How I got my US T-Mobile phone to work in the UK

This is hard-won knowledge. I had to figure out this process by myself with trial, error, calls to technical support and repeated visits to T-Mobile stores. If there’s a similar guide anywhere online, I couldn’t find it. So here you go:

I live in the US. I have a T-Mobile MyTouch 4G, made by HTC. This phone works abroad as-is, but with crazy data roaming charges: $15 per megabyte. So here’s what I did to get cheap UK service on my US phone. I recommend completing all three trips in a single visit to a T-Mobile store. Just stay there until your phone works – you will need to be physically present in front of T-Mobile staff for Step 3.

1. Pay As You Go SIM card

First, go to a T-Mobile store and buy a SIM chip with at least £10 credit on it. The SIM card is technically free: what you’re buying is credit to use on pay-as-you-go phone, text, and data. I selected the International Plan (2p a minute to the US!) To activate the International Plan, text INT to 441.

T-Mobile Pay As You Go Tariffs for UK service

You can get data service with a T-Mobile Pay As You Go Internet Booster. Limited internet costs £2.50 for 5 days (text WEB to 4410, or £5 for 30 days (text WEB to 4410) Read up on T-Mobile’s UK Internet Fair Use policy. Short version: there’s a monthly limit on streaming video and audio.

2. Manually add a new APN

OK, so now your phone can access make calls, send texts, and access the internet. Or can it? No, it cannot, because you need to tell it what servers to connect to in the UK. You need to manually create an APN: “Access Point Name”. The T-Mobile website and the store staff may try to send the new APN settings automatically to your phone. That didn’t work for me, but entering the settings manually did.

Depending on what phone you have, the settings will be different. For my MyTouch 4G, the generic HTC phone APN settings worked.

To create a new APN, click Settings, Wireless & networks, Mobile networks, Access Point Names, then click the Settings button to pop up a menu with “New APN”. Click “New APN” and enter these settings, leaving the other fields unset. The settings are case-sensitive.

Name: T-mobile
APN: general.t-mobile.uk
Username: t-mobile
Password: tm
MMS Protocol: WAP 2.0
MCC: 234
MNC: 30
Authentication type: PAP
APN type: default

When you’re done entering the APN settings, before leaving that screen, click “Settings” again, and “Save” on the popup menu. Then, on the screen that lists the APNs, click to select the APN you’ve just created.

You can also find your phone on this page: T-Mobile phone support: find your phone, click “View all help”, “Manuals”, “Connecting to the Internet”, and “Setting up the phone for Internet surfing”, then follow the instructions.

Now you should be able to connect to the internet. If not, check that you’ve entered the correct APN settings with correct capitalization and that the new APN is active, then try restarting your phone.

3. Remove content lock

Now your phone can access web pages! Or can it? No, not all of them, because your UK SIM card assumes that you are a child trying to view dirty pictures. Flickr, YouTube, and other sites of questionable morality are locked and inaccessible. To remove the content lock, you can visit the T-Mobile website with a UK credit card (which you probably don’t have), or you can show T-Mobile store staff your passport or your obviously adult face and get them to remove the content lock from your phone.

And that should be it. After I had discovered these tasks and completed them my epic quest for connectivity was complete, and my phone worked fine for the rest of my trip. I hope this post will save someone else some time and frustration.

You can get your phone credit topped up with cash anywhere you see a “Top Up” sign: News agents, corner stores, Radio Shack, etc.

Happy travels!

Parade of pez dispensers

J didn’t want me to take a picture.  She said “They need private time for looking at their balls.”

Rosa setigera

The native rose on the south side of my front porch is covered in flowers right now.

“Bringing Nature Home” changed my life

Well, ok, not my whole life, but certainly the part that I spend gardening, which is close to 15% of my life in the summer.

Everything that Douglas Tallamy says makes so much sense that it amazes me I didn’t know this stuff until I read this book:

1. Insects that are native to an ecosystem have evolved to eat only plants native to that ecosystem
2. Baby birds eat insects. Even normally seed-eating birds need a large insect population to support their young.
3. So, if there are fewer native plants around, there are fewer native insects, and fewer birds.
4. Suburban gardeners have a responsibility to rebuild the native ecosystem which the suburb has displaced.

Tallamy makes these points quickly, then spends a chapter on how to make a garden of native plants look attractive and formal so you don’t irritate your neighbors. The bulk of the book is descriptions of insects native to the eastern U.S. and the plants they live on, accompanied by attractive color photographs. I’ve identified the little red bugs on my coneflowers as the nymph stage of Red Milkweed Beetles.

For the last few years I’ve grown some native prairie plants because they are drought-tolerant and don’t require any attention. But I’ve also been planting various exotic ornamental species that are drought-tolerant, and it never occurred to me that they are just wasting space in my garden. Nothing can eat them, so they’re not in the food chain. I never thought about the insect part of the ecosystem, and how important it is to provide food and shelter for the insects that other local fauna depend on.

From now on only native plants and vegetables are allowed in my garden. And when I see that something is eating my perennials, instead of being irritated I’ll be happy that a tiny bit of the ecosystem is working as it should.

Time to start seeds

It’s 8 weeks to the last frost date here in Region 5, and the most recent snow is quickly melting away. It’s spring! Time to get the garden started. My seeds arrived from seedsavers.org this week and I’m getting my seed trays set up under lights in the basement. In this years batch:


Tomatoes: Stupice, Beam’s Yellow Pear, Mexico Midget, Green Zebra, Amish Paste. This is the third year I’ve grown most of these varieties. This year I’m growing them from seeds instead of buying them as transplants. Another change this year: Beam’s Yellow Pear and Mexico Midget, which are both small-fruited huge plants, are going to be grown in containers on the patio, inside tomato towers. I’m tired of having mini-tomatoes take over my whole garden.

Beans and Peas! I’ve never grown beans or peas before. I chose Climbing French, Fin de Bagnol, and Dwarf Gray Sugar because they seemed basic and easy. They’re getting planted outside – the peas can take some cold, so I might even plant them this weekend.

Peppers: Wisconsin Lakes and Sweet Chocolate. I’ve never grown peppers before. The packets say they won’t germinate unless the soil temp is 80°; which I doubt will happen either in the basement or outside. I’ll just plant them and see what happens.

Greens: Forellenschuss and Slobolt lettuce, Five Color Silverbeet. I grew Forellenschuss two years ago and it was good but bolted a few weeks after the leaves were big enough to eat. So I’m trying Slobolt as well, which is supposed to stay leafy and tasty a long time. I planted Rainbow Swiss Chard (same as Five Color Silverbeet) last fall, and thought it was great. Grew fast, didn’t mind the cold, and 8 plants gave me enough for a salad every day.

Cupplant, Silphium perfoliatum. This year I’m making an effort to increase the insect and bird population of my yard by using more native plants as ornamentals.

Oh, good, more snow

I was just thinking, hasn’t it been almost a week since it last snowed? I sure do miss winter, what with all the temperatures slightly above freezing we’ve been having lately. I was getting tired of being able to push the stroller down ice-free sidewalks, and those daffodils sprouting in my garden? Hate them.



Thanks, climate!

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NY Times article about geeks and DnD

The New York Times posted a thoughtful article about Gary Gygax’s contribution to geek – and therefore mass – culture (NYT login required).

Op-Ed Contributor: Geek Love
By ADAM ROGERS

I like his discussion of D&D’s effect on introvert-thinker geek types, particularly his point about how having a way to quantify personalities helps them cope with people in the real world. I, uh, totally do not identify with that.

The path in the diagram that goes through “painting pewter figurines” to “web designer” = me. It’s a cute diagram, but it assumes that all geeks are male, and don’t get me started on that. There are plenty of female geeks out there. One of my earliest D&D memories is of my mom (who is also a programmer) having her first edition thief character kill the rest of the party in their sleep so she could run away with all the treasure. My brother and I were so mad.

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The discontent of our winter

Hey, check out this forecast! Oh man, I can’t wait….this winter has gone on way too long. It snowed today, again, but it looks like there’s an end in sight. We’re almost done.

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Five years ago today

I was on a plane to Frankfurt. I was moving to Geneva to work for the World Health Organization. I’d been married to the sidekick for two days, and he was going to join me in July. The American media had spent the winter enthusiastically building up to the invasion of Iraq, which was expected any day. When I arrived in Switzerland spring was well under way, and the stress of living with the pro-war US media vanished. It was like being teleported to a better world, and apart from having to find an apartment in a foreign city in a language I barely speak, everything was immediately great. I met wonderful new friends, and there was a lot of interesting cheese and cheap wine to be had.

Five years later I’m back in the States and my life is very different, but it’s good. I have a nice house, a new baby, friendly neighbors, and great plans for my garden this spring, whenever spring arrives.

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Nasturtium watercolor

It’s been a year since the last time I did any painting, but considering how disused my skillz are this turned out pretty well. The subject matter is just a bunch of overlapping simple shapes, so I focused on playing with colors.

I departed from my customary palette with a couple new pigments I found in the bargain aisle at Hobby Lobby: Winsor & Newton Cobalt Green and Thioindigo Violet. I really liked these colors. The cobalt green has a lovely cool hue and flocculated very nicely. Or it might have been granulating. The thioindigo violet behaved wonderfully when I dropped it into the green wet-into-wet. Instead of muddying the green, it retreated and formed bright edges.

I used masking fluid to make the veins of the leaves. They turned out messier and thicker than I’d have liked, but the whole painting has a casual sloppiness, so I don’t mind too much. Watercolor is the wrong medium for perfectionism, anyway. Perhaps that’s why it appeals to me; it’s the opposite of programming, in which I spend 90% of my time finding and fixing my mistakes. In watercolor painting I just have to live with my mistakes.

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