Porting a landline number to a secondary Trello eSIM on iPhone with primary AT&T account

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 doesn't ring.

It was on the list of things to replace but lower priority since minimal savings and added hassles.

Then copper wires disappeared everywhere. 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. I think the regulatory/legal frameworks are different. The AIs claim you can't port from CenturyLink VOIP to Google Voice either.

CenturyLink (fiber) will sell us a VOIP phone service for about $30/m. Not the worst option and a savings from $43 though, of course, we have new security system costs.

That leaves the old burner phone solution. 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, 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).

So far, nothing new since 2010 or so. But 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 could instead port it to Emily's iPhone. One less device!

I asked the AIs which had the better customer service among H2O Wireless, Tello, Ting, and Hello Mobile. Tello and Ting won easily, and Ting is rather more expensive. So I chose Tello.

It was surprisingly easy to setup a Tello account. Their account software includes the Quality Seal of Approval - an option to delete the account. Their web UI is clear and clean and is consistent with the AI's recommendation. Their porting directions aren't too bad.

Once you setup your Tello account with payment information the web UI provides an eSIM QR encoded URL and a phone number they choose. Emily's iPhone accepted the secondary eSIM, but to get the full setup questions and configuration you need to restart your phone. 

After you verify texting and voice mail and so is working you start the Port Procedure.

The port procedure needs an account number (on paper bill) and a Transfer PIN (aka Authentication PIN) that CenturyLink provides. Thanks to a separate CL issue with their legacy copper account management I was working with CL overseas chat support and they provided the Transfer PIN. (Otherwise you need to phone CL. Incidentally, the chat support worked around multiple defects in an evidently obsolete CenturyLink web page.)

I'll update this page with what comes next. I'm cautiously optimistic the port will work (CL definitely wants us off that dead copper) and that Emily will have our ancient home number associated with her iPhone for $10/m or so. We'll see how that goes and decide if we want to stay with Tello or port to GV for, at the moment, $0/m.

Move your existing Greenlight account to the free US Bank option: you can't do it on macOS desktop

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:

1. Sending money to "kids" and viewing balance is through the US Bank app.
2. Greenlight app for setting spending limits, managing chores, pay allowance, etc.

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:

I was able to workaround the bug. There are two things I did but I think the big one is the first.

1. I had to click the link in the US Bank mail I received on mobile, not on desktop. I don't think this works on desktop at all! There's no GreenLight desktop access (mobile only), and since the mobile process invokes the GreenLight app I don't see how it would work on desktop even if there wasn't a bug with this form. US Bank contractors coded the page for use on mobile but didn't consider that somebody might click an email link from a desktop app.
2. I thought at first there was a problem because my funding source was already my US Bank checking account. So I switched to using my US Bank debit card and remove the checking account. After I migrated I reversed this. I don't think this was necessary however.

So, basically, I think the GreenLight to US Bank migration is actually mobile only, even though clicking an email link from macOS will initiate the migration in a browser. If I'm right the web page needs to check that it's running on mobile, and display the appropriate error message.

Word Services in macOS Sequoia: reenabling after migration

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.

Managing the incredibly annoying Apple Wallet notifications on Sequoia

I loathe Apple's notifications center on macOS. The notifications constantly get in the way of my work, and the most unstoppable ones are related to Daily Cash and Apple Wallet transactions.

The UI to manage these are obscure.  I'll update this post as a I learn more. (I wouldn't mind macOS Notifications if I could see them only when I clicked on something, the current overlay behavior is infuriating.)

1. On macOS Sequoia: 
• go to Notifications:Wallet and turn off "allow Notifications"
• Notifications:Notification Center: turn off "Allow notifications from iPhone" (I turned everything off)
2. On iOS (iPhone)
• For each card in Wallet tap on ellipsis and turn off Notifications
• Notifications:Notification Center: Change Display to "Count" (I made the all the Notification options as restricted as possible).
• Notifications:Wallet: turn off "Show on Mac".

I'm hoping the above will finally kill Notification Center pop-up notifications on macOS (a typically incompetent Apple UI fail) and the endless Cash/Wallet notifications. Once I get this under control (if that's possible) I will carefully liberalize some of the restrictions starting on the iPhone.

Apple is such a fail whale now.

RIP Simplenote -- data freedom and the painless plaintext migration to Notes

[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.

Creating a macOS Spotlight indexed archive of completed tasks and notes: Microsoft To Do via Outlook.com PDF

I like having local Spotlight indexed "standard" file format archives of completed tasks and calendar items. This is not a popular feature for most people so it's not widely supported. Today I found that this is possible with Microsoft To Do [1] (which replaced old Outlook Tasks).

Microsoft's free To Do.app for macOS has a web store that is shared with Outlook.com (and with Outlook for macOS, but I did not want to install that even though I have a 365 family account).

To Do has no print or archive facility. However Outlook.com does and it shares the To Do sync data. (I think Outlook.com is free for anyone who has a Microsoft ID.)

So:

1. Go to outlook.com and open task list (same Microsoft ID as To Do)
2. View All or Completed or whatever list and click ellipsis to see print
3. When Print choose to include notes. 

I get a multi-MB decently formatted PDF that Spotlight indexes for me.

In the general Outlook.com view has print capabilities the To Do app lacks.

[1] To Do is the only Microsoft product I routinely used. They bought it from somebody a decade or so ago. I could now switch to macOS Reminders but I find it oddly useful to keep Reminders as an aide to my declining short term memory and use To Do for small projects, shopping and so on. I put quite a bit of information in To Do notes and often find value in looking it up.

Migrating my microblog publishing from Pinboard to Raindrop.io

For the past 12 years, following the demise of Google Reader Social, I have used Pinboard (see also) as a core part of my obscure microblog commentary on Twitter, App.net, and Mastodon.  My posts have 3 fields: Title, Link, and Comment. On iOS I use the Pins.app Share Sheet for data entry, optionally edit in Pins.app, and the result is initially published in Pinboard. On the desktop I use a Pinboard bookmarklet to author and I edit in Pinboard.

IFTTT processes the Pinboard RSS feed and posts to my Mastodon instance (via web hook) and to my WordPress blog (kateva.org/sh). Although anyone can follow these posts via RSS from Pinboard or Mastodon or Kateva.org the small number who see them are likely following me on Mastodon. Mostly the posts are for Emily's interests and for my memory. I don't share them to my BlueSky account but I may do a future subset.

It's a kludgy and sometimes fragile workflow but I'm used to it. Alas Pinboard has been in decline for a year or so and around August 2024 it basically died. Maciej Cegłowski has since resurfaced but the service has been up and down and he's been generally unresponsive.

I have identified two replacements: micro.blog and raindrop.io. I chose Raindrop.io as most similar to my prior workflow but micro.blog is my next step.

Today I exported my pinboard content as a JSON feed (52K posts, of which the first few thousand were exports from Google Reader Social) and imported into Raindrop.io with good results. I signed up for the Raindrop.io monthly plan while I see what I can put together. I'll update this post with what I learn.

During this transition there will be some noisiness. Today I forgot to turn off my IFTTT feed and my raindrop.io import started generating kateva.org/sh entries that I had to remove. Eventually I'll remove the Pinboard content and close that account.

I'll update this post with what I learn.

Update 1/6/2025: Things are not looking good

Problems so far:

• Raindrop.io is deprecating RSS features in favor of an API approach and IFTTT integration. But the integration I want is buggy (can't handle URL even though it works with RSS integration) and the mastodon integration is only for one very large instance.
• Raindrop.io fetches a screenshot of the bookmark source to save as persistent artifact. It includes that in RSS as a img tag. For my purposes this is ugly noise in the post.
• Creating a Raindrop.io post from the desktop browser bookmarklet doesn't work well.

I've put in a support request to the Raindrop.io dev but I suspect I'll need to cancel my $3/m subscription. I'll revert back to Pinboard if it's functional again. Next will be a micro.blog evaluation and perhaps publishing in Mastodon with Linky/bookmarklet then using Mastodon RSS to create a kateva.org/sh archive entry.