...stuff I do and things I like...

today is my last day at ARCHOS. Starting May 1st I'll be a full time researcher at Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (SIT). There I'll be working in the area of secure mobile systems (who would have guessed :-).

looks like I've been selected to give a talk at EUSecWest this year. The subject will be the security of NFC (Near Field Communication) mobile phones.

My friend Alech also seems to have a talk there. This should be some fun.

since Friday I own a CradlePoint PHS300 (personal hotspot). The device basically is an WiFi (802.11 b/g) access point that connects to the Internet using a mobile phone or data card/adapter (just some hardware that has a USB connector and supports PPP). The nice thing about this device is that is has a build-in battery. The battery also powers the connected USB device. I just write this because connecting a USB GSM modem to an access point is not really new (access point like these have been around for quite some time now). The battery just makes it portable and that is what I want. My Nokia N810 is the main reason for buying it, well that and the cheap HSDPA SIM form Fonic.

Today I've hooked it up and got it to work with my Huawei E220 HSDPA USB adapter. Besides some small problems it works really good. The speed also seems good (got around 180K/s down stream). The problem with the E220 and the PHS300 is that the PHS300 doesn't seem to detect the E220 when they are plugged in before switching on the PHS300. So you have to power up the PHS300, wait a bit plug-in the E220 and it is working (also sometimes you have to unplug/re-plug the E220 again to have it detected). I already contacted CradlePoint support to tell them to fix this and I'm pretty sure they will do it since I'm not the only person who uses a E220 with a PHS300. See here. Also CradlePoint seems to publish firmware updates quite often so I think there is a good chance.

The PHS300 has an almost complete feature list: custom AT commands, dial-on-demand/autodial/manual dial selection, port forwarding, DynDns, WEP/WAP/WAP2, 802.11b/g/superG, dnscache, ntp list goes on.

Btw. buying this thing in Europe is a pain! I only found one online shop that had a decent price and where I could pay with PayPal since non of them accepted a NON-US credit card. This NON-US credit card thing is soo stupid anyway. Why do I have a credit card that is supposed to be accepted anywhere? Anyway the shop is GeminiComputers.

All in all this device looks really nice and I'll post some more about it after some weeks of using it. It will go into my laptop/gadget bag and I will carry it around with me most of the day.

I was on vacation traveling through Portugal for 10 days and I took my Nokia N810 with me to do email and to have something to browse the web (weather info etc). I must say it was super both the vacation and the N810 as a traveling device. Reading email or checking the web while having a coffee. We had free WiFi at all most every place we visited so I could use my N810 for Twitter (don't ask it is a private stream) to tell some stories directly from the vacation. One of the best things ever, we only needed one battery charger for three devices (we only had Nokia devices with us).

I already take the N810 every place I go while at home but now I'll take it on vacation too :-)