Anyone who’s been following Alasdair Allan’s posts on The Daily ACK will know that he’s had some sharp teething problems with his new 3 HDSPA USB modem. It all started when he unboxed the dongle and found his Macbook wouldn’t play with his new toy; he then updated us a week later, when he’d successfully used the dongle with Leopard on his iMac, but still had no joy with Tiger OS X.

But just to get the weekend off on a good note, Alasdair has posted the news (on the move, using the dongle itself) that he’s cracked the problem. He arrived at the solution by combining advice from a helpful geek in 3’s technical support team with the Mac configuration advice from Aaron Heath that we posted about earlier today. Basically it boils down to the fact that ‘the proprietary connection software didn’t actually have the permissions it needed to add or configure the new network interfaces’ - read the full story here if you too want to use mobile broadband with Tiger.

And there’s a nice extra tip in the article for anyone wanting to keep track of their data usage in the form of SurplusMeter, a free app which can monitor ongoing usage against a preset bandwidth allowance.