Aperture Tip: ⌘↑ or ⌘↓ will change focus to selected image

You select an image in Aperture, one among thousands. Now scroll up. How do you get back to your selected image? ⌘↑ or ⌘↓ will change focus to selected image.

Google Voice for the home - Obihai SIP/VOIP devices and porting landline number to Obihai/Google Voice.

Obihai Technology is marketing Google Voice use with their Obi VOIP-landline bridge products (SIP & OBiTALK VoIP services, $40 on Amazon).

Unfortunately there’s no way to port a landline number directly to an Obi device. Instead you have to use the T-mobile hack - port to T-Mobile then port to Google Voice (best documentation of this hack I’ve seen by the way). Once you’ve made this irksome port however, you do get to use GV’s great features from a home landline and VOIP. (Compare, however, to mix of GV, Bluetooth, Mobile, landline.)

Alas, the future of Google Voice is problematic — we know it’s going to be replaced by Hangout, but we don’t know what Google Voice features will survive. 

Still, it’s amazing to watch the twisty-turny evolution of voice communication. This is NOT what we expected back in 1994; then we expected voice communication to become essentially “free” by 1998. Remember that the next time someone predicts the evolution of the marketplace based on technological innovation. The market is very good at fighting back - for example. (Use a fax machine lately?)

See also

• Making better predictions 3/2011
• Canopy Economics 5/2004

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.