Greece GPRS?

[DaveRo]

Thanks. I've since found the proxy settings, so that's one of the two potential problems solved. As for the http-mangling, I'll have to wait and see.

The Nokia N810 is a very nice gadget, but I've yet to use it with the phone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N810

[petkow]

I have the older version (Nokia 770) and on mine it is possible to set the proxy in the browser so I should think it will be the same with yours too. The proxy cannot be setup in any browser options. Instead in my case I found it in the 'Advanced settings' of the 'Connection Settings' of a chosen connection in the 'Connection manager'. There is an option there to enter the HTTP proxy and port number etc. Took me ages to find it but all works well now.

I am no expert, so for further help it will probably be best if you ask the serious Maemo geeks on www.internettablettalk.com

[petkow]

Oops... crossed message. I see you found the proxy settings! Have you never managed to connect it through a phone to the internet? I usually find a wifi signal but when not I regularly browse and check emails etc. on the N770 through the GPRS on my phone. Works well!

[DaveRo]

Originally Posted by petkow

Have you never managed to connect it through a phone to the internet?

I haven't tried because I'm at home in the UK and I don't want to spend £5/Mb on Virgin experimenting. I'll be in Italy in April using Wind a Mega deal, so I set the phone up for that (very easy: select Italy, Select Wind, done!) which is when I found the proxy settings.

From there Corfu and the Ionian. It looks as if it'll be mainly GPRS - not much 3G I think.

[gmmour]

The http-mangling, unfortunately is a browser problem, so it depends on the Tablet's browser and the way it handles errors... What happens actually in Opera is that you get an XML error message prompting you to click on a link for the browser to parse it as HTML. I don't know why, but some pages (especially PHP and forums) are falsely parsed as XML by Opera when tethered to a phone with the Wind Plus access point, maybe it has to do with the transparent proxy they use on this access point... Good luck! (It was impossible for a browser not to have proxy settings, but it seems did a great job with the Tablet's GUI hiding all the Settings under incomprehensible menus... That's what phone manufacturers do all the time)

[DaveRo]

Originally Posted by gmmour

The http-mangling, unfortunately is a browser problem, so it depends on the Tablet's browser and the way it handles errors... What happens actually in Opera is that you get an XML error message prompting you to click on a link for the browser to parse it as HTML....

I've been doing some research on this, to try to predict what might be happening. Can you post the URLs of some sites that cause this problem? My theory at the moment is that they are served with content type "application/xhtml+xml" instead of "text/html". This is what seems to cause browsers to parse the site as XML.

There is no 'parse as html' facility in Gecko browsers. There's a Firefox Addon called 'Force Content-Type' which changes the content type - unfortunately the wrong way: html to xml! But it could be changed.

[DaveRo]

I've been studying the Wind GR website. I think I'll get Wind 1 postpaid provided I can add Plus non-stop to that; calls to Europe are 2½ times cheaper than F2G. There's a €25 one-time fee but I intend to spend several summers in Greece so it'll probably be worthwhile. Is the bill just charged to the credit card?

In case the http-mangling mentioned above is too bad I tried to find out the default cost of GPRS/internet. I can't find it. I did find this page:
http://www.wind.com.gr/pages.fds?langID=2&pageid=1213
which (apart from containing an error - I assume you get 40Mb on the WIND GPRS 40 plan) is odd. If you take WIND GPRS 10 you get 10Mb for €17.85 - which is €1.79 per Mb. But extra Mb cost €0.0014/Κb - which is €1.40 per Mb - which is cheaper.

Is this right? Or should it be 10Gb and 40Gb - or something else?

[DaveRo]

I'm now in Greece (Corfu) using Wind Plus non-stop on a tethered laptop. Some experience:

I was told in the Wind Shop where I bought the F2G SIM (€5, inc €1 credit) that I could activate Plus non-stop it by calling 1265 and following voice-prompts. Also that I could change the language into English. The former may be true but the latter didn't work: it said (in Greek) key zero for English - that got a short Greek response (don't know what) but no English.

I activated it by sending an SMS saying PLUS to 19369 (not 369 as an earlier post, though both might work.)

I have discovered that a blank SMS to 1269 gives me a balance.
The SIM packet says that I can recharge by sending a 16digit scratch card number to 1268.

On the subject of language, one US site says that it can be changed by dialling 1276 then 3 then 2 but I can't find that on the Wind site and I haven't tried it. (I can't find a list of such numbers at all on the site - in either Greek or English.)

The HTML mangling is bad using Firefox but I think I've partially fixed it by using this addon:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3207

Set up a rule as follows:
. (single dot for the regular expression - matches everything) old="application/xhtml+xml" new ="text/html"

This allows me to see a lot of sites I couldn't - including this forum and my own Wordpress blog! Whether they will all work I don't know.

I don't suppose that addon will work on the Nokia N810 which has the same mangling problem.

Plus non-stop doesn't work with other protocols (POP, NNTP) so I can't get usenet or use proper email - only webmail - which is a nuisance.

Edited:

1 Please feed back to me any experience of my Firefox fix. I'd like to interest the developer in providing a Firefox 3 version.

2 I intend to get a COSMOTE SIM as a backup in case I can't get a Wind signal in remote islands. Any equivalent cheap data package for that?

[caliston]

What a coincidence! This week I've been working on the HTTP mangling too! I've come up with the following Perl script which acts as an HTTP proxy - should work in any browser on any OS. You'll need Perl installed, as well as the LWP::UserAgent module:
http://search.cpan.org/~gaas/libwww-...P/UserAgent.pm
(was already installed on my Ubuntu machine) and the HTTP::Proxy module:
http://search.cpan.org/~book/HTTP-Pr.../HTTP/Proxy.pm

Here's the script, which is very simple. It only works for HTTP, so don't try using it for HTTPS, FTP or other protocols - set your browser to go to WIND's proxy direct. I haven't done it, but it might be feasible to do a two-pass process to avoid the 1MB restriction by trying the WIND proxy, and if that fails redirect to another proxy (eg one using an SSH tunnel as I detailed above).

#!/usr/bin/perl

use HTTP::Proxy;
use LWP::UserAgent;

# create a filter to change the Content-Type header
{
  package FilterPerl;
  use base qw( HTTP::Proxy::HeaderFilter );
                          
  sub filter {
    my ( $self, $headers, $message) = @_;
    # grab the header, modify it, then write it back into the headers
    $ct=$headers->header('Content-Type');
    $ct =~ s!application/xhtml\+xml!text/html!g;
    $headers->header('Content-Type' => $ct);
  }
}

# create a new object to represent our onward connection - ie through
# WIND's proxy
my $fetcher = LWP::UserAgent->new();
$fetcher->proxy(['http','https','ftp','gopher'], 'http://192.168.200.10:9401/');
$fetcher->no_proxy('localhost');

# create our own proxy on localhost port 3128
my $proxy = HTTP::Proxy->new( port => 3128, agent => $fetcher );
# attach a filter to alter the responses returned by WIND's proxy
$proxy->push_filter( mime => undef, response => FilterPerl->new() );
# start the proxy running
$proxy->start;

Paste it into a file called something.pl and run it. The proxy will then run on localhost port 3128 for as long as the perl script is running.

[DaveRo]

It's been suggested I use privoxy on this thread:
http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...404#post180404

Have I got perl on the N810? I doubt it - it hasn't even got a decent text editor. But I expect it's available. Thanks for the suggestion.

Some stuff to work on here while I'm anchored in a bay with my feet up, a Mythos beer or two to hand....