Under the hood

I gave up my Blackberry today, decided to try and make the most of my cell phone and pager. I have data cables for both, but left the drivers at work for the cell phone, so I started working on the pager.

The E-80 has some interesting possibilities. With the backup cable and a program from Arch Wireless, I was able to export 170 of my Outlook contacts into the pager. I used a category called “Pager” and used the export utility to filter only those contacts to go into the pager.

The data format is pretty straightforward on some of the files. The memo folder seems like a great way to store passwords and text info that doesn’t fit into a contact. The file is straightforward, using pseudo-HTML tags:

memo 1 label
text goes here

another memo

The file size is only 2000 characters, though. I can still sift through my password file and store them on here. The Blackberry has a much better keyboard, bigger screen, and auto-corrects typing - I’ll miss that. These pagers are going for under $20 on Ebay, and unlimited data is $19/month - that’s pretty hard to beat for basic data service.

I’ve got Outlook (running behind an Exchange server) forwarding any mail marked high-importance to the pager, as well as messages from my monitoring system. My next step is to trim the monitoring system messages so they fit better into a 160 character message.

What I’d really like to do is figure a way to make a WCTP “mailer” that sendmail could use. format an email using a bogus email address and tell sendmail to mail to a mailer that used WCTP to connect directly to Verizon’s servers. That would allow for message tracking and much larger messages.