Smarter Sheep

I received an email today from another staffer here who was excited that we might have an option to use our Blackberry phones as modems for our laptops when we are away from the office. Verizon has an option for this but they charge us extra every month on top of the big bill we are already paying. The new software was iMobimac Modem version 1.2.

“Letting Mac owners use their BlackBerry as a tethered modem is
something we have been working on for well over a year”, states the
IMM development team. “No longer do Mac users have to rely only on
Bluetooth dial up, which has a marginal success record and poses a
security risk. Now they are able to access the internet whether at
home, a coffee shop or a golf course. The sky is the limit!”

I jumped through all the hurdles to register with them and download the software. I had to install on my MacBook and then download another application to my Blackberry and install there. The installation instructions were fairly simple, however I realized that the software wasn’t quite what I expected and appears to be just a custom proxy server that you have to assign settings in for each of the OSX applications that you want to use with it. In any case, I connected my phone and…. and… nothing… neither portion of software recognized my 8830. I tried several more times re-installing and configuring as well as updating my PocketMac app to see if the connection would help but it didn’t.

Maybe next time IMobiMac…

I have been playing the Visual Sound pedals for the last several years. I currently play a custom shop Fender strat through a 65 Deluxe reissue amp. I initially fell in love with the Route 66 pedal when it first came out after struggling to find tone nirvana modding my tube screamers. I eventually wound up with a Route 66 and a Jekyll & Hyde on my board but typically used the Jekyll side in combination with the Route 66. The two together made my strat come alive… add a touch of delay from the analog qualities of the H20 pedal and magic happens. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the Double Trouble as it combines my two pedal worlds in to one and allowed me to clean up the pedal board a bit. Visual Sound also added a noise suppressor circuit, which has fixed the only other issue with running the other two old pedals combined. I pulled the Route 66 and J&H pedals off my board today when the Double Trouble arrived and put it in place. It sounds dead on like the old TS808 pedals… but with a bass boost. I have only had the pedal for less than a week, but so far I got a sweet sound and found a tone that suits me well… sort of Clapton meets SRV. The pedal with my texas special single coils is very responsive to slight volume adjustments on the guitar and pick attack. The Double Trouble seems very transparent. There are also options available if you want to open the pedal up and changed the noise gate settings. I power the pedal off my pedal board supply, but one of the nice changes in the new V2 series of the Visual Sound pedals is a new battery compartment that is easier to access. The pedal is also about 10-20 percent smaller than the last version of their pedals which helped tidy up the pedal board a bit.