About Joe Wein

Software developer and anti-spam activist

Japan nuclear crisis: Seeking safety for my family

Dear friends,

it has not been an easy decision, but today I have purchased four airline tickets to Europe for my family.

One line of defense after another against nuclear disaster has fallen. After the fire in Fukushima Daiichi #4 and the damage to #2, the increased release of radiation, the talk of a damaged containment and the detection of nuclear fission products as far away as Tokyo and Kanagawa I have lost all confidence in the ability of the people in charge to protect the Japanese population from harm.

In a few days we will be leaving Japan to seek safety with my brothers and parents in my home country until the situation here becomes clearer.

Joe Wein

See also:

Power cuts hit Tokyo

The Japanese capital Tokyo will join other regions of Japan to share rolling power cuts. Each region will be cut off from power for 3 hours a day on a rotating schedule, with a different time every day. I probably will be offline in about half an hour, which means no computer usage, no Internet access, no Skype calls, no landline phone calls (I have an Internet phone line), no mobile calls inside the house (I have an internet femto cell base station), no flushing of toilets (too high tech), no shopping (cash registers), no refuelling (electric gas pumps).

The good news I’ll have time reading on good old paper.

Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), the operator of the fatally injured nuclear power stations, until recently ran a campaign (“oru denka”) to get consumers to switch to only electricity. That means using it for hot water preparation, domestic heating, cooking, everything – not a gas pipe in the house. Not only was this totally un-ecological as about 60-70% of energy is lost when making electricity from heat sources like gas or oil (you burn three times more gas to cook electrically if the electric power is made from gas rather than using a gas cooker), it also meant laying all eggs in one basket. These super consumers of electric power now also put their load on a supply system over-strained by knocked out generating capacity.

Hopefully I will be online again in four hours. The power cuts may continue until next month, Tepco announced, but the real challenge will be the coming summer, when Japanese consumers usually turn on their air conditioners. With at least half of Tepco’s nuclear generating capacity knocked out the outlook is grim.

If only Japan had invested in Wind power and other renewable energy instead of 55 nuclear power stations, a fast breeder reactor and a plutonium recycling plant that alone cost $25 billion, which now have a questionable future.

Japan hit by major Earthquake

Today’s magnitude 8.9 earthquake 400 km from Tokyo was not business as usual. The Japanese are well prepared for quakes and building standards are high, but this quake is the strongest since scientific measurements have been available. It was shaking powerfully even here in Tokyo, for what felt like minutes on end. Numerous items fell of shelves, most of my wine glasses are now a pile of shards — and this is several hours by car away from the centre of the quake. We’ve had countless aftershocks for several hours now.

I was alone at home when it happened and have not been able to make mobile phone calls or send SMS to reach my other family members, though my wife and I could communicate by Skype chat (she has an iPhone). I know all the trains are stopped right now, with people walking for kilometers to get home on foot, as did my wife.

The images of tsunami devastation near Sendai are shocking. A refinery is on fire in Chiba prefecture near Tokyo. I wonder how many people will have lost their lives in the tsunami and in collapsed buildings.

UPDATE (2011-03-12 05:38 JST):

All members of my family got home OK. We were watching TV news until 01:30 in the morning. I got many emails, phone calls and Skype chats from concerned friends and relatives.

Several mentioned the serious technical problems in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station. While the government announced an evacuation of people living within 3 km of the station, few details of what was going on were provided. From US and German media reports I hear that both mains power and backup generators are out and that the cooling system seems to have a leak. Tokyo Electric Power Corporation (TEPCO) was trying to connect external power generators. There was talk about releasing steam that had built up to 50% more pressure than the reactor was designed for. Without adequate cooling the reactor core could melt even when shut down due to nuclear decay heat that continues at about 7% of regular power output when the reactor is shut down. The backup diesel generators were not working due to flooding by the tsunami.

UPDATE (2011-03-12 15:20 JST):

The decision to vent the containment vessel of unit 1 of Fukushima Daiichi suggests that efforts to get the main cooling system back online have not been successful, as it reflects excess temperatures of cooling water and heat buildup.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has announced it will “implement measures to reduce the pressure of the reactor containment vessel for those units that cannot confirm certain level of water injection by the Reactor Core Isolation Cooling System, in order to fully secure safety.”

The Reactor Core Isolation Cooling System is a mechanical system to pump cold water to cool the reactor core using a steam turbine driven by boiling coolant water. It does not rely on outside A/C power for the pumps, but needs at least battery power to open and close valves. It is the last line of defense should both grid power and backup power be lost. Without the above mentioned water injection, water levels could fall in the reactor core and the fuel elements could overheat and partially melt, as in the Three Mile Island accident near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1979.

See also:

UPDATE (2011-03-12 22:20 JST):

The cabinet secretary said that the explosion at Fukushima Daiichi #1 power station was a hydrogen explosion. When they released excessive pressure from inside the containment vessel, it contained hydrogen, which mixed with air in between the exterior wall and the containment vessel, and ignited. That blew away the outside wall. Four workers were injured and have been hospitalized.

The hydrogen is assumed to be the result of a reaction between steam and overheated zirconium cladding of the fuel rods. The water level in the reactor must have dropped so far that the top of the rods was no longer immersed in water and became red hot. The zirconium stripped oxygen from water (H2O) which releases hydrogen. If you remember the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, that was the same way the hydrogen bubble was produced in the TMI incident. The fuel rods then melted into a blob, but the restored cooling managed to contain the molten fuel inside the reactor core.

Since all attempts to restart the cooling pumps have failed, the reactor operators are now planning to pump sea water into the reactor vessel to cool the pressure vessel inside. The choice of sea water appears to be dictated by a lack of fresh water on site. Normally one would avoid salt water because of its corrosive effects, but the operators realize that this 40 year old reactor will never be repaired or put back into service again. It’s a wreck and they do all they can to stop its spent fuel from being melted and released.

An area of about 160 square kilometers that lies within 20 km of Fukushima Daiichi or 10 km within Fukushima Daini along the Pacific coast is going to be evacuated.

Nokia’s suicidal alliance with Microsoft

Much has been written about Nokia’s alliance with Microsoft announced last month. I can understand how Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, an ex-Microsoft employee who until recently was its 7th biggest shareholder, would have made this decision that benefited his former employer, but why did Nokia’s board of directors ever agree to this move?

Under attack from the iPhone and Android, Nokia had to take action, but in my opinion this move is almost the worst possible choice. It will be an unmitigated disaster for Nokia. I am not just thinking of countless development engineers who will undoubtedly be laid off now that Nokia will be buying in Windows Phone 7 (WP7) instead of developing operating system software in-house. No, it’s also a major strategic error for the company as a whole and I’ll explain why.

Nokia used to have a great brand name with consumers. Now Symbian phones have “OBSOLETE!” stamped all over them, but that’s all Nokia will have to sell for at least another year. Who is going to buy those obsolete phones, other than at rock-bottom prices? It will be ugly for Nokia’s cash flow. How on earth does Nokia believe it can still sell 150 million Symbian phones between now and their WP7 models replacing them? They’re dead in the water.

I can’t see that Intel would be pleased about what that all means for their cooperation on MeeGo, if WP7 is the future.

In 2008 Nokia acquired Norwegian company Trolltech, developers of the well-regarded Qt cross-platform application and user interface framework. Licensing to commercial users of Qt will be now be transferred to Digia PLC of Finland. Qt will not be ported to WP7. Only a few months ago Stephen Elop still talked about Qt being the common interface for Symbian and MeeGo. Qt was supposed to be the element that ties together Symbian and MeeGo in the mobile world. With Symbian dead and MeeGo on life support and a categorical “NO!” on Qt on WP7, Qt has no future left on mobile. But what else should one expect from a proprietary software company like Microsoft? They have never been keen on applications being ported from Windows to other operating systems, so they want people to use Microsoft tools only.

Nokia’s name is dirt within their developer community because after the announcement the Symbian ecosystem is dead, whatever Nokia would have us believe. It is also hard to believe that Elop had no plans about WP7 a few months ago, when Nokia still fed developers their Symbian / MeeGo / Qt strategy. Many developers must feel deceived. It will be hard for Nokia to regain their trust.

Several hardware makers had worked closely with Microsoft on the previous generation of its phone platform (Windows Mobile), who are now firmly in the Android camp. For example, HTC built the first Microsoft Windows based smartphone in 2002, but released an Android phone in 2008 and shifted the core of its smartphone business to that platform the following year (my Google Ion phone is made by HTC). Though it also offers some WP7 models, the bulk of its smartphone business is now Android.

With Windows Mobile, Microsoft could not translate its dominance on the desktop into traction in the mobile market, so it dumped Windows Mobile, with no compatible upgrade path to WP7. Developers had to rewrite apps from scratch. These early Windows Mobile supporters learned a lesson with Microsoft that Nokia is yet to learn, the hard way: Microsoft always does what’s good for Microsoft, not for its customers or business partners.

Nokia is betting the company on an unproven challenger that is entering the market behind three bigger established competitors (Google, Apple, RIM). Late last year Microsoft boasted ‘sales’ of 1.5 million WP7 phones over a period six weeks. That sounds significant, but what they actually meant by that were phones stuffed into the sales channel, mostly still sitting on shelves at mobile phone stores and not activated phones ringing in the pockets of retail customers. At the same time Google was activating that many Android phones every five days (every 5 1/2 days in the case of the iPhone).

No matter how much market share Nokia will lose over the next few years, whatever market share is left for Nokia with WP7 will still be a gain for Microsoft. And as long as Microsoft still has a steady cash flow from Windows 7 licenses and Microsoft Office it won’t be wiped out by a lukewarm reception for WP7 in the market, which is more than can be said for Nokia.

So why did Nokia make this risky decision? They must have come to the brutal conclusion that the company could not survive long term while still developing their own mobile OSes. Nokia only saw a choice between either switching to Android or to WP7 (or going under).

With Android they would largely have had to compete on the merits of their hardware, as every other Android OEM offers essentially the same software / marketplace “ecosystem”. Nokia didn’t want to compete on price with Asian manufacturers (which, as an aside, is exactly what they’ll have to do with their dead-end Symbian phones for the next year or more, since there will be little new software developed for them now). So if Nokia couldn’t be the top dog amongst Android makers, they could turn the other way and at least take whatever sweeteners they could get from Microsoft, while cutting back their software R&D costs and cutting jobs to weather the storm.

The biggest problem with that strategy in my opinion is that a few years down the road they’ll probably realize that WP7 was a dead end too. Then they’ll still have to make that switch to Android, but having already lost a few years, their good name and a lot of good staff it will be even harder.

The “Find your stalkers” Facebook scam

Today I received a strange Facebook message. Supposedly one of my friends (an old classmate of mine in Germany) had posted on my wall, but the posting was in English. Now this German friend, unless he happens to forward me an English joke, always writes to me in German. There were several of these wall posts (please DO NOT CLICK on those links!):

23 February at 17:35:
According to http://goo.gl/6hr4J you’re my top stalker. Creep.

23 February at 17:35:
Secret tool shows who stalks your pics http://tinyurl.com/procreeper

23 February at 17:35:
Hey! This is awesome
Insane! Awesome tool to see who looks at your pics >> http://goo.gl/XsUqi

23 February at 17:35:
Hey! This is awesome
New FB tool shows who stalks your profile– http://goo.gl/FTx5T

23 February at 17:43:
Hey, whats happening?
Secret tool shows who stalks your pics http://goo.gl/DxvMD

So I contacted my friend and asked him if it was really him who’d written that or if his facebook account had been hacked. He replied that he wasn’t him.

I investigated the links, which use the Google URL shortening service to hide the
target URL:

tinyurl.com/procreeper => procreeper.info
goo.gl/6hr4J => theprochecker.info/?h
goo.gl/DxvMD => myprochecker.info/?i
goo.gl/FTx5T => procheckers.info/?e
goo.gl/XsUqi => theprochecker.info/?b

Domains procreeper.info, myprochecker.info, procheckers.info and theprochecker.info are all hosted at the same IP address (98.126.9.210, Krypt Technologies) and use the same name servers (ns1.imgurnot.com, ns2.imgurnot.com). The registrant is hidden behind a WHOIS proxy. The reverse DNS name of the host is “wowchatroulette.info“.

Here are other domains that appear connected to these domains (this is probably just the tip of the iceberg):

  • fb-creeper.info
  • fb-creeper.info
  • fbcheckers.info
  • fbcheckersnow.info
  • fbcreeper.info
  • fbcreeper.info
  • fbcreeperonline.info
  • fbcreeperonline.info
  • fbcreepers.info
  • fbcreepers.info
  • fbisfun.info
  • fbpromo.info
  • myfbcheckers.info
  • myprocreeper.info
  • newfbcheckers.info
  • omgfbisfun.info
  • procreep.info
  • procreeper.info
  • procreeperonline.info
  • procreepers.info
  • profilechecker.info
  • profileseek.info
  • profilespy.info
  • profileview.info
  • profileviewers.info
  • thefbcheckers.info
  • thefbcreeper.info
  • thefbcreeper.info

These sites have messages such as:

Find YOUR Stalkers

Find out who spends excessive time with your photos, reading your old wall posts, and looking at your friends list.

This is a scam designed to trick people into running a script on Facebook that will have a message sent to all their Facebook friends and to get them to also visit such websites. Anti-malware site TrendMicro warns:

Malware type : Spyware
Destructive : No
Platform : Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003
Encrypted : Yes
In the wild : Yes

This malware uses social engineering methods to lure users into performing certain actions that may, directly or indirectly, cause malicious routines to be performed. Specifically, it poses as a Facebook stalker finder to be able to infect Facebook user accounts

(…)

This malware may be hosted on websites that run a malicious script when accessed by unsuspecting users.

It poses as a legitimate Facebook application. It propagates by sending IMs and status messages with links to websites where it can be downloaded.

This spyware executes when a user accesses certain websites where it is hosted.

See also this TrendMicro blog post on the subject.

If you have received wall posts like that in the name of a friend, click on the X to the right of the posts to delete them and alert your friend! Do not click on any of the links in the malicious posts.

Outlook Express missing margins while printing

I recently had problems printing out emails in Outlook Express, the mail client I use on Microsoft Windows. Usually Outlook Express will leave about 2 cm blank between the edge of the paper and the start of the text. Instead it started so far to the left that the first character was cut off.

Outlook Express has no “Page Setup” option in its File menu to configure margins. So how come the margins had changed and how could I fix it? As it turned out, Outlook Express considers itself a part of Internet Explorer, components of which it shares for rendering text and other purposes.

The reason I lost the margin was that when I printed my nengajō (Japanese New Year’s Cards) for 2011 two months ago I had tweaked the IE printing margins to the minimum. Since I usually use Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome as a browser, I had not noticed I had left IE with those settings — until I came to print emails in Outlook Express, that is.

The fix was easy: Launch Internet Exporer, go to File => Page Setup => Margins and set Left / Right / Top / Bottom back to 0.75 if using inches or the equivalent in centimetres if using metric. Voila, OE will print with the standard margins again.

SoftBank Mobile “Home Antenna FT” – an update

About two weeks ago I fixed the wireless black hole that was my new home by installing SoftBank Mobile’s “Home Antenna FT” femtocell adapter. It provides indoors mobile phone reception for my family, connecting the small mobile phone cell to SoftBank’s network via my FLET’S Hikari Next broadband connection.

Yesterday I noticed that the antenna had stopped working and my Android had no reception. It had been shipped to us with a “Hikari BB Unit” broadband router.

When I first installed the Home Antenna FT I found that I could get it working by simply hooking it up on the LAN side of my existing broadband router. No luck this time. Wherever I connected it inside the LAN its status LED turned red and I didn’t give me any signal. As far as I knew nothing had changed in my LAN.

After some fruitless poking around and a half hour phone call to SoftBank’s hotline I had little alternative but starting from scratch, following the supplied Home Antenna FT setup instructions precisely. This involved connecting the following to an Ethernet hub (I used the four port hub on the LAN side of a spare router with its WAN side disconnected, but any cheap 4-port hub will do):

  • one of the Ethernet ports on the FTTH ONU
  • the WAN port of the “Hikari BB Unit” broadband router
  • a PC (I used an ancient notebook running Windows 2000)

Then I popped the CD-ROM that came with the FLET’S ONU into the latop’s drive and followed the SoftBank configuration steps. It involved installing some software for PPPoE, which Windows theoretically doesn’t really need, rebooting and then accessing a FLET’S website and entering a CAF ID and access key.

Not sure why, but after that the “Internet connection” LED of the Hikari BB Unit turned green and the Home Antenna FT started providing a signal after it was hooked up one of the LAN ports of the Hikari BB Unit. I could then remove the hub and laptop, directly hooking up the WAN port of the BB Unit to the FLET’S ONU and everything still worked.

Out of curiosity I once moved the Home Antenna FT back to my other router, but still no joy: It only worked with the Hikari BB Unit. So I moved it back there and it will stay there.

Today I am an Egyptian

Since the exciting events in Tunisia stirred activists and the masses in Egypt into action, I have been following the news with anticipation. Finally 82 year old dictator Hosni Mubarak has ceded power, opening the door to a more democratic future for over 80 million Egyptians.

At times Mubarak reminded me of a stubborn elderly relative refusing to give up driving even after multiple accidents. The amounts of money stolen by him and his family during his rule, even if it were just a fraction of the figures reported, are shocking. Hundreds lost their lives in recent weeks and thousands were arrested and tortured over many years.

Echoes of 1989

I felt reminded of the events of 1989 in central and eastern Europe, when in a matter of months and weeks regime after regime collapsed that once seemed cast in concrete for decades to come.

When the regimes in Eastern Europe fell it took months for free elections for a representative parliament and government and for comprehensive reforms of the apparatus of government. A lot of hard work still lies ahead and it will take patience and a lot of skill to solve the problems left behind by decades of violent oppression and mismanagement.

The Islamist bogeyman

Despite some understandable anxiety by some, Egypt 2011 is not Iran 1979. The Egyptian revolution was the work of a broad coalition of unionists, leftists, students, young people and other secular forces as well as Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood was never at the forefront. This was a revolution about democracy and social justice, not Islamism.

Those stoking the fear of an Islamist takeover in Cairo do so for political purposes, but it is up to the Egyptians to decide how to run their country now. I hope they will do it as responsibly and maturely as they have shown themselves in the past weeks.

Democrats need not fear democracy

Israel, until now recognized by Freedom House as the only fully free country in the Middle East, should feel uplifted, not panicked at the prospect of living next door to another democracy. History has proven that in the long term democracies do make for much safer neighbours than dictatorships. Egyptians deserve freedom and justice as much as Israelis do, or Palestinians for that matter.

Supporting a brutal kleptocrat was never going to a stable basis for peace, because peace needs justice. My hope is that one day a future government of Israel will offer an outstretched hand towards a democratic Egypt and recognize it as a much better partner to do business with than Mubarak could ever be, and (I know this will take time) even as a friend.

Speech by US president Barack Obama on 11 February 2011

Good afternoon, everybody. There are very few moments in our lives where we have the privilege to witness history taking place. This is one of those moments. This is one of those times. The people of Egypt have spoken, their voices have been heard, and Egypt will never be the same.

By stepping down, President Mubarak responded to the Egyptian people’s hunger for change. But this is not the end of Egypt’s transition. It’s a beginning. I’m sure there will be difficult days ahead, and many questions remain unanswered. But I am confident that the people of Egypt can find the answers, and do so peacefully, constructively, and in the spirit of unity that has defined these last few weeks. For Egyptians have made it clear that nothing less than genuine democracy will carry the day.

The military has served patriotically and responsibly as a caretaker to the state, and will now have to ensure a transition that is credible in the eyes of the Egyptian people. That means protecting the rights of Egypt’s citizens, lifting the emergency law, revising the constitution and other laws to make this change irreversible, and laying out a clear path to elections that are fair and free. Above all, this transition must bring all of Egypt’s voices to the table. For the spirit of peaceful protest and perseverance that the Egyptian people have shown can serve as a powerful wind at the back of this change.

The United States will continue to be a friend and partner to Egypt. We stand ready to provide whatever assistance is necessary — and asked for — to pursue a credible transition to a democracy. I’m also confident that the same ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit that the young people of Egypt have shown in recent days can be harnessed to create new opportunity — jobs and businesses that allow the extraordinary potential of this generation to take flight. And I know that a democratic Egypt can advance its role of responsible leadership not only in the region but around the world.

Egypt has played a pivotal role in human history for over 6,000 years. But over the last few weeks, the wheel of history turned at a blinding pace as the Egyptian people demanded their universal rights.

We saw mothers and fathers carrying their children on their shoulders to show them what true freedom might look like.

We saw a young Egyptian say, “For the first time in my life, I really count. My voice is heard. Even though I’m only one person, this is the way real democracy works.”

We saw protesters chant “Selmiyya, selmiyya” — “We are peaceful” — again and again.

We saw a military that would not fire bullets at the people they were sworn to protect.

And we saw doctors and nurses rushing into the streets to care for those who were wounded, volunteers checking protesters to ensure that they were unarmed.

We saw people of faith praying together and chanting – “Muslims, Christians, We are one.” And though we know that the strains between faiths still divide too many in this world and no single event will close that chasm immediately, these scenes remind us that we need not be defined by our differences. We can be defined by the common humanity that we share.

And above all, we saw a new generation emerge — a generation that uses their own creativity and talent and technology to call for a government that represented their hopes and not their fears; a government that is responsive to their boundless aspirations. One Egyptian put it simply: Most people have discovered in the last few days … that they are worth something, and this cannot be taken away from them anymore, ever.

This is the power of human dignity, and it can never be denied. Egyptians have inspired us, and they’ve done so by putting the lie to the idea that justice is best gained through violence. For in Egypt, it was the moral force of nonviolence — not terrorism, not mindless killing — but nonviolence, moral force that bent the arc of history toward justice once more.

And while the sights and sounds that we heard were entirely Egyptian, we can’t help but hear the echoes of history — echoes from Germans tearing down a wall, Indonesian students taking to the streets, Gandhi leading his people down the path of justice.

As Martin Luther King said in celebrating the birth of a new nation in Ghana while trying to perfect his own, “There is something in the soul that cries out for freedom.” Those were the cries that came from Tahrir Square, and the entire world has taken note.

Today belongs to the people of Egypt, and the American people are moved by these scenes in Cairo and across Egypt because of who we are as a people and the kind of world that we want our children to grow up in.

The word Tahrir means liberation. It is a word that speaks to that something in our souls that cries out for freedom. And forevermore it will remind us of the Egyptian people — of what they did, of the things that they stood for, and how they changed their country, and in doing so changed the world.

Thank you.

SoftBank “Home Antenna FT” (FEMTO AP-SR1-1) fixes weak mobile phone reception

We have four smartphones in our household, three Apple iPhones and one HTC Android phone, but for the last six months I basically couldn’t make calls indoors. This has now changed because of “Home Antenna FT”, a so called 3G femtocell.

Home Antenna FT access point

When we moved into our newly built home in Setagaya-ku, Tokyo half a year ago we discovered we had virtually no cell phone reception. Most of the time all four phones were out of signal range. If I left my phone leaning against the window pane in my office then I usually had enough of a signal to have it ring, but I couldn’t pick it up from there without immediately cutting the connection. I would then have to walk out into the street, wait to see some bars indicating a signal and then return the call to whoever had tried to reach me.

After several weeks I found out that SoftBank Mobile, our mobile provider offers a small device called “Home Antenna FT” for free to customers with connection problems. It acts as a low power mobile phone tower covering only the inside of one home, connecting to the SoftBank Mobile network using a broadband connection such as DSL or Fibre To The Home (FTTH) . The device is called FEMTO AP-SR1-1 and is made by SerComm Corporation in Taiwan.

I applied for one in September, but then later was told it couldn’t be used with J:COM, my then cable internet provider. I would have to change to NTT FLET’S Hikari (FTTH) or Yahoo BB (DSL). So I bit the bullet and changed provider in December, only to find out later that J:COM had also concluded an agreement with SoftBank Mobile. I wouldn’t have had to change after all.

Another month and a half passed until a box was delivered by Takkyubin (parcel service), which contained a broadband access router for use with the femtocell access point, but no access point. I already have a router and didn’t really want to replace it, but according to the instructions the new router was supposed to be connected in parallel to any PC that was hooked to the NTT Flet’s Optical Network Unit (ONU). I left it sitting on the shelf for a week until this morning when another, smaller box arrived. It was the access point.

I first hooked up the WAN port of the SoftBank router to the FLET’S ONU and the single network port on the FEMTO AP-SR1-1 to a LAN port of the router as per the instructions. I turned off / turned back on the mobile phone to make it seek a fresh base station, but initially had no luck. So I moved the access point to my office and and connected it to a small ethernet switch on the LAN side of my router. A little while later I had full signal strength on my mobile. Yeah! 🙂

I then moved the access point to a central location in my house, where I have with a WLAN access point with internal 4 port switch that is connected to the router using category 6 LAN cable and connected it to one of those 4 ports. Now the entire house is covered by the 3G signal. The unneeded SoftBank router went back into its cardboard box.

All in all, once I received the hardware it was a fairly painless experience.

Some people are concerned about cellphone radiation and having a micro version of “cell phone tower” right in the living room may be worrying to them, but in fact it’s a benign alternative to not having one: The further the base station, the more power the mobile phone has to emit to connect to it. By keeping the base station inside the home the mobile never never has to jack up the signal strength to levels that would penetrate exterior walls. If I do walk out of the front door, all bars disappear and only reappear when I stand far enough out in the street, indicating the device uses minimal power and only just covers the interior of our home.