Michael's musings

Mon, 19 Mar 2007

GSM phones

Today, I got a call on my mobile phone from a Bell Mobility sales person.

The irony is that, were I a Bell Mobility customer, he couldn't have called me, since I'm in Prague, roaming on GSM.

He wanted to offer me a Bell Mobility corporate package.

I explained that I was not interested in what I call a cordless phone. Sorry, Bell and Telus don't offer mobile phones. They are just cordless phones. Cordless phones have a base station (usually in your house), and you can go some distance. You have to use the phone that came with the base station, and one can't use different phones with the same base station.

Mobile phones such as those based upon GSM, seperate their handset from the identity, and you can roam almost anywhere in the world. You can switch phones by just switching the SIM card, or make my phone become your phone by doing the same thing.

What Bell "Mobility" sells is just a cordless phone. Sure, it has a larger range (a good part of Canada, and some parts of the US) than the one I can get at Walmart, but that's really it.

Bell will switch to GSM. When it happens, I will switch. Or to Telus.

Mon, 05 Mar 2007

dvdrecord

I finally got around to trying to burn a DVD. It is an ISO image to upgrade an IBM PPC machine that I maintain.

I have

0,0,0 0) 'HL-DT-ST' 'DVDRAM GSA-H10N ' 'JL10' Removable CD-ROM

in it, which I got last fall. Often takes me awhile to install new hardware, because apparently it's a good idea to turn the power off first. That involves a reboot... which my computers almost never do.

I tried cdrecord, and got a message telling me I should use "ProDVD", which is a binary-only program from the author of cdrecord. Hmph. I don't think so.

After some searching, I did:

growisofs -Z /dev/scd0=HMC_Recovery_V6R1.0_1.iso