Navigating AT&T mobile's web site: a cheat sheet

I have a hard time navigating AT&T's mobile site. So I wrote this post to store some of the links I use. I'll update it periodically. Some links may embed one of our phone numbers, so they're not so useful for others.

In general I login first, then copy and paste these links to navigate.

• SMS blocking options, esp. email management
• Data Usage on key number (filter to show text/im)
• Manage/review features: how to see what's currently on your phone. It's not a very useful summary.
• Bill Summary: includes current charges
• Device Management: change wireless number ($36), reset voicemail password, suspect/reactivate, unblock SIM card
• Send a text message (free to send, is sent from own number)
• Marketing preferences: turn off spam from AT&T and "partners"
• User Information: including link to customer service summary, contract and contract end date
• Support: 611 from phone (best) or live chat agent or phone support

Google results 100% ads?!

I did a search on "open source document management".

My result page was 100% advertising.

I've never seen this before. I'm hoping it's a bug of some kind. I tried opting out of Google personalized ads to see if that helped. Next up I'll just block every advertiser on the page using Ad personalization.

iOS Restore problems: App Sync failure and missing Google Contacts

Fresh off discovering iOS Restore problems with In-App purchases and video podcasts I was called in to help a friend transition from two 3GS to two 4S iPhones.

He had a different set of problems, some familiar, some weird, some new to me:

• When restoring Mail, Calendar and Contacts from Google Active Sync, the best option is to delete the Google account and restart. I've run into this several times, and reentering a password on a restored Google Active Sync (Exchange) data set works about half the time.
• He ran into a real mess with AppleID vs. me.com ID. I think he'd started out with one Apple ID (Store Preferences) on his iPhone, then switched to another. As a result he had apps on his iPhone that no longer matched his iPhone Apple Store ID. They'd run, but they wouldn't sync to the desktop or the Cloud. When we did a restore they were gone. There's no way around this; he either has to switch to his old ID (but it's lost) or repurchase the apps that were owned by the lost ID. Yech.
• He and his wife share one instance of iTunes, but their apps have different Apple Store IDs. This can be done, but it requires a mixture of Cloud and iTunes sync. Double Yech.
• To enable email delete on Gmail with Mail.app delete, we had to rediscover the insanely obscure m.google.com/sync setting that makes Gmail behave like a rational piece of software.

Those are the familiar bugs. Yes, Apple Store IDs and App DRM are a mess. Apple isn't a genius every day of the week.

The weird bug was, I think, a Google bug. After we reentered his Google credentials and synchronized, we found several missing entries in his Phone shortcuts. That's because the Contacts were missing. After a few cycles of removing/restoring Contacts Sync I could see the missing entries varied.

Turns out that Google was giving us exactly 100 out of 216 contacts; but the 100 varied. It seems Google was throttling the phone update.

Maybe if we'd waited a while we'd have gotten the rest. Instead I changed Sync from Push to Manual. Tried a few manual updates to no effect, then switched back to Push and we had all 216. A real pain, and I found zero hits on this problem. (Now there is one.)

The iOS user experience could use some work. In particular, the Backup story is pretty feeble.

Start Chrome using a specified "user profile".

I love Chrome's Multiple User feature - aka Identity Management in the G+/Facebook era.

 It's why I switched from Safari to Chrome on OS X. I have a profile for

• My TrueSelf that only a few shall know.
• John (Kateva) Gordon
• My corporate self

I also have profiles I use when I'm assuming my children's identity (ex: Facebook monitoring). All the Profiles sync through Google Cloud including bookmarks, passwords, extensions and so on. So I use the same Profile everywhere.

Even in Darkness, Google does some things well.

I switch my three primary profiles all the time. That's how I know the great weakness of the current implementation. The Profile Google gives me is never the one I want. I frequently have to switch identities, which opens a new window, then hunt that window down ... Meanwhile, the original Window hangs on.

I want some shortcuts that will take me directly to the Profile I want. In both Windows (easily) and Mac (comand line), there are ways to do that as described in SuperUser and Quora:

• How do I start Chrome using a specified "user profile"? - Super User
• Is there a way to create shortcuts for a direct access to a user's profile in the new Google Chrome? - Quora

This is top-secret stuff, these parameters don't show up on the most popular listing of Chrome command line options. 

The command line parameters are of the form:

• chrome --profile-directory="Profile 1" -> Kateva
• chrome --profile-directory="Profile 2" -> Corporate
• chrome --profile-directory="Default" -> Personal

They match the directory names shown in (Win) C:\Users\[userid]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data.

I've created a Windows shortcut for each Profile, now I have to give them unique icons.

iOS Backup and the Cloud: Problems with Restore

After the 5.1.1 update my son's iPhone developed a crash habit. One photo in particular triggered an immediate restart on editing. Perhaps an iOS bug, maybe another problem. I did a full Restore, which means a backup then wipe then reinstall then restore. That didn't fix the bug, so we deleted the problem image.

That's not what I'm writing about though. During the Restore cycle we ran into some newer limitations with iOS backup. These included:

• His Pocket God Comics, which are in-app purchases, were not backed up - contrary to Apple's iOS backup document. We were able to re-download them from within the Pocket God app; but that process appeared to rely on Pocket God and its Cloud servers.
• His video podcasts vanished. We sync through iTunes though, not the Cloud, and they were still in iTunes and could be restored. Some of them aren't available from the Cloud any more.

I don't think there are any workarounds for these problems. Apple could fix this; in the Jobs era it's the kind of thing that tended to get his peripatetic attention. I doubt they will, but I'd be happy to be wrong.

My only recommendation is to distrust the Cloud, and avoid in-app purchases whenever possible. If you are using something that's Cloud dependent you don't own it -- and you don't even rent it. At best you have a fuzzy claim to occasional use that might be revoked at any time.

Mac: how to make a server photo screen saver work

I wanted to share a common set of screen saver slide show images across 3 of our Macs. First I put them an old G5 with abundant storage. It seemed to work, but if there was any interruption of our wifi network other machines couldn't reconnect. (Disregard the marketing. Wifi is much slower and much less reliable than wired.)

So I put them on our Time Capsule NAS share. That worked, but if a client logged out or a machine restarted the share wasn't remounted.

Sigh. OS X Networking is reliably disappointing. I remember network shares being more reliable in 10.3, and that using a share shortcut mounted the share. Certainly shares worked better in MacOS Classic (albeit a lot more slowly).

What seems to help is mounting the share on startup by adding it to one or more user's login items. After this the screen saver image slide show survives a restart.

(There are ways to mount drives on boot for all users with vifs.app editing of etc/fstab, but it looks risky to me and I read reports of "finder problems".)

iOS In App Purchases - they're not backed up

I restored an iPhone from backup -- and discovered at least In-App Purchases don't restore automatically.

I'm now downloading the set from within the app.

It's a pain to do this across all "In App" purchases. I'm surprised there aren't more complaints about the in-app purchasing system; to me it's a big regression from the original App Store model.