Lenovo Ophone will be out as early as next month

The Chinese version of the Ophone reportedly will be out in China as soon as September. The image of the phone had been leaked since a few months ago. China Mobile will be the carrier of choice of this phone, and this will be an Android powered phone. According to sources, China Mobile is willing to give 50% of the price rebate of the phone, and after that rebate, phones will cost RMB $2000, or roughly $300 US dollars.




This phone will carry the usual 800x480 screen, along with 3MP camera. 3.5 inch touch screen, with no physical keyboard.

What google Voice will mean for the Telco industry

FCC is still investigating why Google Voice was rejected from the Iphone apps store. And over at Techcrunch Michael Arlington is already delcaring that Iphone is dead and Android is the next platform simply because Google voice works, and he made a good case out of it.

What this comes down to is Google stepping over the toes of the telco giants. The phone number is not that important anymore, people tend to use the same service because they have to retain their phone number, be it retaining their friends and family or their customers. AT&T and T-Mobile will not be important anymore. I think the whole industry might start to drift towards calling based on an IP address,email address or an domain name. Soon you will be able to make a call to 10.0.0.1, bill@msn.com, steve@mac.com or john@johnso.org. However, if that would be the base, Google will turn into the next Microsoft(if they haven't already), who will be owning you from your email, to your word processor to your cellphone(pretty soon your OS too). I can think of one pretty good outcome that can result from all of this, is that Google will provide cellphone and service to the public for free. And advertisers can pay for all of this. Very much like those futuristic movies that advertise based on

How to Setup Openvpn in Tomato

There are 2 ways to setup Openvpn in Tomato, either way you will need to install is to install the openVPN modded version of the tomato firmware, then set it up from the tomato admin screen. There are many ways to setup Openvpn, in this tutorial we will set it up with a single static key. This setup is recommended if you only need 1 user to connect to your home network to access things locally, or just to hide your traffic when you surf on unsecured channel.
I will assume that you have a router that is tomato/dd-wrt/openwrt enabled, with a variation of the firmware installed, that way it is very easy to flash to the tomato openvpn enabled firmware. Your best friend to this information is google.

First download the firmware.
http://tomatovpn.keithmoyer.com/

you can download the binaries, and the latest update is 1.25vpn3.3 release as of this article.

Then go to your tomato router and flash it with the firmware from the Administration Screen.


Notice that I am already using the OpenVpn Modded Tomato, I have attached that screen so users can really see what they are doing.

After you have loaded the firmware and rebooted the router you will see the VPN Tunneling Option in your menu. What you need now is to download openVpn and generate a key, a good tutorial would be to read the materials in Openvpn's main page.

Click on the VPN tunneling option in your router menu. And you will be presented with the following screen


Then you can select the following
Interface Type:TAP
Protocol:UDP
Port:1195
Firewall Custom
Authorization Mode:Static Key

Ignore advanced and goto keys, and you will reach the following screen


Insert the key with the static key you have generated in your copy of OpenVpn. Remember not to share this key with anyone.

Then you should go to your firewall and forward the port 1195 to your router's IP address. In my case, I forward external UDP port 1195 local port 1195 at my router's IP address which is 192.168.1.1

If you do not have static ip with your ISP, it is easier if you configure a DDNS host. You can join free service in either Dyndns.org or no-ip.com. Then you can connect from anywhere to your
xxx.dyndns.org

After that you should configure your local config file for openvpn and save the settings to a configuration file, in our example we name it connect.ovpn.

# Use the following to have your client computer send all traffic through your router
# (remote gateway)
remote replace this with your server's address or xxx.dyndns.org
port 1195
dev tap
secret static.key
proto udp
comp-lzo
route-gateway 192.168.1.1
redirect-gateway
float

Then place your static key in a file in the same directory as your connect.ovpn, make sure the name of the file is "static.key".

You can now connect to your host by right-clicking on your connect.ovpn and select connect option

Magic Pro MP-p6vm-a4 OS X, ideneb 1.4

The recent surge in Mac and Iphone had made me start to pay more attention to Mac. So I have decided to pick this back up (from 15 years ago) by getting myself a computer with Mac in it. I originally started this by trying to install OSX in my new AMD Phenon II by using VMWare. I have tried numerous distrubtion and they all don't seem to boot properly. IPC, Ideneb and leo4all all don't seem to play nice with my VMware and AMD hardware. However, I don't want to shell out for another new Mac, so I assembled back my retired good old Core 2 Duo E6300 with the MP-P6VM-A4 board to give Hackintosh a try. After a few install and reboots, I started to understand that you really have to know all your chipsets on your motherboard to make this thing start properly. It is much like installing Slackware back in the early 80's. Heck installing Slackware was even easier back in the days.

I am using this not too popular Magic Pro board, and it uses all VIA chipset, on Board VGA and IDE's are all working, I am not sure about SATA because I don't have anything attached, ethernet is working with the ViaRhine kext. Sound is not working properly because I can't find the Kext(drivers for Mac) for this particular chipset. Via VT1616B is a very strange chip, I am starting to think that this is one of those chip number variation that they give for different countries. I google this chip and there are only a handful results, need not talk about the kext.

After all assembling this machine and installing OS X was quite interesting, they have come a long way. After recent use of Windows 7, Ubuntu and this I am starting to understand why people swear by OS X, it is a well designed operating system. I mean you can do the same stuff in other systems, but it is much easier to do it in Mac. And you can also dig deep into the console if you know what you are doing, so it basically has the wonders of both worlds.

I will next try to install 2 OS onto it. Windows 7 RC and OSX hope it works.

edit:Sound works now by choosing generic AC97 audio. And you don't really need the Voodoo kernel also. So everything works. However one slight hickup is it doesn't boot via USB, so it is kinda a pain to try Snow leopard on it.
You can update from 10.5.6 to 10.5.7 via upgrade pack from tpb, or other major torernt sites. After that you can update via the Mac Software update with no problem.