'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

Today I wanted to get at some data on an old Ericsson T39m cellphone I used to use. Unfortunately, sometime over the past year or two the battery has completely failed (and has swollen quite alarmingly), and this particular phone won't power up unless the battery is present. The variable PSU only has a fixed choice of voltages, none of which are near the ~3.5V that a Li-Ion battery puts out (and in any case I only seem to have one crocodile clip lead so I can't connect it up).

But... what I do have is a Bus Pirate!



Here, I've connected the 3.3V rail of the Bus Pirate to the battery terminals on the T39m. The Bus Pirate probably won't be able to sustain the current draw for an actual phone call, but it can certainly supply enough for the phone to boot:



Success! And a full strength signal too (that's old-school GSM frontend design for you - none of this "you're holding it wrong" rubbish). Aside from the zeroed clock and the dead SIM, the rest of the phone works fine and I was able to extract the data I wanted.

Today was supposed to be phone line day, but unfortuantly that failed to happen. And I can't even rant at the person who's fault it is (and I was very nice and didn't rant at the engineer - it's not his fault), so I shall instead rant at the Internets!

It turns out that I'm not only the first person in this flat to want a landline, but the first person in the whole block - the other tennants all use mobile phones. But that shouldn't be a problem, the block itself should be wired up.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Turns out that the builders fitted a DP and wired all the flats up to that, but then left the cable out of the DP in a heap on the floor. And they ran a couple of ducts in the cupboard, but a) they aren't the same colour as the ones underneath the BT manhole cover right outside which leads to b) the engineer has no idea where they go! The landlady doesn't know how the phones should be run, and the person who would know is on holiday. So the phone sockets in the flat are all wired up, but the cable between the flat and the exchange isn't connected and no-one knows where it should run!

With any luck BT'll send another engineer soon to sort out the ductwork (the one today didn't have the necessary equipment), and hopefully that one will manage to get it wired up.

At least at the end of this I should get an excellent broadband connection as the new flat is much closer to the exchange!