Unlimited Rice Pudding

In the caravan last night, looking at the weather forecast via my mobile phone, and showing videos of my niece singing Abba songs whilst she’s hidden under a table (I have a feeling that she’s going to hate that cutesy clip in years to come), I wondered why I hadn’t hooked up the notebook via the mobile phone to the Net. Simple reason – I hadn’t needed to.

So there was a task for me whilst Mr Ramsay was having a time of it sorting out a Mexican. I new I could use the Nokia 6220c as a mobile dial-up modem, but went in search of a way to use it with my O2 mobile phone contract (unlimited data transfer) rather than via my home broadband connection.

It turns out that there is a button on the Nokia Suite that allows this. So I downloaded it on to the phone’s memory card, as Nokia had, thankfully, included the whole install file instead of just a wee install stub. I left the phone working on that 35mb download overnight and recharged the battery in the morning (handy USB phone cable just plugs into notebook).

In the morning, I use bluetooth to transfer the file across to the notebook. I haven’t really used bluetooth too much, but was impressed by the transfer rate. A simple install, bish bash bosh and a button-press, and I can see the weather forecast for the Minch on XC-Weather without having to strain my eyes.

It is an awful lot easier to use than pinking out messages on the phone’s keyboard, or trying to read messages on the wee screen, or browsing a forum without the aid of tabs. At 115kbps, I wonder if it can handle the BBC iPlayer. Mitch Benn (6,589 followers)(S. Fry 398,220 followers; B Obama 21,398; Fred MacAulay 98) twittered on Thursday that the old gang were back together again. As the caravan walls are paper thin, I’d better get the headphones out and stifle my guffaws.

A few minutes later, and the little swirly thing goes round, the connection resets itself, and – for some reason as yet unknown – the headphone socket is ignored and the sounds come out of the speakers; I think I’ll close the iPlayer page down, and wait for the Saturday repeat on the car radio.

Now … I’m off to find out what the issue is with the headphone socket that wasn’t there before. Typical computer problem that. Find one solution, and it causes a separate problem – I bet it has something to do with bluetooth. Hmm, maybe it is using the phone as a speaker and was playing back through that. Well, it keeps my brain ticking over as the sound of breathing comes from various close relatives, over the sound of the river and the crows outside.