My Random Keys

I'm sitting here in Chicago with over 600 new friends at the New Tech Network Annual Conference. This is a educational conference for a specific model of high schools based in PBL (Project Based Learning). So, if you have 600+ educators in a small area, all with laptops, and all hitting the wireless network, what's going to happen?  Yup. The wireless network is dropping out in big ways.
Well I'm sitting here in a room listening to one of the original developers of the Google Teacher Academy and working online with him when the bottom drops out again. Thanks to a little forward-thinking research before I left Austin, I'm online while my neighbor closes his laptop.

I have done much publishing on the frustration my TMobile MyTouch's random crashes. Apparently, some improvements have been made and I've seen a big reduction in the number of crashes. With that new feel-good feeling, I jumped the shark and decided to try one big undocumented trick. I want my cell phone to provide internet connectivity for my laptop.

Thanks to Miguel Guhlin's post, Tethering Your Smartphone, I learned how to use my USB connection cable and one piece of free software to share my cell network. I won't rehash what he wrote very nicely in his post, but I am running PDAnet on my Android phone and installed the PDAnet app on my laptop. Once the phone app is running, I simply connect using the laptop app and I'm online. No big setup needed.

Most tethering options that I have read about in the past all required me to jailbreak my cell phone (called 'rooting'), voiding my warranty. The very recent Supreme Court ruling has made jailbreaking legal, but using PDAnet helped me avoid it altogether.

Thanks Miguel, your post got me across the shark tank safely.