Horrendous cool software

2013-08-19

Devices should work together. All devices. Also from different companies. They don’t.

A good example is the feature ‘USB Tethering’:

When I plug my iPhone in my Macbook it works.
When I plug my iPhone in my Windows notebook, it works.
When I plug my Google Nexus in my Windows notebook, it works.
When I plug my Google Nexus in my Macbook Air… I’m screwed.

I didn’t find a way to make it work. I always needed to open up a mobile WiFi Hotspot to tether when I’m on the road. That sucked. And it costs a lot of battery on my phone. And I need that for Ingress ;-)

Then someone saved my day. It was Joshua Wise ( @jwise0) by writing a cool piece of software. What he did was writing a driver for Mac OS X that understands Microsoft’s proprietary RNDIS protocol - that is used for USB tethering by Google’s Android devices. No, I won’t go on the topic ‘Google uses a proprietary Microsoft protocol for their relatively open Android platform’ now. That’s not my thing.

The software has the interesting name HoRNDIS (pronounced horrendous) and its source is also available on GitHub. He also have binary packages available on the projects homepage for a simple installation.

And, what should I say? It works like a charm. I installed the driver, plugged my phone in via USB, activated USB tethering through the menu and now I’m publishing this blog post USB tethered.

Thank you, Joshua. Very much.