I’ll first tell you what I did so you don’t have to repeat it, or at the least can save it for last, but if you’re impatient just scroll to the end of this post.

The Issues.. Oh god the issues!

The problem started Saturday morning when I was lying in bed and decided to check my email. Our roommate had just moved out and took with him our wireless network (his hardware, but I was managing it), but seeing the little blue “E” icon that meant i have EDGE service, I decided to open the mail app. Instead of a nice tidy inbox, I was greeted with pop-up message saying “Could not activate EDGE: You are not subscribed to EDGE”. Now, I don’t have a $20/month data plan for nothing. I most certainly was subscribed to EDGE, so pardon my acronym but WTF was this?

I restarted my phone and still got the error message, then turned airplane mode off for 20 seconds and back on again (This is supposed to clear some settings like WiFi so I gave it a shot). Still nothing. Now, I had jailbroken my phone the day before with iLiberty+ (I STRONGLY recommend this program for installing 3rd party apps, unlocking, activating, or bootloader patching), and so was afraid I’d broken it somehow, but I had used EDGE fine after that for the better part of a day so I was on the fence on whether that was the problem. Like any good problem solver I had to rule it out regardless, so I decided to restore my iPhone.

The first thing I did was go into iTunes and hit Restore. Once that was done I tried to get on EDGE with the result of the same error message. Through iLiberty my bootloader had been changed, and more importantly my baseband may have been changed as well. Baseband is the firmware that runs your phone, modem, wireless, and bluetooth hardware, so I was definitely suspect of that. I re-ran iLiberty+ with the option of restoring the baseband and bootloader, and still had no success. Finally I re-re-ran iLiberty+ with a WiFi/EDGE fix I had come across, usually only broken through using ZiPhone (DON’T USE ZiPHONE!) but decided to try it anyway. Of course, no change. I still got that damn error message! This was getting frustrating in the extreme.

After this I called AT&T through 611, and after 30 minutes of work knew the lady, while being extremely nice, had no idea what the problem was. She thought it must be because I was picking up WiFi. Not only were there no hotspots in range, I had WiFi explicitly turned off. Rather than explain this to her I just said thank you and hung up.

Figuring I’d done all I could with hardware, I account was screwed up, I went to AT&T and checked my account. It showed that I had an EDGE data plan and should be working. Nothing on the support site, KB, FAQ, etc. was of any use, and live chat was closed for the day, not that I had high hopes for that… I had a lot of things to do this weekend so I decided I’d just call a different support number on Monday and try again.

The Solution!

I know I know BLAH BLAH BLAH Get to the fix! Okay okay! Flash forward to today. Before calling AT&T back I decided to do some goog-vestigating. Of course this was practically the first thing I did, but hadn’t gotten any immediate success, the closest being an AT&T forum where go-phone customers were having a similar issue last December (they fixed this by renewing their monthly contracts a bit early). On this second round of searching I found a couple of potential hits, but the one that finally fixed me was here on Apple Discussions!

To summarize, people fixed this one of two ways. The way that fixed me makes me want to facepalm so hard that I replace Captain Picard as the de-facto image macro. Its an iPhone setting and goes thus:
Settings --> General --> Reset --> Resent Network Settings

I know! “IDIOT!” Why didn’t I know that was there? Because there was no “TFM” for me to “R”, thats why. I was so relieved when it worked that I cried out in a fit of unbridled joy, to the unease of my co-workers. Not only was my problem fixed, I didn’t have to call AT&T back!!!

Now, for those of you who are not so lucky as to have you iPhone placated with this simple settings reset, most of the people on the above thread solved their problem thusly:

It’s definitely not an Apple problem, it’s a simple checkbox on AT&T’s account configuration screen called EDGE Provisioning. Some account changes, like adding a Foundation Account number to your plan to take advantage of company discounts, over-ride the EDGE provisioning setting.

Unfortunately, some AT&T customer service reps think it’s iPhone related and don’t bother checking your account first before transferring you to Apple. So, do yourselves a favor and ask them to check “EDGE Provisioning” on your account (use their terminology) and they will be able to fix it for you in a second.

Several people on the forum echoed cries of joy as this solved their problem as well. Apparently the number to call is either 800-331-0500 or 877-419-4500 and be sure to ask them to check your “EDGE Provisioning”.

So, with a fully functioning iPhone (again jailbroken and running some kick-ass apps!) I leave you this information in hopes that it helps someone out the same issue.

PS: A very special thanks to Joe Maloney1 at the Apple Discussions forum for providing the crucial fix for me!

Today I was 3 computers deep into remote desktop (RD to one computer, then use that one to get to another, etc). Navigate through that sort of setup long enough, and you start to question what is real, or at least what is actually the machine you are physically sitting in front of. Quite existential, that.

At any rate, on the drive to work today I was doing a little casual geo-wardriving with my new bluetooth GPS receiver and netstumbler and I came across 2 access points within about 100 yards of one another that I found very interesting. They had two distinct names that told me a lot about the persons that set them up.

The first AP was secured and named “Da Internets”. This one made me literally LOL, but beyond that, shows that the user was familiar with the silly internet jargon we love to use (the internets, the intarwebs, the interwobbles…) and was therefore smart enough to know they should secure their wireless to prevent theft of their personal information. That, and they probably are stingy about bandwidth usage.

The second AP was unsecured and named “FREE WIRELESS HERE!” There are actually at least 2 types of people that could have set this up. The first would be a generous person who embraces the movement to provide a network of open wireless across America, and knows to not send private info across their wireless, using a wired connection instead. The second type of person is someone dumb enough to not change the DEFAULT PASSWORD for their access point and also not secure their AP. Then some 31337 h4X0r with the default password list saved on his/her laptop connected to the open AP, saw it had a default SSID of “linksys” or “default” or “belkin” and went to 192.168.1.1 and proceeded to log in with the default password and change the SSID if they were lucky, and infect their computers with backdoors or trojans or sniffed their traffic if they were quite unlucky.

Moral of the story: Be generous or be stingy, I don’t care. But please secure your AP’s admin account!

If you’re interested, here are some of the APs I hit before getting onto the interstate last night on the drive home. Red nodes are secure, green are unsecure, and the size of the node is how close to it I was when I picked it up. If I drove around I could pinpoint an individual AP, but as it is the locations are where I was when I first got the signal.

In other news, I’m excited for what may be announced at Mac World next week. Steve Jobs’ keynote, or “Stevenote” is 90 minutes long, and new laptops and a video-rental area in the iTunes Store is not enough to cover that! Or is it? Perhaps he will talk about those for 15-30 minutes, rip his shirt-mic off, and say “Thats it bitches! Keep buying iPhones! BAAAAH! BAAAH! and throw a smoke bomb, cackling as the vapor disperses leaving and empty stage. We’ll see.

Oh, speaking of DRM free, apparently Amazon is going to start selling Sony mp3s without DRM! Pretty cool stuff if you ask me. This basically us breaking the dinosaur record lable’s balls until they’re forced to concede un-copy-protected music so we’ll start buying it instead of stealing it. Kudos to them, despite their monetary motives, and hopefully it will last.

Remember, Artists wont go hungry if you don’t buy their albums. Labels give them next to nothing for their music, and many artists have spoken up about it (Trent Reznor, Courtney Love, NOFX, to name just a few). Because of this, I’m much more likely to pay for a Fat Wrech Chords or Fueled by Ramen album than I am a Sony or RCA one.

Artists go hungry when you don’t go to their shows and don’t buy their merch. Support your favorite bands by going to some shows and buying t-shirts! You may even fall in love with the opening band you hadn’t really heard of and thus further your own happiness.

via torrentfreak.com

TorrentFreak contacted Ashwin Navin, President and Co-Founder of BitTorrent Inc. When confronted with the 50 times faster than BitTorrent claim, he said: “BitTorrent can regularly saturate your downstream capacity, which in layman’s terms means BitTorrent is as fast as you can get. The claim is indicative of the fact that BitTorrent is the global standard for P2P transfers, against which all others are compared. BitTorrent DNA took that standard up significantly, but we don’t run around making sensationalist claims to get buzz.”

I just came across a great little utility today, and am amazed I’ve not heard about it before now. Its called TCP Optimizer, and it’s greatly boosted my download speeds.

Why You Should Care

If you have a “broadband” connection, but it still crawls, or if your ISP advertises 2Mbps downloads but your *local* speed tester shows more like 900kbps, or if you just wish things would download faster, then TCP Optimizer can make you a happy little surfer. Now I’m sure you’ve seen annoying pop-up ads before telling you “your connection is slow, speed it up here!” or something to that effect; I know I have, and I also know they’ve made me skeptical of any free “speed improving” product. However, you needn’t worry my friends, for this little freeware util. is virus free and spyware free. Best of all, it really does work!

The Skinny

On most all Windows OSs (even XP) the network settings are configured for low-speed connections and devices. This increases dial-up speeds, but can greatly slow our superior broadband connections. TCP Optimizer works by tuning your TCP/IP parameters in the registry, mainly the networking related buffers, increasing your connection speed by as much as 200%.

The Simple Setup

TCP Optimizer is set up so that complete novices and power users alike can enjoy a faster connection. For novice users:

1. Simply download the program, run it (theres no installation), and for safety’s sake, click “File” > “Backup current settings” and save it somewhere. This will let you go back to your default settings just in case.
2. Set the slider to the speed your ISP advertises in kbps (kilo-bits, not kilo-Bytes!).
3. Choose your Network Adapter, or check to “Modify All Network Adapters”.
4. Choose the “Optimal settings” radio-button near the bottom of the program and click “Apply changes”. Reboot when prompted by the program.

Thats all there is to it! Now don’t get snarky and set the slider to more than your reported speed, as it may actually lower your rate. For power users, there are options for setting your MTU (it will even calculate the largest unfragmented MTU size for you!), maximum connections per server, QoS, TOS, DNS error caching, and multiple-site latency. Now if thats all mumbo-jumbo to you, just use the novice steps above and you’ll be humming along in seconds.

Compatibility and Concerns

I suppose you’re now wondering what the downside to this is. Well… there are none. Seriously! Lets address some concerns you may have, and whether or not it will work on your system.

This program doesn’t slow your computer down, because it changes the settings then doesn’t run again. The settings stay through reboots, and you never have to run it after the first time. In fact, you could delete it once you’ve tweaked your connection if you wish, bud it’d keep it around, as you may want to change your settings in the future.

TCP Optimizer doesn’t install anything, and you can revert to the default windows settings with a simple click of a button. It works behind routers and firewalls, and supports Dial-up, Cable, DSL, 1 and 2-way Satellite, and T1.
Supported OSs include: Windows 95, 98/98se, ME, 2000 pro/server, XP home/pro/sp2, and 2003 server.

All in all, I cannot think of a single reason not to use this wonderful utility. It does exactly what I need it to, does it very well, and is as unobtrusive as you can get. I think everyone with a windows computer should use it to get their computer’s internet connection running at peak performance. Try it for yourself. I guarantee you wont look back. Do a couple speed tests at your favorite testing site, I strongly recommend speedtest.net, use TCP Optimizer as explained above, reboot, and try the same speed test again. I bet you’ll soon be telling all of your friends about it too!

For more information on TCP Optimizerview the documentation, and check out the FAQ.

Update: Speeding up BitTorrent Downloads

If you want to further speed up BitTorrent downloads, I strongly suggest you read these three great articles at TorrentFreak.com:
Speed Up Your Torrents
Speed Up Bitcomet and uTorrent
Speed Up Your Torrents II

I had absolutely NO idea that this many people actually used wireless networking up in Maine. I havn’t even gone around half of campus yet either. The best part, though, is that I can hit 4 networks from my apartment including the hospital across the street that has a wicked fast connection. As I drive around Bangor, every few seconds Netstumbler squawks at me, detecting another MAC.

This is too fun for words. Now I just wish I had a cheap GPS unit to plot the locations automatically with netstumbler!