Tethering

In a previous posting discussing Pandora’s potential, I was quite excited by the prospect of tethering. Yes the Pandora has WiFi, but outside of your home there are not many opportunities to (safely) get on the net. While my particular phone has a very good 3G connection, the full potential of this is limited by the small screen size, processing power. and not having a "sexy" o/s such as Android Being able to comfortably view and edit my online calendar or checking out Google Reader is not  practical on my handset. Another scenario I often find myself in is when abroad and needing to get on the net quickly without having to go to a net cafe. The possibility to channel my 3G connection from my phone to the Pandora via bluetooth  was for me a killer app. You could ofcourse use a MiFi which makes use of your 3G connection from your SIM card and then distribute that using WiFi. This would have required me to either buy a separate sim card, or to keep pulling out my existing one from  my phone and into the MiFi unit - not much fun when you are standing on a crowded train. 

The initial attempts to tether were unsuccessful, although I did manage to establish a blue tooth connection between phone and Pandora. In so doing I accidentally discovered a nifty feature where I could use the phone to remotely control the Pandora, could be handy if I am presenting something and the pandora is hooked up to a projector. Further attempts to tether were proving very frustrating, not helped by the fact that it was difficult to tell whether it was something wrong with the phone or Pandora. However progress was eventually made, again thanks to a tip from one of Evil Dragon’s daily videos. Once I had established a bluetooth connection, I then had to instruct the Pandora to make use of the 3G connection. However this was still not the end as it seemed I could only get a connection randomly with what felt like a 10% success rate. Trying to resolve this was frustrating enough to drive a saint round the bend, again because it was difficult to establish whether the problem was due to the phone or the Pandora. It appeared to be the phone at fault because it seemed to refuse to give the Pandora permission to connect. In the end it turned out to be an issue of sequencing. Once the bluetooth connection has been established, an icon on the phone appears to show that it is ready to share 3G, however this times out fairly quickly. So the trick is to get the Pandora to "grab" the 3G connection from the phone before it times out. I will produce a video to make it clear what steps need to be taken, but I would also be interested to know if other Pandora users have suffered similar issues to me.

PND System

This blog seems to be characterised by some seriously infrequent posts, even though for the past 2 months or so I have finally received my Pandora. However, having a two week stint in Siberia, followed by starting a new job in a new city AND not having a net connection in my flat makes finding the time and ability for blogging a challenge. Enough of excuses though, as I am sure at least one or two people might be vaguely interested as to how my experiences have been so far. A detailed review of first impressions is coming up, but for now I would like to introduce you to one of Pandora’s unique features: the PND System.

The PND system has been developed in order to make installing software a walk in the park. However there is an obvious obstacle, all software has to be installed on one of the SD cards (you COULD use the on board NAND memory but that's a bit crazy) If you have a desktop cluttered with shortcuts and remove one of the SD cards, wouldn't you then have a desktop full of broken shortcuts? Not so, because PND not only automates the installation of software, it also dynamically makes your programs available, akin to mounting a USB device. If the SD card was removed, then all the desktop short cuts (thats pointing to programs on the removed SD of course) will disappear because they have been “un-mounted” from the Pandora. Heres an example: (sorry photos are not great - had to make do with my camera phone)

 So as you can see there are only a couple of icons on the desktop which presumably means theres not a lot of interesting stuff installed. However heres an earlier prepared SD card, loaded with a Genesis emulator, some freeware games and the Chromium web browser. Insert the SD card and voila! We magically have some desktop icons!

But why is the Genesis emulator not on the desktop? No it did not fail to mount, I specified that it should appear under the menu rather than the desktop so as you can see in the screen shot it is right there.

The PND system was something I could not get to work initially. I assumed that the O/S would scan for all PND files regardless of their location. Also, having looked at the forum, other users were also having similar problems. It was suggested in those threads that the cause of these issues was a bug in one of the hotfixes for the O/S. This was not a blocking issue for me because you can directly execute a PND using “pnd_run" command. This is not a great solution because the command has to be typed into the terminal which means if you close it, your application will also close. If you are running several applications you will have a rather cluttered task bar due to all the open terminals. Also I suspect the application data gets stored on the NAND which does not have a lot of spare space so filling that up with the likes of cache and saved states is not particularly smart.

I assumed that PND files could be located anywhere. However, having watched one of Evil Dragon’s daily videos talking about PND, I realised I had missed the fact that PND files need to be located in “/pandora/desktop" if you want deskop shortcuts or under “pandora/menu" if you want them to appear under the Pandora menu.

Enabled AdSense

I have enabled AdSense to the blog today. This normally is something I am extremely reluctant to do - nothing worse than cluttering a web page with tonnes of rubbish. However a friend of mine suggested to me that AdSense could be used as a way of allowing your readers to say thanks if they enjoyed or found your blog useful. All they would have to do is click one of the adverts. A nicer way of giving and receiving appreciation than having a donate button I think (& besides, aren't we all supposed to be ditching PayPal in support of a certain spiky haired blond guy?)