Richard's Tech Reviews

Firefox 3.5 geolocation

When you visit a location-aware website, Firefox will ask you if you want to share your location.

If you consent, Firefox gathers information about nearby wireless access points and your computer’s IP address. Then Firefox sends this information to the default geolocation service provider, Google Location Services, to get an estimate of your location. That location estimate is then shared with the requesting website.

Mozilla: Location-Aware Browsing

via The Map Room

I wonder how it finds out about nearby WAPs? Is Firefox 3.5 effectively a wifi scanner now?

The Google Code Blog gives more background

With recent launches like Google Latitude and Google Toolbar with My Location, it's clear we think location-based services are useful and fun! We also want developers everywhere to be able to use location to build cool new features and applications.

I'm pleased to announce that Google's Location Service (the same service which powers the My Location feature in many Google products), is now the default location provider in Mozilla Firefox 3.5 beta 4. This means that developers can, with users' permission, gain access to their approximate location without requiring any additional plug-ins or setting configurations. It just works!

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 beta 4 uses the W3C geolocation API, a standard being adopted by many major browsers, so you won't have to branch code in the future.

Google Location Services now in Mozilla Firefox - April 30, 2009

In a quick Google search, I didn't find any page specifically on "Google Location Service" itself.

iPhone does not report Internet Tethering data usage

Summary

I had noticed, as mentioned previously, that it seemed that when I connected my iPhone using Internet Tethering and pumped 100s of MB around, the usage reported on-device in Settings->General->Usage: Cellular Network Data didn't seem to change.  I have now formally tested and verified this.

Tested on iPhone 3GS with iPhone OS 3.0 on Rogers Canada cellular network.

If you're using a limited data plan with Internet Tethering, don't use the iPhone's Cellular Network Data usage numbers to determine how much data you have used.  I don't know yet how you can find out how much data you have actually used.

UPDATE 2009-06-27: I asked @RogersKeith "any way to find out my current cell data usage from Rogers?" and he replied "Rogers sends out data usage SMS messages at certain thresholds to let customers know how much data they've used."  (In case you're wondering how official a Twitter response is, Keith is Senior Director of Social Media and Digital Communications at Rogers, so what he says is official.)  Unfortunately the only information I could find online about Rogers SMS Data Alerts applies to their Mobile Internet Browsing plans, which are not the same as data plans.  ENDUPDATE

Details

The test is pretty simple: download about 100 MB on the iPhone directly over 3G, and then download the same amount onto a computer using Internet Tethering, and see whether the usage numbers change.

The easiest way to do this would have been to download a 100MB+ TV show, but for some reason the iPhone will only allow you to download TV shows (and movies I assume) over wifi or on iTunes on your computer (even though I have a 6GB data plan and get upwards of 1.5Mbps download over 3G).

It will however quite happily let you download entire albums, so I downloaded the 91.4 MB Perishers album "Victorious".

Test 1: Download over 3G on the iPhone

At the start of the download we're at Settings->General->Usage: Cellular Network Data - Received 266MB

Now download the 13 tracks, 91.4 MB plus overhead.

And we're done (if you're watching the time at the top of the screen, I sat the iPhone on a counter and let it download while I was doing other stuff - it didn't actually take an hour to download).

So now we're at 361 MB, or +95 MB which is about what you would expect.

Test 2: Download on Mac, over Internet Tethering on the iPhone

So after a bit of setup, getting iTunes ready etc., we're at Received 362 MB at the start of the download on my Mac (PowerBook G4 OS X 10.4.11 tethered to iPhone over Bluetooth)

Let the downloading begin (exact same album, 91.4 MB).

and 11 minutes or so later we're done

and according to the iPhone, we've Received... 362 MB of Cellular Network Data.  Change: 0 MB.

Now maybe this is all as intended.  Maybe you're supposed to understand that usage shows data received ON the device, not THROUGH the device, but that's a pretty fine distinction, particularly considering there's no way on-device to see your Internet Tethering usage.

On Rogers at least, your Internet Tethering usage comes out of the exact same data plan bucket as on-device, which means you could potentially exceed your plan limit (and start incurring very high per-MB costs) while your iPhone says it is still below the limit.

iPhone 3GS tether to Win XP over Bluetooth

Not a whole lot to say about this, it's pretty straightforward - turn on Bluetooth and Internet Tethering on the phone, turn on Bluetooth on the XP machine (Dell Latitude XT laptop running XP Tablet, in my case), then discover the phone.

Double-click the network icon in the Bluetooth Settings screen

(it may ask you to pair the first time you do this) and you're online.  Note: it's possible your Bluetooth settings interface may be different.

I'm seeing reasonable speeds, about 1.4 Mpbs down and 250 Kbps up. About the same as I saw over Bluetooth to my Mac.

Rogers Canada network, Ottawa area.

This entire article was posted (including uploading the screenshot) over Internet Tethering.

Apple has a couple articles that may be helpful:

• iPhone 3G: System requirements for Internet tethering
• iPhone: Troubleshooting Internet tethering

Previously:
June 22, 2009  iPhone 3GS tethered over Bluetooth to Mac PowerBook G4
June 20, 2009  tethering iPhone 3GS with Windows XP over USB

MacWorld on manual geotagging in Places

A MacWorld article "Working with Places" by Derrick Story (@Derrick_Story) goes through the steps to manually attach a geographic location to a photo in iPhoto '09, and gives some suggestions on how to do it efficiently.  Online date is April 2009, and there is also a version of the article on pages 68-69 of the July 2009 MacWorld in print.

iPhone tethering uses cell data only, even if wifi available

Your iPhone can connect to the Internet through two main channels: wifi and cellular data (3G or if that is not available or disabled, EDGE).  However, I found that when using Internet Tethering, all packets to and from the tethered device appear to go through the cellular network ONLY, even if the iPhone has an active wifi connection.

(You may ask why you would use tethering on the iPhone when you have wifi available that you could use direcly on your laptop, but that's not the point.)

On the iPhone itself, connections still go through wifi.

Also it is not at all clear to me whether Internet Tethering data usage is showing up in General->Usage->Cellular Network Data.  I've tried doing some big downloads on my laptop and the Cellular Network Data usage numbers don't budge.

What this means mainly is that if you're doing Internet Tethering, you might as well turn wifi off on the iPhone, because you're not getting any benefit from it and it's using battery (as well as the same frequencies that Bluetooth uses).  I tried to see if tethering over Bluetooth was any faster with wifi disabled on the iPhone, but I didn't see any consistant pattern.  These are some of the speed tests with my PowerBook G4, iPhone 3GS Bluetooth tethering, Rogers Canada, downtown Ottawa:

wifi on

wifi on

wifi off

wifi off