When Tello failed to transfer my CenturyLink number I canceled their service. I then tried to remove their eSIM from my phone. Apple's instructions worked -- but the line name remained even with a deleted eSIM.
It's a bug.
When Apple asks if you want to update any contacts using the number associated with the removed eSIM you have to say yes -- even if there are none. Looks like a simple logic bug. Then the entry will be removed.
Writing this up quickly, I might get back to it later.
I want to have a shortcut to a specific macOS Notes.app note that I can put in a folder.
1. In the note I want to link to hit ⌘K. Search on name of the current note.
2. Do NOT use the note title option. Unclick that and provide your own title. Create link in note.
3. A link is created in the note. Click on that that and then drag it to the desktop. An inetloc file with a deep link is created.
This is what the .inetloc shortcut has in it:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>URL</key>
<string>applenotes:note/fcbf1ab3-4779-49d5-b12f-ab33e9809113?ownerIdentifier=_5e4c6731f56ce6c061ce7014d9bc1b2a</string>
</dict>
</plist>
This was much harder than I expected it to be. Below is a simplified account of what eventually succeeded. I actually started out by trying to transfer from CenturyLink to Tello. That port failed. It was impossible to determine why it failed, each company pointed me to the other. I did learn that the porting process is surprisingly manual, there's an actual carrier to carrier voice call involved. The porting office is kept away from customers to reduce social engineering exploits. Lastly the all important PIN provided by, in this case CenturyLink, is of a form that suggests the carriers don't take it very seriously. Overall I was left with the impression that carriers have fairly successfully sabotaged the landline porting process. I miss having a government that cared about such things.
My best guess as to why the port from CenturyLink to Tello failed is that CenturyLink takes too long to process the request and Tello is too impatient. It took CenturyLink 4-5 days to complete the Port that succeeded, longer than Tello's 3 day limit. Tello's disinterest in the port process makes me wonder how much time they have as an MVNO.
After some glitches I was able to delete my Tello account (they had a bad link that I'm sure they will never fix).
Now to what worked with an preface of why we were among the last to do successfully port a number from a landline to a mobile company.
We are among the last in America to have a $43/m voice only family landline. It persisted because our ancient security system relies on two of the standard four copper landline wires, and the switching costs were comparable to our monthly landline fee. The landline was purely a message phone, it didn't ring.
It was on the list of things to replace but lower priority since minimal savings and added hassles.
Then copper wires started to disappeared in our metro area. I think wire theft may have peaked for the moment, but the copper side of Century Link isn't paying what it would take to maybe keep the wires working. When the elderly techs come by they beg us to leave copper so they can finally rest.
We want to keep the legacy number so I looked into the 2025 porting options. The only thing that's changed since I last looked in 2015 or so is the eSIM. Mastodon friends suggested voip.ms, but it was obvious that we're not their business. (These days we think a lot about how things get managed after we die, and we assume that the kids are having to make decisions. They are not techies.) Also, canceling voip.ms service requires tedious interactions with their outsourced retention people. A huge red flag.
You still can't port from landline directly to Google Voice. The cost of a landline port would be prohibitive for what is still a "free" service. The AIs claim you can't port from CenturyLink VOIP to Google Voice either.
CenturyLink (fiber) would sell us a VOIP phone service for about $30/m that I'm sure would not have a porting issues. This is modest savings from the $43 landline, but we felt we could do better. Also, I'm not impressed with legacy CenturyLink service. (Their fiber service has worked well for us, they behave like separate companies.)
We looked at using an old iPhone as our home phone with its Apple Voice Mail (requires data). AT&T is our ($$) current family carrier and we could add a $30+/m line from them. But of course there are cheaper options. Back in 2012 we used H2O Wireless for the kids phones. It's rock bottom service quality but if you work at it you should be able to use them for under $100 a year (prepay, no contract). They are still around! Also familiar from the old days: Tello, Hello Mobile, and Ting. All of which will provide new phones that could be left in the kitchen. We could even use one of our old iPhones. (Note Apple vmail requires some data support, so data-free won't work).
Happily there are better options than leaving an old iPhone on a charger. In the past few years eSIMs have started to work fairly well on iPhones. Our current phones can all handle at least 2 (I think up to 8?) eSIMs. So rather than hassle with an old iPhone holding the number, we ported it to an eSIM on Emily's personal iPhone.
I asked the AIs which had the better customer service among H2O Wireless, Tello, Ting, and Hello Mobile. Tello and Ting won easily. I tried Tello and my initial impression was good, but as noted above the port failed. With Tello you get a temporary number and eSIM immediately, then switch numbers if the port works.
After the Tello port failed we removed the eSIM from Emily's iPhone and tried Ting's $10/m plan. I actually sent a referral from an older Ting account I had but I'm not sure the referral credit thing worked.
We again called CenturyLink. Emily's name was on the landline account, so we used her name on the Ting account. We had the correct account number. Emily navigated CenturyLink phone puzzle and got a 4 digit Port code. We submitted the port request with Ting.
There's no way to monitor porting progress from the Ting site but after 5 work days Emily got an email notification.
Then as expected, things got a bit wonky. Ting's documentation on the eSIM assignment process is contradictory and didn't match what happened. We got a link to go to, but the link only displayed a blank page. We tried it from both the desktop and from Safari mobile. When I investigated the Ting account however it seemed like her iPhone was activated.
In fact it appears that Ting was using Apple's eSIM Carrier Activation. Under some conditions, presumably including a port, the eSIM can be pushed directly from the carrier to the target device. No customer interaction needed -- despite Ting's reference to QR codes and the like. (Bit unnerving really.)
After confirming the eSIM was on her phone we configured it. There are several options to look at, We configured her Vmail response and tested texting and calling. Everything seemed to be in order.
If you have a GreenLight family debit card and are a US Bank checking customer, you can, in theory, link the GreenLight account to the US Bank checking account and save $72 a year. If you do this you lose some Greenlight features (investing, maybe some others) I don't care about, and after the migration some functions move to the US Bank app:
I got an email about this from US Bank, very thoughtfully clicked the macOS Mail.app email link, clicked Approve on the form ... and nothing happened. Even with popups enabled:
When I migrated from Mojave to Sequoia (with a pause at Monterey I think) I lost the word services I liked. Today I finally investigated and figured out they came from DevonThink's free WordService "app". During the migration they were disabled, so I had to relearn how they work (macOS needs AI for searches of system settings -- because obviously Apple will never do the obvious fixes):
Now go into System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Services > Text and you’ll see several services prefixed with WordService. Enable the ones you’re interested in, e.g., WordService: All Caps. If it’s a command you think you’d use often, you may want to assign a hotkey. Double-click the shortcut field to the right and enter a shortcut for the desired service.
I had to reenable my preferred services. Some of them don't seem to work now but most do. They are big timesavers for me. Reformat is particularly appreciated. From the help file:
A combination of Trim Lines, Remove Line Endings, Remove Multiple Spaces and Remove Quotes preserving paragraphs.
Devon Technologies has several free and valued utilities. I use EasyFind and WordService.
[UPDATE: Simplenote tech support is working on a fix for the bug that manifested with 15.3.1. I have migrated for several reasons so I will stay with Notes. Which has an annoying migration bug with incorrect style assignment by the way.]
Fifteen years ago Simplenote freed me from Outlook Notes. It was one of the last steps in a long and remarkably painful migration from PalmOS to iOS. [1] Prior to that, in 2008 my Palm Notes moved to Toodledo Notebook.
I considered Evernote at the time, but by 2010 I'd learned about data lock and data freedom. I didn't see an easy migration path from Evernote to anything else. Even then I feared products I could not easily leave.
In those days Simplenote didn't have an export facility, but it would sync with Notational Velocity and that stored plain text notes in the file system. They were indexed by Spotlight (when it worked) and even by them there were products that would import those plaintext notes. At worse I would have them in the file system. So Simplenote was my choice.
Later Simplenote introduced support for RTF but I stayed with plaintext. Data portability was the key.
Over time macOS Notes slowly, very slowly, improved. It added import facilities (but not export [3]!). Sync worked, more or less [2]. Meanwhile Simplenote kept working, but their business failed and Automattic bought them -- and kept it running without a business model. But it still worked and I knew there was an exit strategy.
Then yesterday Simplenote's macOS client started crashing for me on Sequoia 15.3.1. I would click on a note and the app would through an exception. 100% of the time. It worked on web and iOS. I tried logging out, deleting their Application Support folder, and a few other measures. Nothing worked. There's no email support or way to submit bugs. They had a forum but it was little used. I learned that the web version no longer supported my Simplenote credentials, instead authentication required mailing me an email code. I'm guessing, in the absence of useful documentation, that I needed to create an Wordpress.com account with the same email address and maybe I'd get access to my notes. I also fond the web app wouldn't work in Safari (redirect to Simplenote app I think).
There were other "red flags", like some erratic behavior by Automattic's CEO, that told me the time had come to leave Simplenote after 15 years of great service for essentially no money (I paid back when you could still do that).
So I got Simplenote's web app working, exported all my notes (still plaintext) as text files, then imported them into Sequoia's Notes app. All 954 notes showed up in the "On My Mac folder" after import. It seemed to take a minute or two for Notes to digest them, but after that I could drag and drop the files into the iCloud notes folder. After a few seconds they appeared there.
I did run into one bug - incorrect Style applied to Note on import. The imported notes appear with Helvetic Regular 10.3 font in Sequoia Notes with the "Body" Style checked in the UI. They are a bit hard to read my Air, but impossible to read on my iPhone.
This isn't the Body style! Despite these being plaintext notes the import tool assigned them an odd style and mislabeled it as "Body". If you use the "Remove Style" option or assign "Body" they revert to the correct default font (System Font, Regular, 13). In practice this is only annoying and when I use a Note I just fix the style as desired. One day I might see if I can automate removing the bad style [4]. (I "submitted" the bug via an Apple Discussion post, which at least gets indexed and AI accessed.)
One nice surprise about the migration is that the export process set "data last modified" in Finder metadata to the date the note was last modified. And on import Notes set it's date modified to the Finder value! One of my oldest notes kept it's modified date of 3/9/2010 (it's actually much older but got that data during a 2010 migration). I did not expect that nice detail.
I may run into other bugs, but for now this was the easiest data migration I've ever done. Praise be to Data Freedom and plaintext!
I'm sad to leave Simplenote; if they had had a subscription plan I'd have paid for the service. It was a great product that worked well for 15 years. AND they had a decent export capability. Thanks to all who made Simplenote work. I will remember it fondly.
- fn -
[1] Few remember, but it took several years for iOS to be as useful as PalmOS had been. There was a gap between PalmOS dying and iOS being functional where I went back to paper for several tasks.)
[2] It's possible to create version conflicts in Notes where the conflict notes stop syncing. There's no error message and sometimes they sort-of merge. We live in fallen times.
[3] There are 3rd party solutions and Shortcut/Automator solutions. Not ideal, but in 2025 we don't get ideal any more.
[4] There's no AppleScript or Automator/Shortcut for changing the formatting or style of text in a note that I found or that Perplexity knows about. I was able to create a script for Keyboard Maestro that lets me remove the style on a selected note with a shortcut keystroke. Of course that does set modified date to today, so keeping the old modified date ends up being a transient benefit.
