George's Weblog

Why is Skype so lame?

March
31

I got an email today from Skype with the subject line, "Your Skype subscription has been cancelled." Now I just bought an unlimited year of landline calling. Why would my subscription be cancelled? In the body of the email it said my credit card expired. Okay, so it did. But I still have ten months of service left.

I logged in to my account, clicked on purchase history and it says, "Your subscription is active."

Completely lame. Also, clicking on the link in the email that says you can update your credit card information doesn't go anywhere useful. I have yet to find a link anywhere on the site that says anything about changing the payment for the account.

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Getting PDANet to work on Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Motorola Droid

March
22

I struggled with this a bit so I thought I would share what I found that worked for me.

First of all, I did buy PDANet. I probably didn't have to since they only block HTTPS in the free version but they had a deal for only $18.95 which is pretty cheap. So I'm supporting the developers. Here is the URL for setting up the connection according to the PDANet folks. I followed some of these instructions but had to improvise.

http://www.junefabrics.com/android/mac.php

I installed the PDANet application on my Droid. No big deal, just download it and load. You don't have to pay for the application on the phone, only for the host software. Everything went fine with the install. I heard that people had trouble when they turned on the PDANet application before enabling Bluetooth. I had Bluetooth already running so I'm not sure if this can present a problem or not. I also enabled USB debugging but I think that's only for USB tethering.

On the Mac, I downloaded and installed the latest version, it is 2.41. You have to reboot after you load it which I did. After rebooting, there is an icon in the top bar which shows whether the phone is connected. It seems that it retains the little red X when you have it tethered via Bluetooth. I'm guessing that is an indicator for when you have the phone tethered via USB. I already had the phone paired with the MBP.

It seems that there was no Bluetooth Dial Up Networking detected as a phone feature though so I had to re-pair it. I added a Bluetooth DUN connection to my network settings. I did not add an Ethernet connection like it said in the documentation. Here are the settings that I got to work:

Here is the main network screen showing the DUN settings.

I clicked on the Setup Bluetooth Device to pair the Droid and had to tell it to overwrite the current pairing.

So I'm able to browse and such but certain things aren't working completely right. For example, I can't seem to ping things. TCP applications seem to mostly work but there may be some tweaking needed. I'll add to this post with what I find.

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Format a drive on a Macintosh to FAT32

March
14

It's been a while since I've used my Philips DVP5992 DVD player. It plays DIVX files and all kinds of other media. I got the idea that I would upgrade it to the latest firmware if there was any, just for kicks.

A quick search for firmware yielded an upgrade right from Philips. They recommended that I use a USB drive to load it up and added that I needed it to be FAT32. This makes sense and is the same as my PS3. I remembered that I had a small flash drive that was a handout at some trade show so I found it.

The trouble that I found was that MacOS X 10.6.2 wanted to format it FAT16 and there was no option for FAT32. I figured it might just be looking at the size of the drive and deciding that FAT16 would be more appropriate since this thing was only 512MB. Well, that might have been fine under different circumstances but I wanted FAT32.

A Google search yielded a few worthwhile links but nothing that had all the steps listed so here goes:

First, you want your drive inserted, a partition on it (via Disk Utility) but you don't want it mounted since you can't format the filesystem when it's mounted. You can find out what's mounted and where though by using the mount command. My drive was mounted as follows:

/dev/disk2s1 on /Volumes/TURIN (msdos, local, nodev, nosuid, noowners)

To dismount the volume, I used the diskutil command (as root):

diskutil unmount /dev/disk2s1

Volume TURIN on disk2s1 unmounted

Then I could create the filesystem:

newfs_msdos -F 32 -v TURIN /dev/disk2s1

newfs_msdos: warning: /dev/disk2s1 is not a character device

512 bytes per physical sector

/dev/disk2s1: 1013416 sectors in 126677 FAT32 clusters (4096 bytes/cluster)

bps=512 spc=8 res=32 nft=2 mid=0xf0 spt=32 hds=54 hid=0 bsec=1015434 bspf=990 rdcl=2 infs=1 bkbs=6

The error about not being a character device didn't seem to mean much. Not sure why it wouldn't expect it to be a block device anyway since it's a disk drive. The new volume can be easily mounted:

diskutil mount /dev/disk2s1

Volume TURIN on /dev/disk2s1 mounted

Now the drive is FAT32.

Tags: fat32, format, mac, newfs, partition

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