The Tenuous Link

I had been planning to amaze everyone in my phone book with amazingly-fast rapid-fire SMSing. But I was going to cheat, and send them from my PC. I signed up to the BT Text SMS service, and even chucked in some money up-front for a stack of prepaid texts each month.

I did find a few applications on the net for sending SMS, but hadn't actually tried them out. Most of them turned out to be for a mobile handset with Bluetooth or IR. The ones that work using a landline modem didn't (work).

The closest I could get to technical details that I could understand are here: www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=561830. The full gory details are in a document from ETSI called ES 201 912.

In summary, for a modem to be able to send SMS to the BT Text SMS Centre:

1. The modem must give the CLI (Caller ID) for incoming calls: just like an SMS telephone, the computer needs to know when the SMS center is dialling in with a new message.
2. The modem must support v.23 connections.
3. The modem must support fast connect (aka fixed mode?).
4. The modem must work in half duplex mode (1200 baud while transmitting and recieving data).

I actually have the only modem in Hampshire that does support BT "standard" Caller ID, but it falls down on the last requirement, which seems to be unusual. Oh well. Back to twiddling my thumbs.

// posted by Steven @ 10:24 PM 5 comments

Is it strange that my 3 year old mobile phone has far more functionality packed in to a far more usable package than the brand new phone tethered to the wall of my house? Or maybe that's not true. I just found out 2 interesting things from the BT web site*.

Caller ID is Free to BT Landlines Now

Caller ID now comes in 2 versions, free, or paid for. The service is the same whichever you choose, but only one version currently costs £1.75 a month. With Caller ID, a suitable telephone will be able to show you the telephone number of the person that is calling you. If your phone has an address book, and the caller is in the address book, then the phone will show you their name too. All very obvious, and how mobile phones have worked for centuries.

Phone 150 (or log on to BT.com) and ask for the "Privacy at Home" package, which includes Caller ID. They will also offer to register you with the Telephone Preference Service, which is a list of people who don't want to answer any more phone calls about double glazing. I joined, so I only get bugged by people calling from outside the UK now**.

SMS from Landline Phone Works Now

I have a landline phone with an SMS logo on it. But when I read the instruction book to find out how it works, I decided not to bother. The problems were because the service was from a 3rd party (Bizzyline): SMSs arrive on the recipients phone with the message centres phone number in the details, and not my phone number; SMSs to me had to be sent to the message centres phone number, and have my phone number #between hashes# in the message. Too broken.

Now BT are offering the BT Text service there is no need for anyone to mess with the phone numbers. Sending and receiving works just like from a mobile. But first you have to tell your telephone that you want to use the BT message centres. On my Panasonic DECT phone I had to go to the "Parameters" section of the SMS menu and make these changes:

	Old Number	New Number
Message Centre1	09110235029	1470P17094009
Message Centre2	0161274599	0800587529

More details on the BT website:
http://www.downloads.bt.com/callingfeatures/bt_text_settings.pdf
http://www2.bt.com/static/i/btretail/consumer/bttext/faq.html

BT have ended their free texting offer, but you can still get some free texts each month: http://www2.bt.com/static/i/btretail/consumer/bttextbundle/index.html

* I would have found out about the free Caller ID and (free) SMS service 6 months ago if I still got paper bills from BT, but they neglected to mention it in the e-bills that they send me.

** Mainly the unwanted phone calls I get are to ask me if I want cheaper phone calls. I explain to them that I pay £1.75 a month for something that is actually free, so I'm not likely to go for something that is merely cheaper. Don't tell BT though, they might start trying to take advantage of me.

// posted by Steven @ 10:23 PM 1 comments

Like all good gadgets, I know loads of things I can do with Knoppix, but I'm not really sure what it's actually for. It's free to get hold of though, so you have nothing to loose but your time if you try it out.

Knoppix is a Linux Live DVD (or a smaller version is available as a Live CD if you still use those). That means that you can put it in your computer when you switch it on, and instead of starting up in to the Windows desktop (or whatever) you normally load from the hard disk, your computer will run Linux and the KDE desktop from the CD. If for any reason Knoppix doesn't get on with your hardware (unusual), or when you are done, then just reboot your machine and you are back to how you were before.

At a superficial level, the Knoppix desktop looks a lot like a Windows desktop, except the background wallpaper image is different. You get a selection of icons to click on that will start various applications from web browsers, to word prosessors, to web servers. Most of the software you'd expect to have after you installed Linux on to your hard disk is available, except of course you haven't actually installed anything on your hard disk. So Knoppix is great for checking out the latest eye-candy in Gnome or KDE without having to install the monsters.

It's also great if you need to check what your web site looks like in a non-Windows browser. oliverbeale.com is unreadable in Firefox in Linux, for instance, but is just about OK using the Konqueror browser.

Also very useful if you are replacing a hard disk. I used a USB disk caddy and a Knoppix CD to clone and stretch my system partition and the rescue partition on to a new larger hard disk for my laptop. (I used the dd command and the QTParted application, but Knoppix also includes Partition Image.)

Another neat trick is that because the read-only DVD is mounted in to a RAM-disk, it behaves as though you can write new data on it. If you notice that there is something missing that you need to use, you can install it. Your changes will all disappear when you turn off the computer though, unless you use the latest whizzy feature to get added to Knoppix: you can use a USB memory stick to make changes to the filesystem on the DVD look persistant. Next time you boot, plug your USB stick in before you put the CD in, and you will be asked if you want to restore your settings. (Click the little penguin button at the bottom left of the screen to see the Knoppix menu, which is where you find the application that sets up your USB key.)

I got a bit carried away with that, and quickly filled up my USB stick with Perl modules. (Actually I think it was mostly full of indexes from the apt-get database and the cpan archive ...) Mysteriously there are some parts of the hard disk that it doesn't let you save, so I couldn't set login passwords for instance, they are reset to nothing at each reboot.

I didn't get to the bottom of why some bits of the filesystem were saved and not others. Like all gadgets, I got bored with it after a while. At least until the next version is ready for me to download!

// posted by Steven @ 9:24 PM 5 comments