Here is the quick setup: (Read the entire post for why this is useful and how it could be profitable )
1) Buy a Mac Laptop (sorry the MacBook Pro is the laptop I have and its OS X and Airport make this super easy)
2) Select system preferences from the Apple Menu
3) Click on Sharing from the Internet & Network subsection
4) Select the Internet tab from near the top of the screen
5) Under Share Connection From: Select your EVDO Broadband card (mine is listed as: Novatel Wireless EXP CDMA)
6) Select the AirPort checkbox under the To computers using: list
7) Configure the AirPort Options as your situation necetates (read the rest of the post for more info) Click Start
Read on for my story, why this is cool, and warnings …
Prologue: Wireless Broadband EVDO
I have had Verizon Wireless’ EVDO wiereless broadband service since August of 2006 and have been very happy with the service’s speed and coverage area. I have been able to get signals everywhere from in the Cascades of Oregon to Philly and nearly everywhere in between. If I have cell coverage I can pick up the EVDO wireless broadband signal. Check out a previous post for a full review of Verizon’s EVDO service and my detailed setup. Cingular/AT&T and Sprint also offer EVDO mobile broadband services and this technique will work if you have service through Verizon, Sprint, Cingular/AT&T, or whomever is the provider where you reside.
Chapter 1: Jealousy and a Heart for the Un-Plugged-In
The only problem with the service is it kind of pricey and it invokes jealousy from other laptop users wherever you go. I have gotten numerous comments about how I am online [insert location here]. Recently I attended a conference at the Sheraton in Philadelphia where the card really came in handy. It seems they Sheraton folks felt it necessary to block out WIFI inside of the conference room, so if you purchased WIFI from the hotel so you could surf in your room (yep no free WIFI) you were maddened to find that WIFI would not work in the conference room and you had to sign up for additional WIFI at another cost! Then, to make things worse, that conference room only WIFI kept falling off. So here I am with a room full of web designers half with laptops checking my email etc while none of them can get online. Yes yes I felt like an internet magician but I quickly had pity on those around me and I knew I must jump into action to save the masses!
Chapter 2: Give the People their Internets
I said to my self
“Bob (not my name but what I call myself), I wonder if its possible to share your bounty of EVDO goodness with all these poor conference people. This way you will be a hero to all and Robin Hood those evil Sheraton WIFI evil dooers.”
Well it took a few clicks but I found the solution and gave those people their tubes to clog.
After checking around in System Preferences Internet & Network section I stumbled up on the Sharing menu. By simply selecting my EVDO card and clicking to share it on my Mac’s internal AirPort card I had done it! The crowd erupted in moderate indifference and all updated their MySpace pages in celebration.
Chapter 3: Coolness
Why would you want to share your EVDO wireless broadband connection?
You are traveling with a group of coworkers, family, or the circus who refuse to pay $9.95 to check their gMail or update their MySpace while waiting at the airport, bus stop, or space port. Instead they insist on bugging you to borrow your laptop and make small talk about hair products. The quicker they get online the quicker you return to the peace that is mindless surfing to pass the time.
Your work or school does not allow you to access say Digg or GMail and since you don’t agree, are a rebel, dont’ care about getting in trouble, and wish to share your good fortune you help them stick it to the man.
You are at a Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, or anywhere else that limits its WIFI access to TMobile and you want to prove a point about why WIFI should be free or should be bought from you not them.
“Simply” share you EVDO connection, configure the Airport correctly, set up a required proxy page, and either collect donations or charge a reasonable buck or two for the pleasure of using your provided WIFI connection instead of TMobile’s.
Granted this could and probably get you arrested or sued as a proof of concept it could be pretty brilliant if you can pull off the technology necessary.
Remember if you are running at full EVDO speeds you can hit well over 5MBps which is plenty fast to share the wealth a bit.
Chapter 4: Bubble Bursting
All is not roses in EVDO sharing land, though. There are a couple of issues you should be aware of, though (some of which I can think of and others I am sure I am missing).
By doing this you set up your laptop up as a router and thus straddling it with all of the CPU, network, and management load that goes along with that not to mention the security headaches. Translation: You go slow and could get screwed.
Verizon and probably Sprint and Cingular closely monitors your use and if they feel you are not being reasonable with your bandwidth they shut you down. I know, I know, it says unlimited but the small print says its not so.
If you set up your Airport to share without a required WEP key you have NO idea who will access your connection and thus your laptop. I sure don’t want to be responsible for what other people download and set myself up for some lame RIAA lawsuit or worse so I suggest setting up WEP using the Airport Options button when you share your EVDO connection.
Security. Security. Security. I have no idea how this opens you up but I am assuming it is probably enough to make your sphincter pucker. I would never recommend this on a PC (hello Windows viruses et. al.) but even on my Mac it does worry me.
The End: Suggestions
For lawyer types from Verizon etc., hackers, and others who would chap my hide: I would never recommend anyone doing this and have and never will do this myself.
For EVDO users and normal Mac users: Just be careful that group 1 doesn’t catch you since I am not totally sure if they could have a valid point. Have fun showing your Mac and EVDO goodness even if it is just to wow the throngs of lame PC’ers in your office. PS. let me know if you have any cool uses for this I didn’t think of.
With the release of WordPress 2.1 it is now possible to easily create a static homepage. Previously, it was possible through plugins and hacks to create a static home page on your WordPress site but it wasn’t easy or reliable because it worked outside of the main WordPress loop. One of the major improvements with the 2.1 release is the ability to create a static homepage within the WordPress framework.
The only issue with the new WordPress release is the features have out paced the documentation. Even though the WordPress CMS supports a static home page it was pretty difficult to figure how to do it. Here are the few steps necessary to set up your WordPress 2.1 site with a static home page.
1) Create a new template to be used for the home page. The easiest way to do this is to save the current index.php template as a new file such as home_page_template.php. Then change the top of the page to identify it as a new template, for example:
/*
Template Name: Home Page Template
*/
2) Change your template as necessary to become your new static home page. The first thing you will notice is because this is not the main template you will not have access to the WordPress Post Loop. This means when you fire up your home page it will just have the content for that page and not all of the other. I go over how to access the loop outside of the main template in another post if you need to do so.
3) In your WordPress Admin section select Write Page from the Write menu. Create a new page to house your posts. You can leave the content of this page blank as it will be filled with your posts. Save this page with a descriptive name, something like Blog, works well.
4) In your WordPress Admin section select Write Page from the Write menu again. Now you will create a new page to be your static home page. Again you can leave this content blank unless you need the content as part of your home page and you are using the content in your template. Select “Home Page Template” from the Template option menu. This tells WordPress to use the new template to display your information and gives you the ability to have a unique design and content for your home page.
5) Now for the version 2.1 magic. In your WordPress Admin section select Reading from the Options menu. The top selection on this page is Front Page. Under the Front Page Displays: section, select “A static page”. Next select the Home Page you created in step 4 for the Home Page dropdown and the Blog page you created in step 3 for the Posts page. Click the Update Options button and thats it you now have a static home page for your WordPress 2.1 site.
With the latest release of WordPress version 2.1 it is easy to set a static homepage for your site. The difficulty with a static home page is finding out how to configure the settings and then making a template that looks like you want it to. If you are having problems getting your homepage to look like you want it to check out some of my other posts for help.
Thanks to the release of WordPress 2.1 I was able to redesign the Home Page of RichAndStephSipe.com to make it more user friendly. I blog about a variety of topics including technology topics, my log furniture business, and miscellaneous other topics and it was confusing to most people to see all the posts grouped together. This new look sports a bunch of really cool features and will continue to get better as I have time to update it.
Some new features include:
1) Links to my Blog topics on the right hand navigation bar. This way you can easily find topics without having to wade through posts about things you don’t understand or care about.
2) Links to all posts from the previous 9 months on the right hand navigation bar. If you somehow actually read my blog and remember when I posted something you can find it this way.
3) Probably my favorite feature, 9 randomly selected pictures from our picture gallery. Each time you view this page the code randomly selects a gallery and then a picture from it. Frequently, I will refresh this page many times just to see all the pictures I have forgotten about and take a walk down memory lane. If you would like to post pictures in our gallery let me know because I can easily set that up. Carmen even posted pictures from New Zealand at an Internet Cafe!
4) My second favorite feature is the 5 most recent pictures from the 4 most recent galleries. Now with a quick glance you can see if new galleries have been posted! I still need to work on this feature but even in its current state it is awesome.
5) The posts in the body of the home page are now the most recent ones from the Sipe Family News category which includes information and news from our family.
If there is something I have missed here, let me know and I will try to build it into future versions. As always, check back often to see what new is going on out here in Washington State.
The first thing I thought when I heard that Oregon Legislators are putting clips on YouTube is: Has YouTube “Jumped the Shark”? Just kidding. Really I thought if the group of people who are historically the most behind in technology and the most afraid of new mediums are adopting YouTube as a communication strategy, what does that say about those businesses who are either ignoring the site or who have made strategic decisions to stay away.
In the past year or two, YouTube has had a meteoric rise from quirky video sharing site to Google owned media monolith. YouTube brings millions of eyes daily to their site and is no longer limited to videos of kids being hit in the family jewels with various objects or pirated video clips of movies and TV (although, these are still very popular on the site). YouTube now has everything from recent Super Bowl commercials and educational videos, to self produced music videos and VLOGS (Video Blogs). If the notoriously ill tempered and slothy movie and television industries are adopting the video-sharing site as a marketing tool there must be a reason.
The recent movie hit “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” was almost entirely driven by the buzz created by Borat clips on YouTube and their subsequent viral nature pushed by social networking sites such as Digg, thousands of blogs, and good old word of mouth. “Snakes on a Plane” is another example of a potentially bomb of a movie with huge buzz created through YouTube pre-promotion and YouTube clips placed in Blogs, message boards, and social sites.
Comedy Central was initially an unwilling star of YouTube with millions of views of their popular “Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” clips. Initially Comedy Central chose to send YouTube a cease and desist, causing the removal of most of their clips. That is until their talent, producers, fans, and the blogosphere erupted in outrage and bafflement. It seems everybody but the TV execs realized the amazing marketing opportunity YouTube was offering the shows, all with almost zero advertising investment. Now CBS and NBC are regularly posting clips to YouTube.
If you are in a business and ignore YouTube you are not only wasting a potentially powerful, mostly free, marketing medium but you are giving the power of identity to your competitors and customers. Just because you ignore this video phenomena does not mean it doesn’t exist, will go away, or you are protected from its effects. If you aren’t driving the bus you might very well have abdicated that responsibility to strangers.
Driving the bus is exactly what Oregon Representative Dennis Richardson who represents Oregon House District 4 (Jackson and Josephine Counties) has decided to do. Instead of allowing the lobby machine or the press to dictate the tone and facts of the discussion he has chosen to use YouTube to get his message out. Granted the 400+ views of his two videos may not cause a groundbreaking shift in the legislation, it has other powerful implications. In the local area, this story has gotten a full day of radio and TV coverage plus write ups in various newspapers and publications. Where previously Representative Richardson couldn’t have hoped to get any coverage of his positions or invaluable face time on the news outlets; by posting a few 5-minute clips on YouTube, he has achieved both with minimal effort.
I never thought I would say this but more businesses need to be like the Oregon Legislature and pull their heads out of their ancient marketing strategies, take off the Internet blinders, and embrace the Web 2.0 market. If members of one of the nation’s most dysfunctional governing bodies are adopting new marketing strategies and leaving your business with its substantial marketing budget in the dust you have more problems than they do. If that doesn’t scare you then you are destined to continue to spend stupid amounts of money on ads in struggling newspapers or magazines while your competitors are getting that impact and more for pennies on the dollar.
When I got wind of the newest internet fad yesterday I had to sign up to get in early. Who cares it is a useless account, no really, its a Useless Account that does nothing but allow you to edit and sign in and out. Seems like the perfect startup to sink some VC money into huh? You better hurry up and get yours or you may miss out on something truly useless.
After their marketing stunt in Boston the two Aqua Teen Hunger Force gorilla advertisers were arrested and charged with nasty nasty things. During their press conference they refused to answer any questions that were NOT HAIR RELATED. The press did not find this funny at all.
The full Boston Mooninites news story on the press conference is here and you can see the infamous Hair Press Conference video here. An expert of the Fox news story is below:
Peter Berdovsky, 27, and Sean Stevens, 28, ignored a barrage of reporters’ questions about their role in the botched scheme and talked, instead, about mohawks, dreadlocks, Beatle cuts and Afros as their attorney, Michael Rich, stood by with an incredulous look on his face.
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