iPad, Mifi and T-Mobile broadband

As I already have a mobile broadband account with T-Mobile I didn’t see the need for me to spend £100 more on a 3G enabled iPad. I really object to this growing trend of expecting people to pay multiple times for stuff they already own, be it an ebook, music or internet access. Since I couldn’t find a definitive answer to my question as to whether I could put my T-Mobile card into an unlocked Three Mifi I decided “what the hell, I’ll just go for it”. This blog post is really just to let anyone else know who’s wanting to run the same setup that yes, you can run a T-Mobile broadband sim card in an unlocked Mifi and it works brilliantly with an iPad.

I won’t be buying an ebook reader yet

Every so often I have a sneaky look at the latest ebook hardware in the hopes of seeing something that will fit my needs. I want to read mostly technical, text booky-type PDFs. So far only the Sony Reader Touch PRS-600 comes close. It handles PDFs and allows annotation. As it doesn’t store the annotations inside the PDF they cannot be synced back to my computer for additions or rereading. What good is an annotation that’s stuck on a device?

This is my shopping list of features:

• Reads PDFs natively (i.e. no file conversion)
• Allows PDF annotation
• Syncs annotations back to computer where they can be read in Adobe Reader / Preview.
• Screen large enough to allow comfortable reading without zooming

As you can see it’s hardly a long list, most of it’s pretty basic too. For the sake of balance here’s a list of the features I really don’t need:

• An MP3 player
• Mobile phone network connectivity
• To be locked into one ebook supplier

What I want to use this for is hardly groundbreaking and yet a device with the simple list of features does not exist – amongst ebook readers that is. Looks like I’ll be sticking with my phone which does read PDFs and has an annotation feature that syncs back to my computer. The only problem is I’m sure it will send me cross-eyed.

Setup Googlemail push email

Google currently doesn’t offer push email on their mail service. Whilst there are plugins for various email clients and desktop widgets they require a constantly running desktop computer to work.

What you will need

- A push capable iPhone
- Prowl for iPhone (setup and working)
- A second googlemail account with IMAP switched on
- A shell account to run a cron job
- Hosting to run a PHP script
- Be willing to add the email login details to the PHP script

Setup

Download and open the mail.php file. Add the email and password details from your second Googlemail account and your Prowl API key. Create a folder, say gmailpush, on your PHP enabled hosting and upload mail.php into it. Set the permissions on mail.php to 711. You also need to upload the prowlPHP class file to this same folder.

Next login to your shell account and setup a script to call the mail.php file. The shell script should look like this:

curl "http://www.domain.com/gmailpush/mail.php"

Set its permissions to 700.

Next you need to setup a cron job to run the shell script every five minutes. Still in your shell account type crontab -e to open your cron settings. The settings will be open in Vim. Put Vim into insert mode by pressing the i key. To set your previous shell script to run every five minutes type:

*/5 * * * * ~/shell_script.sh

Then save and close by hitting the escape key and typing :wq and pressing enter. You can read more about cron at Wikipedia.

Finally you need to setup a forward on your main email account, I recommend the use of filtering to prevent any password related emails from being forwarded, since the password for the push email account is being stored online.

What does the PHP script actually do?

Logs into the Googlemail account and sends out a push notification for each message. The messages are then deleted, hence the need for a separate account.