Wanted - a way to make an old style landline work over a cellular connection.

My 93 yo father is a resident of a Canadian Veterans long term care facility. He’s doing pretty well there, but it’s a bugger to reach him. Their landline costs are very high, and installation seems to take eons. Vets who can use a cell phone are fine, but that’s hard for him.

What I need is a cell phone that looks and acts like this phone:

I’m sure they make these for the China market, they’ve turned everything into a cell phone.

The closest I can find in the US market is the Panasonic Link2Cell Phone (note, however, complex compatibility grid.pdf - 3GS is borderline).

I could put an old iPhone in his room, leave it permanently plugged in and maybe this would work. It’s pretty complicated though he has used similar devices. (I think these are sold to people who  get rid of their landline and transfer the landline number to a cheap cell, but want to share a home phone.)

I fear what I really want is only sold in China  It’s either mobile that looks just like old red except that it has a plug rather than a phone cable, or it’s a bluetooth device that fools an old style phone into thinking it’s on a phone line.

Update: I found a few other options…

• Amazon.com: Xtreme Technologies Xlink BT Bluetooth Gateway: This should work with the red touchtone phone! So it seems ideal. More here
• eBay has some that look like they might be out of China
• The Clarity-Sempre is a very interesting device for extending a cell phone for an elderly person, but it’s $290 here — cheaper on Amazon. More discussion of Sempre’s alternatives here, the BT914 is much more senior friendly that the Panasonic.
• Cobra PhoneLynx is $20 - on Amazon.
• Obihai sells a solution made up of their Obi202 and a simple bluetooth adapter.
• In Canada, Fido, an MVNO sells this service for $30/month

Mac 2014 - I go into full Windows XP mode

I bought a Panasonic 8086 in 1986. Over the next 30 years I’d often use a Mac (Classic) at work or school and sometimes at home — but DOS/Windows and OS/2 were my primary environments.

That was not a pleasant time. The one happy memory I have is DOS 3.1 zooming on a 80386. Otherwise the Wintel world was a long, hard, slog. I bought an iBook in 2002, and a couple of years later we went all Mac. I’ve never regretted that — though I’ve written hundreds, maybe thousands, of posts about Apple bugs and issues.

You can guess where this is going. In 2014 the Mac feels a lot like Windows in 2002. iTunes 12 is a widely recognized disaster and iOS 8 is little better. The modern Mac doesn’t do nearly enough to diagnose and expose issues in our increasingly complex hardware environments. Every OS X version since Snow Leopard has been a regression.

It’s taken a while to get my head around this. Until last Friday I was in denial. Today, though, today all my XP experience came back to me. 

I’m now treating my OS X and iOS devices the way I used to treat Windows XP machines. 

I’ve configured Mavericks to restart at 6am daily. No more running weeks without a reboot.

I’ve configured mosts of our iOS devices to backup to iCloud and I no longer use a USB hub to charge iOS devices and sync to iTunes [2]. I bought a Brooks endorsed6 port Photive 50W USB charger and most of my devices now sync there. All this is to minimize interactions with iTunes and my iMac.

I’ve also removed Launchbar. I’ve used that utility for about 10 years, but, honestly, I never mastered it and it uses a huge amount of system memory. I can do most of what I need using Spotlight. No more TSRs.

For the few iOS devices I’m still syncing to iTunes I’m using Apple cables directly connected to a single USB port. 

Now to wait and see if Apple reboots itself. Otherwise, it’s gonna be XP for all of us … forever …

- fn -

[1] A very cheap passive USB 3 way splitter picked lets one port charge Fibit, bike lights and other oddball devices when needed. The other 5 ports are all for iDevices — we have nine currently.

[2] I’ve used a Plugable USB 2.0 10 port hub for about 2 years to simultaneously sync and charge, The power supply output says 5V and 2.5 Amps, that would be about 12.5W — but maybe it gets useful power from the iMac’s USB port. An iPhone charger supplies 5W, so I’ve been making a 12.5W-20W device do the work of a 60W device. I’m surprised it still runs.

Blogger's internal search is now very broken

I tried a search from Blogger’s web view. it returned 19 posts, the oldest from 2009. Using other methods it’s easy to find results back to 2003.

I don’t know when this stopped working, but Google turned off its Blog Search a few months ago.

I’ve been running a microblog on WordPress for a few years, but I’d put off migrating my primary blogs. Blogger has been a very reliable service — especially because Google largely leaves it alone. I guess I have to stop putting off the inevitable. This is gonna hurt.

Cancel Videotron internet service for a parent

My mother lived in Pointe Claire and received internet service through Videotron, a Quebec ISP. To cancel you have to call 1-888-433-6876 and have your name on the service. In our case my mother had passed, so a phone call from her would be supernatural.

I’d maintained her service, so I had her user name/password. Videotron’s web site doesn’t support canceling their service, but they do support adding a name to the service. I did that to add my name and contact information; then I was able to call and cancel. 

Cancellation went quickly once I mentioned she’d died. They need her cable modem and power supply back within 1 week or they’ll charge us $69, when it’s returned we have to provide her account number.

Custom search engine for Apple Aperture photo management

I’ve created a Google custom search engine for Aperture.

Aperture: Find in Project will show empty project if there's a search filter on project

Aperture allows you to filter projects in the Library tab by substring. It also lets you search for a photo by name, and from the photo you can find the enclosing project.

However, if there’s a filter in Library that doesn’t match the container project, you’ll get an empty project. Kind of worrisome — you might think your Library is corrupted. Clear the Library filter and you’ll see the project.

It’s a bit of a minor bug really. Aperture should probably give an error message, like “clear Library filter to view project”.

How to buy an xbox 360 skyrim add-on for your kid

It’s kind of nuts that I’m writing this, but Google didn’t have an answer when I asked “How do I buy an xbox 360 skyrim add-on for my son?”

Seems obvious right? But I couldn’t find any documentation. I figured I’d need an identity (“account/profile”) and I’d have to associate a credit card, and I knew each xbox user had a local identity and an optional xbox live/microsoft identity, but that’s about as far as it went. I didn’t know if purchases were associated with a console or an identity; Microsoft’s DRM docs suggested purchases went with a profile - which is wrong for skyrim add-ons.

Briefly, this is what I did. I’m sure there are ways to do it all from the Console, but if you try that be sure you connect a USB keyboard first. Trying to do data entry from the xbox controller will drive an old person (> 18y) mad. Also, if you get d0000034 when you try to buy add-ons from within Skyrim it’s just Microsoft’s brilliant way of telling you that you don’t have an XBOX/Live account/profile.

1. Go to https://account.xbox.com and login if you have a Microsoft ID (I have one from Passport/Hotmail days) [1]. If you don’t, create one.
2. Add your credit card information and then buy your skyrim add-on purchases. In another purchase I had to buy a "Game", that required me to click a download to 360 button after purchase.
3. On your xbox console login with the profile you created, you'll want to plug in a USB keyboard to make entering your password less painful. Press the xbox control silver central button to see profile associated menu that shows downloads. The downloads window can take a  long time to appear (shows empty white screen) and downloads may be slow.
4. After the download completes it should be available to all users of the console.  I’m not sure what happens if you are logged into more than one console at the same time. This is the language skyrim shows at purchase time:
   "The item you are buying is subject to usage restrictions. You can use this item on the first Xbox 360 console that you download it with. Access to this item will also be granted to all users on this first console. If you transfer the item using a memory unit or other storage device, you will also be able to use it on other Xbox 360 consoles, but you’ll need to sign in to Xbox Live with your Xbox Live account on that console before accessing the item."

I recommend not saving your profile password to the xbox, unless you, for example, trust your kids.

[1] If you had a profile on the xbox already associated with your Microsoft ID, you’ll see that here. However, if you decide to use this UI to change your gamertag, the profile on the xbox will lose its relationship to the xbox profile. Evidently the ‘key’ is the gamertag rather than the Microsoft account. Yeah, Microsoft is just like it always was.