have searched, downloaded, used and experimented with a number of third party applications starting from antivirus and security solutions, multimedia applications like players that can play a variety of file formats, multimedia file converters and rippers, word processing/editing, photo editing, video editing etc etc... I have tried most of the free softwares and open source applications.

I have had all kinds of experiences in the course of my experimentation - some quite pleasant and some not so pleasant- one thing that i have found out however is that in most cases, the applications with a small download size and installation footprint were usually the best. However, some of the programmes which started out as very small and effective, have over the years lost track of their basic design philosophy and have joined the bloatware bandwagon today.

I have a list which i feel would be recommended for novice users, try them out and i don't think you will have any regrets, the list however is random and in no special order and is meant for Windows users. I have covered a list of programs for Linux users in another blog.

First of all to get started after a fresh installation of windows an ANTIVIRUS program is a must

there are any number of free programs available today and surprisingly I have found Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) to be excellent for the Windows environment, if however you desire to get something else you can take a look at Antivir, AVG and Avast, you can get the latest versions at http://www.filehippo.com/

before you start downloading your programs I recommend you download the latest version of Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome you can use internet explorer to download this from http://www.mozilla.com/ or alternatively from filehippo. Install this browser download the flash player plugins for this too and when you're done forget you ever saw internet explorer on your desktop and don't even think of using it again (unless of course you come across some weird website that firefox cannot open)

In addition to a good antivirus program I usually recommend that you install an antispyware and antimalware, but if you have installed MSE you probably won't need to do that. But, if you're the paranoid kind then download malwarebytes from http://www.download.com/ and spybot search and destroy, you can even take a look at some firewall programs like comodo, zonealarm, sygate or sunbelt all available at filehippo

For multimedia applications if you're used to using windows media player as your default player, download the latest version and also download Klite Codec pack this pack enables media player to play almost all popular formats which the player doesn't natively support. An alternative to media player, in fact a highly recommended one is VLC or video lan client player. This player can open and play almost any multimedia file format you throw at it. Winamp is also a very popular player and is quite adept at handling a big music collection.

A maintenance tool that can help you remove junk files, clear your browsing history, clear your usage history and help you with your registry is ccleaner, this is an excellent tool, it will make things so easy for you.

windows xp installation on CQ40 133TU

2009-04-26T06:17:00.000-07:00

If you have reached my post obviously you have tried to install win xp on your compaq laptop cq40 but you must have reached the point where it blanks out or rather blues out into that famous blue screen. I'm not going to ask why you want to downgrade to xp you obviously have your own reasons.

Lets look at the list of things you are likely to need.

1. Laptop

2. WinXp Installation Disk (with SP2 or SP3 integrated)

3. Another desktop or laptop computer with an active internet connection and a CD or DVD Writer

4. A lot of patience...

First you will have to integrate the necessary drivers into your xp installation cd, the best way u can do this is by using a software called 'nlite' download the software from the net, before you install it make sure u have dotnet installed on your computer, if you don't go to the microsoft website, download and install it.

The next step is to integrate the sata drivers into your windows xp installation cd, now you will be thinking, how the hell do i do that, you cannot copy and paste it on to your cd obviously and i don't plan to cover integrating drivers in this post. Do a google search and find out how to integrate sata drivers onto your installation disk using nlite...

After u feel confident enough of venturing into this you will have to find the relevant SATA drivers for your particular machine, this again you can do by searching on the net, and you will most probably get the relevant drivers from the manufacturer's website, after you have downloaded the relevant SATA drivers for your laptop model, extract them into one folder and later u can get them inside ur xp installation disk using the insert function in nlite.

Once the integration process is done you can burn your integrated disk as a bootable cd when this is done you can now use your cd to install a fresh copy of win xp on your CQ40 series laptop.

But this is just the beginning or ur problems

getting the drivers for windows xp for this particular laptop is a big pain, I have posted the drivers in sky drive, when you click on the links you will be taken to the skydrive site and you can download using the download button on the right hand pane of the window, if you are taken to the filefactory website you do not need to pay or get a premium account, you can log in as a free user and download the files for free.

The sequence for installing the drivers is: chipset, uaa, audio, graphics followed by other drivers

First install the Chipset driver, you can get it from here

The chipset driver will be followed by the Audio driver (DO NOT install the graphics driver before the audio driver)

If you have slipstreamed your Windows XP installation CD with SP3 you will not need the Universal Audio Architecture, but if it is not slipstreamed with SP3 then you will have to install the UAA first before proceeding with the Audio driver. You can get the UAA from here

After installing the UAA , download and install the audio driver from here

This will create a swsetup folder in C drive ("C:\swsetup\sp34200")

Installing this driver may result in an error. However, you can continue with the following steps to get the audio driver to work.

Go to Start and select Run. In the Run box type devmgmt.msc and press enter
Right click on "Audio device on High Definition Audio Bus" then click update driver
Select "Install from a list or specific location"
Click Next, then select "Don't search, I will choose the driver to install"
Click Next and select "Sound, video and game controller" from the list.
Click Next and then click Have Disk
Click Browse C:\swsetup\sp34200 folder and select the .inf (wis30b2a) file and click open and Continue with the onscreen instructions

At this point DO NOT RESTART click cancel if it asks to be restarted

The next step is to install the graphics driver download it from here
You can also install the driver for the modem now (although nobody uses a modem anymore these days) for modem driver click here

You can restart the machine at this point and XP should be able to keep the audio driver and you will be able to hear XP's familiar welcome sound.

For webcam driver click here

For ricoh 5 in 1 card reader driver click here

For LAN driver click here or here

In case u have any particular problem concerning this laptop u can post a question and i will try to answer it for you.

2009-03-11T08:37:00.000-07:00

As usual this was a case where someone wanted a downgrade from vista to xp and it turned out that this machine was a samsung SENS Q45 laptop preinstalled with vista with the korean interface, it was a core 2 duo machine with 1gb ram 12.1" screen, bluetooth, wifi, lan, modem, 1.3 megapixel webcamera and 120gb hard disk drive. I had to make sure i would be able to get the necessary drivers before i formatted it, creating a recovery disk for the vista was another headache because everything was in Korean and I haven't had the time to learn Korean yet.

The first task was obviously to search for the drivers, the model number on the bottom of the laptop mentioned it as NT Q45 but on further research I found that samsung referred to it as the NP Q45 and I had to look for the appropriate drivers, after a bit of a tedious search i reached the official samsung site here offering multilanguage option for the windows xp operating system.

After this it was smooth sailing with the usual clean install from a windows xp disk integrated with sp2.

After the installation was done the first driver to be installed was the chipset driver followed by the graphics driver and then the sound.

If you have the Win XP with SP2 integrated installing the sound driver can be a bit tricky and u will have to install the high defintion audio driver package before installing the realtek driver, after that everything went smooth except for the modem which is not yet working.

If you have the Win XP with SP3 integrated you won't have to install the hi-def audio driver package.

This had to be followed up with installing the korean language pack to enable the machine to be used for Korean language input both for internet usage and word processing using MS Office 2007.

I'm too tired to post all the details will do that in a few days...

if you have any queries feel free to comment