Tom Purl’s Web Site

My Nokia 6101 just died after 2.5 years of faithful, inexpensive service, so I was in the market for a new phone in a hurry. When I originally bought this phone, I hoped that Google would have revolutionized the cell phone industry in America, making smart phone service more flexible and inexpensive. Well, the changes that I want still haven’t materialized yet, so I went looking for a new phone that was as similar as possible to my old trusty Nokia.

Another requirement that I had was that I wanted the phone to work with the T-Mobile pre-paid service. I’m actually a really big fan of T-Mobile’s price and network coverage

The closest thing I could find was the Nokia 2760. On occasion, it would be available on th T-Mobile web site, but it couldn’t be found when my phone died. I therefore checked the Walgreens and Radio Shack stores in my town until I found one at “The Shack” (as the employees seem to be forced to call it). It was $40 plus tax, which means that I won’t lose any sleep if my daughter tries to flush it down the toilet.

To “activate” the phone, I simply took the SIM card out of my old phone and placed it in the new one. 20 seconds later, I was able to receive calls using my mobile number. I didn’t have to contact T-Mobile even once, and my old “plan” seems to work with the new phone very well.

The biggest questions that I had when I bought this phone were “what was missing from my old phone” and “what did I need to buy”. Here’s the results:

Missing

• This phone doesn’t have any buttons on the outside like my old one did. I really liked having a volume and F-you button on the outside of the phone. The 2760 forces you to open the button to silence an incoming call, and I have yet to figure out how to adjust call volume without 5 button clicks.
• I can’t record video on this phone like I could with the old phone. This isn’t really a bad thing, however, since the old phone’s videos were just god-awful.
• Apparently, Nokia phones no longer come with a ringtone that sounds like a phone ringing. And I guess noticing that makes me some type of old fogie who can’t figure out why stores no longer carry Lawrence Welk LP’s. I tried to buy one from T-Mobile’s ringtone shop, but I couldn’t find one.
• The 2760 doesn’t have a little antenna nub sticking out of the top.

Different & New

• Bluetooth! I know I am the last person in America to buy a bluetooth-enabled phone, but I’m really enjoying it so far. On my 6101, I actually purchased the compatible serial cable from Nokia, which was around $50 if I remember correctly. I hate that I have to basically throw away that investment, but I am loving how easy it is to use bluetooth. Also, I purchased this bluetooth adapter from Newegg for $15, and it works very well on both XP and Ubuntu 9.04.
• The software interface has changed a little bit, but it’s nothing too revolutionary. If you’re used to your old phone’s interface, then this one should be very intuitive.
• I can now add MP3 ringtones from my MP3 collection. Sweet! Now I just need to find an MP3 of a phone ringing
• I can log into Gmail with this phone, which I couldn’t do on my old phone for some reason. That’s nice, but the interface and network speed are nothing to write home about.
• The battery model changed. My old phone’s battery model was BL-4C, and my new phone’s battery model is BL-4B. I don’t yet know if the two models are interchangeable, but I doubt they are.

What Hasn’t Changed

• The wall AC adapter looks like it’s identical. Based on that, it doesn’t look like I need to buy another car charger.
• The photo quality appears to be identical.
• The phone still has a ridiculously small amount of storage. I think the official amount is 11 MB. Oh well, I already have a digital camera and an MP3 player, so I guess I don’t need a phone that does all of that too.

Conclusion

If you like little Nokia flip phones, then this one seems to be as good as its predecessors. I’m pretty happy with it so far, and it’s hard to beat the price.

I just finished upgrading my MythTv/printing/data/everything server from version 9.04 of Ubuntu to 9.10. For the first time, I tried using the Software Update program to upgrade my entire system, and it went surprisingly well. Here are some of the highlights; hopefully they will help a few other people.

MythTv

The OS upgrade included an upgrade of MythTv from 0.21 to 0.22, so I was a little nervous about how well mythbackend and all of my MythTv-related applications (like mythweb and nuvexport) would work. To my surprise, mythbackend and mythweb both upgraded flawlessly. This is a really impressive feat, and it reflects the hard work that the MythTv package maintainers put into each Ubuntu release.

The nuvexport package is broken for me, but I think that’s because I compiled a customized version of ffmpeg. Oh well, this seems to be a common hurdle when I upgrade Ubuntu.

One little thing that I did have to fix after the upgrade was my MySQL configuration. The upgrade laid down the default version of the /etc/mysql/my.cnf file (after asking, of course). This file was configured to block any computer from using MySQL over the network. This is bad for me, because I like to watch my MythTv movies from other computers using mythfrontend.

To fix this, I simply commented out the following line in my.cnf on my MythTv server by placing a # in front of it:

 bind-address            = 127.0.0.1

After that, I simply restarted MySQL and I was able to use mythfrontend from my other computers.

VirtualBox

I run Windows XP in a VirtualBox VM for work, so it’s very important that both VirtualBox and my XP image work properly at all times. Again, to my surprise, everything worked perfectly after the upgrade. I didn’t even need to re-install VirtualBox. The VirtualBox kernel module was automatically re-compiled during the upgrade process, so I didn’t even have to do that.

Please note that I was using the absolute latest stable version of VirtualBox (3.0.12) before I started the upgrade. Your mileage may vary if you are using an older version.

Overall

Again, I am very impressed by how well everything went. I don’t see why I would ever choose to do a fresh installation of Ubuntu again on this machine.

Caveat Emptor

The automatic upgrade process is far from perfect, and your results may be different. Before you start any major upgrade, make sure that you perform the following steps:

1. Make a backup of all of your important files – I use rsnapshot to back up my important files daily, and it has saved my bacon more than a couple of times. Also, it’s a good idea to store this backup on a separate disk from the boot disk.
2. Download the current and target versions of Ubuntu and burn them to CD’s – If things do go south, then you will want to be able to either reinstall the current working version of Ubuntu or the target version. Having the actual ISO’s available on a CD may save you a ton of time and grief.

Good luck!