PdaNet and YOUR iPhone. Tethering.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I'm tethering wirelessly through my iPhone right now, and it's pretty awesome. Getting there was not, however.

The first thing I had to do was jailbreak my phone - but that was fine. I did that months ago, for reasons that had nothing to do with tethering.

I'm using a wireless network at the moment, but my computer does not have a wireless network card. I figured I'd be in this situation someday, so I downloaded and installed the Cydia app PdaNet.

Attempting to use it in USB mode, however, revealed two things:

1) You need client software on your Windows machine.

Reaction: Well, shit! I had no idea. I ended up having to grab the client (about 500K) through non-wireless means, but whatever.

2) You need fuckin' iTunes on the client PC as well.

Reaction: That of pure, red rage. iTunes is 90MB in size, and the only place I saw this requirement was after I installed the previous client piece.

At first I thought this was pretty goddamn unacceptable, because people are going to be trying this when they don't have Internet connections. I was a bit cross! But it works sooooo well.

So anyway, something to keep in mind.

[Flack]

I haven't tried tethering yet, but probably should. Seems like one of those things you should set up and get working before you actually need it.

By the way, what do you need tethering for? The longer I own an iPhone, the less I see a need to depend on my laptop.

[milker]

Darn Robb - you should have called me. I already went down the pdanet route and did not like it as much as this one:

http://www.iphonemodem.com/

I just seem to like the interface a little better. Did you purchase PDAnet?

This one is cheaper as well.

[milker]

Watch out on pricing some of these whodats want to charge for their little tether ball programs. They will seriously wrap you around their poles for the likes of $30.00 for a damn tether program. We all know you are gonna need that for either Superbowl tickets or the line in Vegas baby.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I haven't tried tethering yet, but probably should. Seems like one of those things you should set up and get working before you actually need it.

By the way, what do you need tethering for? The longer I own an iPhone, the less I see a need to depend on my laptop.

Oh - I was house-sitting, and I brought my PC over to do some text game work on it. I still wanted to get onto the Internet, but my new PC has no wireless network card.

I have to admit I am not even sure how people solve this problem. Is there wireless hardware people plug into the network jack of their motherboards? I shall assume so. But the free option seemed to be using the iPhone, so I gave that a shot.

And yeah, I have left my laptop home on my last two trips. The only thing I'd need it for is to code text game stuff with, and I just had either too-busy or too-short trips to worry about it.

I might take it (my laptop) to PAX-Boston in March, though, as that will be very text-game-crowd heavy.