Sunday, August 02, 2009
After the battle: The improved Google Voice Web App
Barring successful FCC arm twisting, Google Voice customers must use the mobile web app with the iPhone.
The good news is it's much better than the last time I looked at it. In my testing today it was very responsive. In fact, it was faster to use for placing a call to Canada than GV Mobile, the native app I've been using.
The GV web app follows RESTful principles, so I save a phonetop bookmark for a specific call. In my case, I can create a bookmark that takes me directly to the call setup for my regular Canada call.
To complete my regular long distance call I tap the bookmark, tap the "call" button (or SMS) then choose the calling number (defaults to my mobile) then tap call. I tried saving the last screen so it would be a 2 tap operation but it didn't work. So it's 3 taps, but it's significantly faster than using GV Mobile (but not quite as quick as using the long defunct GrandDialer).
It's not nearly as good as the dedicated iPhone app we aren't going to get, but for my purposes it's pretty decent. Note phone search only returns Google Contacts with a phone number.
OS X Tip: Open all windows from the dock
Friday, July 31, 2009
In Our Time - how to subscribe to the podcasts
- Go to the iTunes Store. Find the search box and enter "In Our Time". Pick the icon that says "In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg".
- Go to the BBC podcasts page for IOT and click on the iTunes icon.
- The original page with archives (RealAudio, yech).
- The aforementioned podcast page.
- The new page with links to the above two.
Better Byline: Add a post to twitter button
I like the iPhone’s Byline Google Reader client and I like how it works with Google Reader Shared items (my shared item feed, standard view).
My Shared Items are all searchable, they're a collection of things I found interesting. Google records what I like and share, and it helps build their search network. Lastly any interested person can subscribe to my shares and add their own.
That's great, but there's one missing piece. Byline could fill it in perfectly -- or a competitor could do it and challenge Byline's supremacy.
The missing piece is Twitter. I don't do or get much from Twitter -- I prefer blogs. I wouldn't mind experimenting more though; "tweeting" on topics I find interesting. I'm not going to give up my Shared Item workflow to do that however. If only I could have everything ...
Happily, I could. Byline could add a button that would take my Byline Shared Item comment and post it as a tweet along with a shortened url pointing to the feed item. I could tap one button to Tweet my comment, another to post the same comment to Google Reader shared items. Tags would get hash marks in Twitter, labels in Google Reader.
Win win, and a big win for Byline. Or someone else who wants to challenge them ...
(This idea is hereby offered free of charge to the public domain -- so no stupid patents but anyone can use it.)
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Buying my Chrome OS (XP) Netbook
Apple saved me some money the other day.
Apple persuaded me that I should forego a MacBook Air or new MacBook in favor of a netbook running Google Chrome atop creaky old Windows XP.
I thought of waiting for Windows 7, but then reality spoke up. Regardless of what anyone might say, I know that Windows 7 won’t really work on a paltry Netbook. In any case Microsoft will pull XP from the market, jack up the price of the OS, and try to push everyone to high end machines (Ballmer has said as much publicly).
Makes more sense for me to buy an XP Netbook before Win 7 comes out, and just run Chrome and Windows Live Writer. It will be my preview version of Chromestellation.
I’m going to need a companion data service, but I’ll add that as a dongle or use the Verizon MiFi (No love for AT&T here) …
… the Novatel MiFi 2200, available from Verizon starting in mid-May ($100 with two-year contract, after rebate). It’s a little wisp of a thing, like a triple-thick credit card. It has one power button, one status light and a swappable battery that looks like the one in a cellphone. When you turn on your MiFi and wait 30 seconds, it provides a personal, portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot…
…The MiFi gets its Internet signal the same way those cellular modems do — in this case, from Verizon’s excellent 3G (high-speed) cellular data network. If you just want to do e-mail and the Web, you pay $40 a month for the service (250 megabytes of data transfer, 10 cents a megabyte above that). If you watch videos and shuttle a lot of big files, opt for the $60 plan (5 gigabytes)…
…If you type 192.168.1.1 into your Web browser’s address bar … the MiFi’s settings pages magically appear. Now you can do geeky, tweaky tasks like changing the password or the wireless network name, limiting access to specific computers, turning on port forwarding …
…The MiFi recharges from a wall outlet; it still works as a hot spot while it’s plugged in…
With the MiFi you can get your App Store-plagued iPhone off AT&T’s dying data network.
So, which Netbook to buy? Here Amazon, as usual, is my friend. The #1 seller in Amazon’s netbook category is the $380 ASUS Eee PC 1005HA-PU1X-BK 10.1-Inch Black Netbook (with $20 for an upgrade to 2GB)
Display: 10.1-inch 1024x600 LED-Backlit Widescreen LCD (Color-Shine/Glossy Screen Technology) Intel CPU: Intel Atom N280 Wireless Data Network: WLAN: 802.11b/g/n (draft 2.4GHz n) & Bluetooth V2.1 + EDR Camera: 1.3M Pixels Audio: Stereo Speakers, High-Definition Audio CODEC, Digital Array Microphones Storage Cards: 2-in-1 MMC, SD(SDHC) flash card slot Input/Output: 1 x VGA connector, 3 x USB 2.0 ports, 1 x LAN RJ-45, 2 x audio jacks: Headphone & Mic-in Dimensions: 10.31 (W) x 7.01 (D) x 1.02~1.44 (H) inches Weight: 2.81 lbs (with battery)
Or what about the Acer Aspire One for $300? That one also comes with an evil AT&T service plan option (integrated 3G dongle) …
To be updated with my purchase decision …
Update 7/31/2009: In response to a provocative comment, I clarify my perspective on the logic of AT&T/Apple's actions.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Notice you're not getting any voice mail messages on your iPhone?
AT&T Is A Big, Steaming Heap Of Failure
... the most recent AT&T failure is completely inexcusable. Its visual voicemail system — which is the only way to be notified of voicemails on the iPhone — has been down for many users for days, if not weeks. And AT&T apparently didn’t bother to tell anyone...I just tested, it's working in Minneapolis St Paul. In general though our AT&T network is not as lousy as many other cities.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Fixed: My iMac was losing net access – but only for one account …
Some days, I feel like the aging Sheriff in a bad western. The bad bugs been walkin’ into my town for years, and I’ve been shooting ‘em down.
‘Cept I’m not as fast on the draw as I used to be, and the bugs are getting meaner. Sooner or later the bad guys are gonna take this town – unless a new Sheriff comes along.
Not today though. I dropped the latest bastard. It took a few shots though. Not a clean kill.
I’ll tell the story, but first some background. I’ve been weeding my network for months, dealing with a slew of problems that seemed to be software related but were probably more hardware.
I’ve replaced the NIC on my old XP box and an ancient AirPort Extreme. I worked my way through way too many AirPort Time Capsule issues with cobbling together 802.11b,n,g across multiple devices, but it seemed I had things fairly stable.
Wrong. I’d be working away happily, and my browser sessions would hang. Sort of. Well, actually, Safari would first give me weird error messages about being unable to obtain a secure connection “Safari can’t establish a secure connection to the server...”. Firefox said something similar, though sometimes it would work when Safari wouldn’t.
A little bit later though, I’d lose all browser access.
At first I wanted to blame my DSL provider (Qwest), but I’d given them a hard time when the truth was my AirPort was dying. So I decided to be a bit methodical. It took a while but I found …
- Other machines were fine.
- Other accounts on my iMac were fine.
- I could ping things, I could do email, I just couldn’t use my browser.
- When Safari died completely, no other browser worked (Firefox, Camino).
- Sometimes logging out and in again would fix things, sometimes restarting the machine, sometimes restarting the Time Capsule …
So it was something to do with my user account and maybe with Time Capsule. My next step was to enable logging on the Time Capsule and to learn to use the OS X Console (equivalent of XP Event Viewer).
That was a revelation. There were lots of little system problems showing up in Console. As it turned out, I had to clean them out before I could find the real problem. So I fixed a MobileMe related bug, removed 2-3 Widgets [2] and learned about MenuCracker and cleaning that out [1], but I was still getting locked out.
Once I’d cleaned up the other Console messages though, I found the sweet one ..
7/22/09 10:50:13 PM com.apple.familycontrols 7470 failed to send kill to 7714. Err:3 No such process
Ahh, yes. Parental Controls, the bane of Apple. Of course my standard user account shouldn’t have Parental Controls, but this made sense. I use Parental Controls and the kids machine and I know how they work, they could cut off my browser access – though there’s supposed to be a UI notice.
I checked the PreferencePane for the problem account from my Admin account, but there seemed to be no Parental Controls set. On the other hand, when I viewed the Parental Controls Preference Pane I wasn’t seeing the big yellow icon and the notice that “Parental controls are turned off for this account”.
So here’s where things get even more obscure. Let’s say you have a User Account and you want to remove Parental Controls. Just enabling everything isn’t enough, there’s another mysterious step.
Here’s what you do
- Log out of all accounts.
- Go to an Admin account
- Go to Parental Controls
- Click on the (problem) User Name.
- Look carefully for a small gear icon above the lock icon, window bottom\
- Click on the gear and choose “Disable Parental Controls …”
It’s been several days now without browser failure, so it looks like I got another bad guy.
If only I knew this one was the last …
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[1] It’s a hack that allows apps to put an icon in the Finder title bar; it’s not a separate app, it’s a “.menu” resource in the Application Package. If you decide you want to get rid of it, you have to find and uninstall every app that uses it, such as, in my case, MenuMeter. I don’t think MenuCracker was causing me serious problems, but it was producing Console error messages and it has caused grief to some in the past. I not only removed it, I removed Perian and a “Better Finder” Preference Pane. Trying to get simple …
[2] I was surprised by this. Looks like non-Apple widgets are problem prone, I’m sticking the Apple ones – don’t really use them anyway. In particular, I was surprised how many were active in the background – putting error messages on the Console …