Sagar Pandya

Scratch that. I figured out how to tether via Bluetooth on Ubuntu. Firstly, install blueman from here. Blueman is a Bluetooth manager replacement for Gnome that is about 30 billion times better than the default. Next, make sure your computer is discoverable, and pair FROM THE iPHONE. That’s the important step that I failed at when I tried this before. Once your computer is paired, you can open up Blueman, right click your phone, and go to “Network Access

This is a note for my own reminder. It’s also sort of a cheap hack. iPhone 3.0 has the ability to tether to a computer over Bluetooth or USB. The task is made extremely simple on Windows and Mac, but I haven’t really figured out a way to take advantage of the iPhone’s tethering feature on Ubuntu. Maybe some day it will be integrated into NetworkManager, but in the mean time, we’re forced hack our way to a functional existence. So the method I found that works requires a jailbroken iPhone. Here’s how to do it. Note that obviously this can be done on almost any distribution of Linux with minor modifications to the steps.

1. Download libiphone. To do this in Ubuntu 9.04, just add these lines to your sources list, along with their key (F0876AC9). Then apt-get update

So I stopped taking melatonin and drinking coffee last Friday. I went to bed at reasonable times this weekend, and woke up without the aid of an alarm clock at around 7-8. It felt pretty good. Last night, I couldn’t sleep and lay awake restlessly until about 2:00am. But I woke up easily at 7:30am feeling pretty good. I know it usually takes a lot longer than a single day to change your sleeping pattern, but I’m hoping this trend continues. I’m about to go to sleep again (without melatonin) and hopefully I’ll wake up feeling good at around 7 again. I have about a month before the GRE and I hope I can get this sleeping issue out of the way by then.

It’s hard to believe, but I used to wake up every day and get to class by 8:15am in high school. That memory seems remote and distant now. Then suddenly in college, 11am classes were almost impossible to wake up in time for. Now I’m sort of in between. Soon I’ll be in grad school where I’ll have to be especially disciplined about sleep. With a bad sleeping pattern, my whole life becomes pervaded by a bleak fogginess. The simplest daily tasks seem impossible or simply not worth doing. My actions seem vague, like I’m watching them peripherally from a distance. I imagine it’s what depression is like, only not nearly as crippling. The memories of time spent this way are even more discomforting. It’s like huge swathes of time have shrunk away; not gone, just somehow shortened.

I’ve been having sleep related troubles for a few weeks. If I leave my eyes open in the dark, strange imaginary apparitions cast themselves about the room from within my sleepy mind. I find it difficult to wake up in the morning, and I’m tired all day long. I take 6mg melatonin almost every night, and I have been for over 2 years. I try to go to sleep between 10:30-11pm every night, and try to wake up at 7am every morning. However, I am usually unsuccessful at waking up at this time. Dad says maybe melatonin has a cumulative effect across multiple days, and its lingering traces in my brain are making it difficult to wake up. He also suggested that I might just need more sleep. So now I’m going to stop taking melatonin, and also try to sleep earlier. Maybe 9:30-10:00pm every night? I don’t know how successful I’ll be at that, but I can easily stop taking melatonin. I don’t like taking it anyway; it feels like a crutch. On separate notes, here are things I’ve done lately that make me feel happy:

• I started using Google’s Chromium browser on Linux. I like its speed and minimal interface. I know I’m a bit late to the game, but can you blame me? Chromium has been sort of unstable for a while, and just recently gained features like “Options.” My laptop is now quite minimal. I’ve even done away with window decorations entirely.
• I’ve been listening to Harry Potter audiobooks on my iPhone while I drive around. Although I’ve read the books, it’s always nice to hear them read by a talented and British person like Stephen Fry. Also, the stories are quite good.
• I’ve been reviewing for the GRE. This sounds boring and tedious (and it is) but it’s also quite fun. It’s simple and straightforward, quite unlike the tests I’d become used to preparing for while at school.

This is my attempt at a blog. I hold a very new BS degree in Computer Engineering from UCSB, complete with that new degree smell everyone loves. As you might have predicted, my interests include Linux, programming, hardware design, and science of all kinds. You can follow me (up to a point) on Twitter, see my Facebook, or view my bookmarks.