The Geek Brewery

Did you know that most Globe Broadband packages comes with WiFi minutes?

These WiFi minutes can be used in any WiZ hotspot (Wireless Internet Zones) around the country, including most Starbucks coffee shops.

Instead of paying a hundred bucks an hour for Internet on your next visit to Starbucks, just don’t forget to copy your Globe Broadband username and password and redeem your two free hours per month. The format of the username is [alias]@globelines.com.ph where alias is the username you gave when you applied. The default password is your account number which is reflected on your bill.

If you are quite unsure of your username or password, you may call their hotlines @ (02) 9198888. The number is toll-free if you dial the number from a Globelines landline, local landline or Globe Telecom mobile number.

Globe Telecom recently launched Free Apps, a “portal” where subscribers can download free applications from Globe Labs developers and third-parties. Free Apps website can be accessed online thru your computer or mobile phone. There already have a handful of free apps available for download including my personal favorite, Globe Calls!

Globe Calls is a free app that keeps prefixes of Globe call promos. This means you don’t have to memorize all those prefixes as they are stored on the app itself. You just have to open the app and dial the number from there. As of now, the following promos are in the Globe Calls list:

• Sakto Calls (10 centavos per second, 5 centavos per second on Sundays)
• P10/3 min
• Tawag 236 (P20/20min)
• Unlicalls Nyt

The only problem I see in this app is that it doesn’t have an update option. Once all of those promos terminate, the application becomes useless. New promos are not added on the fly, too. It’s too hassle for end-users to download a version of the app manually everytime new promos are released.

Globe Calls has a Touch Mobile counterpart, TM Calls.

Last Friday, we had our Globe Broadband connected at the apartment. Globe Telecom deployed a PROLiNK Hurricane 5200 as our ADSL modem. Since we wanted to share the Internet connection throughout the room, we bought a Linksys WRT54G2 wireless router.

Configuring the PROLiNK Hurricane 5200 to work with Linksys WRT54G2 wasn’t that easy. Here’s a rough guide on how to do it. This guide must work with other models (such as Hurricane 9200) and other brands, but the steps will differ. (more…)

Globe Telecom uses a transparent proxy on it’s http.globe.com.ph access point. This means when you open a website, it passes thru their server for caching or whatever purpose it might server before it reaches your cellphone or computer.

URL of image when not cached.

I’ve noticed though that they replace the URL of images inside <img> tags with another URL on their server for caching. This, in turn, causes some problems with web applications that requires authentication and generates images on the fly such as StatCounter. This replacement/caching process is only done when Globe Telecom detects that you are using a web browser on a computer or on a mobile phone (I curl-ed this website and the output did not have any URL replacements).

URL after caching. Notice, the cached and compressed image is in Globe or a third-party partner’s server.

As a workaround, you can spoof your User-Agent by modifying the headers of your requests. You may do this in Firefox by:

1. Going to about:config. A warning will have to scare you but just continue.
2. Then, find the general.useragent.extra.firefox setting. Using the filter above may help you find it.
3. Once you find it, double click the entry and change it to whatever you want. For it to work, it should not contain words like Mozilla, Firefox, Safari or other web browsers. I’ve changed mine to MikkoFox.

Have fun browsing without cached images.