Tetherbot

Losing internet connectivity sucks. But it kind of comes with losing my job (which kind of sucks, but no where near as much as losing the net). Thankfully, I still have my T-Mobile G1. A badass phone, this little guy is about the closest thing for competition to the ubiquitous iPhone. For those of us who do not support Apple's way of doing things, it's nice to have something else to fall back on. And the G1 isn't just some wannabe iPhone clone neither. It's an awesome device in it's own right. But that's really something for another post... perhaps an extremely biased review of the G1. Later, methinks. When I have enough bandwidth for uploading pictures and all that.

So anyway, what I really wanted to post about was Tetherbot, a free application for the G1. Like the iPhone, the G1 has no real support for 'tethering', which is basically the in-da-hood slang term for using your wireless phone as a wireless modem for your portable computing device (or as the Gs call it, a 'laptop'). There are some options available to us, such as PDAnet, but who wants to pay for something that should be free? Not this guy. And not that I could even if I wanted to.

So, enter Tetherbot. It's a long way off from being as simple as PDAnet, and frankly at first glance looks pretty daunting to use for the average user. But once it's up and running it's pretty good. No annoying client on your end and no need to hack the phone; it works on stock hardware and only required a USB connection to the computer (and the android drivers, of course). Using Firefox (which I typically don't use) was the only way to get it to work, as the numerous in depth options available to the user with that popular browser made everything actually work. Namely, the ability to use a Socks proxy (something Chrome can't at present do, and no one wants to use IE so why bother?). And after following an extremely dumbed down tutorial (I'll post the link later), I got tetherbot working without a hitch. And glorious EDGE speeds. Takes me back to the good ol' days on AOL. Yeah, the wall still hurts on my head when I bash it repeatedly while waiting for pages to load. Takes me back... if only I could remember.

Anyway, tetherbot is awesome. And when T-Mo rolls out with 3G in my area (supposedly by th end of September *crosses fingers*) it'll be that much more awesome. But hopefully by then I'll have for reals internet access back. Here's hoping!

EDIT: Of course when I went to post this the first time Tetherbot lost connection. Well, it's not perfect. You get what you pay for ^^