Confession: by most geeky measures, I'm an old dog. I don't stay abreast of the latest advances in geek tech. However, becoming untethered has presented new challenges, and to cope I've had to learn some new tricks. My latest modest accomplishment: setting up my cell phone as a Bluetooth modem so I can connect my laptop to the Internet from anywhere I can get a cell signal -- that is, pretty much anywhere -- all with no wires. Can I have my geek cred back, now?
(All you übergeeks out there thinking, "Humph, I was doing this in '89 with nothing but an anolog modem and a Pringles can," can just eat it. For me, this is progress, ok?)
Installing the hardware was no problem. Setting up the dial-up connection, on the otherhand, was a bloody ordeal. To make it work, you need to know some essential pieces of information that you should get from your cell provider: your APN gateway, username and password. (I'm so sorry I know this now.) My phone is a Blackberry and my provider is AT&T. OK, I'll just Google for the information...
But everything I read online is WRONG! They'll all tell you that for AT&T, you can leave the username/password empty, and use "proxy" as the APN. Bah. Here's how I found what my real settings needed to be. Maybe this will help someone out there ...
On my Blackberry, I opened Settings->Options->Advanced Options->TCP. There, I learned that my APN is actually "wap.cingular" (huh?) and my username is "WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM". My Blackberry hid the password from me, but Google told me what it is. (Pssst! It's "cingular1".) Why all the "cingular" when my provider is AT&T? I'll probably never know.
After configuring my dial-up connection with this Top Secret information, I was finally able to connect to the Internet from my laptop through the Blackberry in my pocket. No wires.
Now I can do my work from a park bench. Or a beach. Anywhere.
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