Why I can finally use Google Voice

I was a beta tester of Grand Central.  It was a great service but one that I could not directly use.  Why? I could not port my number.  Without number porting, I could send calls to my Grand Central account but could not dial out.  In practice, this meant that I would give my friends and family my Grand Central number but if I ever called them back, they would see my cell number provided by my carrier.  This meant that these people would be required to have two numbers for me, which was more work and confusion than I wanted them to bear.  Due to this, my Grand Central account received almost no usage.

Google bought Grand Central in what, about three years later (might be off by a bit), is turning into a prescient move.  Google is slowly but surely making Grand Central (now Google Voice) into the pre-eminent, centralized place for all of my calling that is outside of the carriers control.  This should (and does) scare the carriers.  It is a powerful idea, which will force innovation (avoided like the plague by carriers).  However, Google Voice, despite all the rucus earlier this year when they were slowly opening the beta, changing names and launching their cell phone apps (and being rejected by Apple/ATT), still had the one glaring flaw carried over from Grand Central – number portability (and the subsequent hassle required).

What changed today that incentivizes me to finally use Google Voice?! Enablement of non-Google numbers for usage with Google Voice.  Read about it here, here, and here.  I enabled call forwarding on my cell phone and now all calls that are not answered go to Google voice.  Goodbye Verizon voicemail and hello, in no particular order (since they are all great features, none of them offered by VZ on my phone), my new Google Voicemail: 1. Voicemail transcription, 2. Automatic email of the transcript (plus the voice message), 3. Customized answer messages for different people.

The first two options are great and will now allow me to actually manage my voice messages (instead of listening to each and every saved message to find the one I want).  However, it is the third option (answer messages for different people) that has me the most excited (even though it has the least utility).  I can now make specific messages for my brother, mother, father, girlfriend, boss, friend abc, and so forth.  It is personalized and fun.  This is the wave of the future.  In five to ten years, everyone will be able to customize their voice messages (assuming we are still leaving them).

Thank you, Google, for innovating and pushing the boundaries.  My life just became easier and more fun.

p.s. Google is going to fix the glaring number portability problem.  It is on the way (supposedly sometime soon).

Duplicate Programs in User Folder

The installation of Snow Leopard prompted me to do something semi-dangerous — delete a bunch of duplicate programs.

These duplicate programs resided in my “Users” folder under the folder “Adam” (the other folder is “shared”).  Because I have this inane trust in Apple, I assumed that these programs were supposed to be there and that they were not in fact true duplicates.  I thought that they were just a link to the main file.

I was wrong.

Snow Leopard made me look at my old Mac programs, which I thought would have been deleted during Snow Leopard installation.  The old Mac programs were not deleted.  I copied to new Snow Leopard Mac program version into my “Apple” folder.

I then looked at the “user –> Adam” folder.  All the programs in that file were the older (sometimes much older) version of the most recent version of a given program.  The most up-to-date version of the program resided in my “Application” folder.

I have no idea how these programs came to reside in this location.  I never directed them to install here.  My guess is that they installed in this location at the same time of the original program installation.  As I updated the file that also resided in the “application folder” these files did not change or update.  My assumption (giving Apple the benefit of the doubt) is that these files reside here as a backup in case your main application version becomes corrupted somehow.  This is smart except for one problem — if you do a spotlight search for a program, it is not clear which version is the updated one and you may end up using the older one.  Apple should delineate the the backup file as such.  Of course, this is only speculation.  Maybe this is something that is wrong with my machine.

With that said, I have Time Machine so I deleted away.  I deleted 90% of the programs (about 80 files).  I recovered about 3 gigs of space.  My computer is still running fine without any issues (yet). If you are worried about doing this, don’t worry too much.  No problems here thus far.

Next time I install a file, I will check to see if it copies to the “user –> Adam” folder.

Has anyone else seen this occur?  Is this normal?  Is there a way to turn this off?

Apple Snow Leopard

My Macbook Pro has a horribly small hard drive — 120gb.  With Windows Vista taking up 32 gigs, I was not left with much.  With some music and a bunch of random applications, I was left with little extra space.  As of last week, I had about 3gigs of free space.

When Snow Leopard, the new operating system from Apple, was announced, I was curious.  I am a tech guy so new OS’s interest me.  However, I am not usually one to jump at version 1 of most products.

Snow Leopard promised something that I could not pass up — more free space on my hard drive (8 gigs was promised).  I pre-ordered Snow Leopard via Amazon.  Choosing free super saver shipping, Amazon took exactly 14 days to deliver my item.  Super Saver shipping is never usually that slow (although they claim it could take 10 business days and it did).

I immediately installed Snow Leopard.  My main goal: free up hard drive space.  The installation requires 5 free gigs.  I found some files to move to my external backup drive and had 5.15 free gigs.  Installation proceeded and took a little over an hour.

At the end — 18.5 free gigs.  In other words, Snow Leopard gave me back ~13.5 gigs.  Thank you, Apple.  This one improvement is huge.  [If only MS was promising the same with Windows 7.  My Windows Vista partition is completely out of space -- only 32 megs of space free, seriously].

With a few days of light use, I have only found one major problem with Snow Leopard.  It installed new versions of many the main Mac programs such as Quicktime and iChat.  However, it did not delete the older versions.  This may be due to the fact that I have the older versions in folders other than the “Application” folder.  Either way, I am about to delete the older programs and hope it does not some how corrupt the newer programs (which are clearly using data from the older programs).  Wish me luck.

Side note: my computer seems to run at about the same speed as before.  No changes there but the free gigs are huge.

Happy anniversary Dreamcast

10 years ago today, one of the best game systems of all time launched — Dreamcast.

I was at the midnight launch in Montgomery mall.  The next day, I left for my senior year of high school.

Dreamcast with Soul Caliber and NFL 2k made senior year at boarding school go much more fun (only allowed a TV during your senior year).  No one could beat me at NFL 2k and few could beat me at Soul Caliber.

Once I reached college and the Xbox and Halo launched, I was never that good again (but LAN Halo 1 on your sophomore dorm hall is easily one of the best experiences a person could have).

Who remembers Next Generation Magazine?  I have almost every copy ever made.  I loved it.  It covered the Dreamcast extensively.  Dreamcast was the first and the last system I stood in line to buy.  I still own my DC today and toy with the idea (if I ever could find the time) of setting it back up). Great times.

Happy anniversary Dreamcast.

Why I went back to Firefox — Feedly

In my previous post, I spoke about why I left Firefox for Safari.  The basics — Firefox ran too hot for my liking.  Safari is better optimized for my Macbook Pro.

However, a few weeks ago, I read about a program that has “forced” me to go back to Firefox.  It is called Feedly.  It is an add-on for Firefox.  Scoble and Louis Gray have both spoken about it, which piqued my interest.

What does it do?  Generally, it aggregates all of your feeds and creates a magazine like digest of those feeds.  However, it has another function that makes it worth Firefox abusing my computer’s fans.  Feedly Mini sits at the bottom right hand corner of my Firefox screen.  Feedly Mini essentially turns every web page into a Google referenced page.

What do I mean?  I can share any web page or article that I read through my Google Reader shared items feed.  I can email it using Gmail.  Feedly also ties into some other great web 2.0 programs, which I rarely use.

Feedly is great for me because my reading habits are not just confined to my 250 RSS feeds found in Greader.  I read many other websites such as the Nytimes, Cnet, Techmeme, WSJ, WashPost, etc.  I prefer to read over these general sites because they open me up to greater variety of information than I would otherwise gain from my more directed and specific RSS feeds.  Until Feedly, I was never able to share (and, why I really like Greader, it allows me to save these feeds) the articles that I read outside Greader.  I would read many great articles that were quickly forgotten.

With Feedly, these articles no longer go through my head and then a few days later, leave it.  I have a record of my favorite articles that is kept for posterity (or for however long Google is around).

Feedly is not available for Safari so now I am back as a Firefox user.

Blackberry 8830 versus iPhone (and most other smartphones)

My company gave me a Blackberry 8830 (thank you!).  Despite my pleas, my company is Blackberry only.  However, I thought that since the Blackberry 8830 was a smartphone (and a popular one at that), I would be able to customize it to my heart’s content.  I was wrong.  

As a gadget loving tinkerer, I enjoy finding great new programs for my electronic  toys (i.e. phone and computer).  By great, I almost always mean easy to use, useful, and, most important, free.  Sadly for all the developers out there, I have found almost no reason to purchase most pieces of software.  A legal, free alternative is usually viable and available.  If there is no alternative, I pay but it is rare that I actually need said software enough to buy it.  I just do without.  

Back to the berry — I started finding great programs for my phone.  Many seemed useful and fun.  Of course, the options for the Blackberry 8830 are not as easily found or as good as those for the iPhone.  Despite this fact, I was able to find many things that interested me.  I downloaded them.

I quickly ran into a problem that many Blackberry owners have found — lack of memory = messed up Blackberry.  I soon ran out of memory.  Suddenly, most of my messages, past call history, and other important items were deleted.  My berry took forever to open up programs.  I did not get it.  I added a memory card.  At least in the 8830, memory cards do not actually help in the memory department unless you only want to store photos or music.  All programs are stored on the internal memory.  

What did this mean?  Simple — my smartphone is a lot less smart than the competitors (i.e. iphone).   Besides the normal bberry programs, I have Gmail, Google Maps, Viigo, Beyond411, Wall Street Journal program, and an icon for the New York Times and WashingtonPost.  Anything more and my memory would run out.  

I can somewhat forgive RIM for shipping my phone with such a minimal amount of memory.  However, it is unforgivable on the newer Berrys (such as the Bold and new Curve).  On the new phones, memory cards can store programs but this is still ridiculous.  Memory is very cheap.  For the same price as an 8GB iPhone, you can purchase a Bold.  From a memory and program option perspective, the choice is clear (iPhone).  Obviously, some people love BlackBerrys but if you want programs that make your phone truly smart – an iPhone or any phone with real internal memory is the winner.

Firefox vs. Safari – processor use and overheating computer

Fan noise irritates me.  When I am only running essential programs, there is no reason for me to hear my fan.

What constitutes an essential program: a web browser.  

On my Mac, I have two major options: 1. Firefox, 2. Safari.  Due to all of the extensions and add-ons, I prefer Firefox.  

However, after months of attempting to ignore the fact, I came to the conclusion that Firefox is main reason for my “overheating” computer.  Since a web browser is an essential program, I did a simple test.

I turned on Firefox and Safari.  I opened the exact same web pages on both (3 pages/tabs per browser).  I only had one add-on running (1Password). Using iStat pro, I was able to watch which processes were using what percentage of my processor (lots of p’s in that sentence, phew).  

Firefox consistently used 5-20% more processor power than Safari.  My fans were running ~1000rpm faster with Firefox.    

I still do not like Safari but I prefer a quiet computer over Firefox.  The choice is simple — Safari is my web browser of choice from now on.

As a side note, here are some details about my web use: normal pages that are open: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Google Reader, Pandora.  Some of these might not play nice with one or the other web browser although it is more likely they would not work well with Safari rather than Firefox since FF has a larger user base.  

I also have 4GB of Ram, so that is not the problem.

Slow internet and the culprit – Entourage

Brief summary – entourage slowed down my internet and I could not find a post about this anywhere online.  I hope this helps.  If you don’t want to read the story, scroll to the bottom.

Over the past week, for a reason unbeknownst to me, my internet slowed to a crawl.  By slowed to a crawl, I meant that speedtest.net was showing 999 ping and approximately 200kbps up and 20kbps down — i.e. my Internet was nearly unusable.

I should note that this occurred just after I lectured my parents on the slowly dying need for any specific OS such as Windows Vista or Mac OSX.  I told them that the OS of the future was a web browser and all one would need was access to the an internet connection.  Then my internet…broke.

My first reaction — blame Comcast (my internet provider).  I recently moved and the place where I was using internet has notoriously terrible service.  At my old place, my internet (also from Comcast) was extremely fast and worked without major issues.  My new place — terrible.  I called Comcast cust support and the rep did a few checks and said that I was achieiving 75% data packet loss.  He sounded impressed and admitted that this was “unacceptable.”  I couldn’t agree more.  A technician is on the way.

I now realize that my knee-jerk “blame it on comcast” reaction might have been just that — knee jerk.  I am now at my parent’s place for the holidays.  I started up my computer here and after about 30 seconds, the internet speed dropped from acceptable but not great 1.5Mbps speeds  with 299 ping to 999 ping and the same slow speeds I had at home.  My parent’s confirmed that their internet usually worked well and this new “speed” was not common.

Could my computer somehow be corrupting an internet connection?  Personally, I have never heard of such a thing occurring.  Unless a person was using ungodly amounts of down and upstream data, they should never experience dramatic drops in speed. However, I was experiencing just that epidemic and my computer was clearly somehow at fault (the moment I shut down my computer was the same moment that my parent’s internet sped right back up).   Whoa…stop the presses.  What was going on?

I did a few searches and decided that I had one of three problems: 1. major spyware, 2. my computer was part of a botnet, 3. my computer was doing something that it should not.  Since I have a Mac and keep everything password protected, I felt fairly confident that number 1 was not too realistic.    I dont know much about #2  but thought that it could be possible (although the Mac thing made me wary).  #3 was the most likely.

Unfortunately, I consider myself fairly tech savvy.  I keep my computer clean.  I maintain it (and everyone else’s computers & technological gadgets).  What could be the culprit?

Like any sleuth, I set out to find the problem.  I ran Applejack to clean up everything (caches, etc).  I went through every process in the activity monitor to make sure I knew what it did.  Unfortunately, the problem persisted.

Next step, trial and error with my programs.  Which two do I use most often?  1. Firefox, 2. Entourage.  They usually run all the time, at the same time.  I turned on FF.  Speed was good.  I turned off FF and turned on Entourage.  Speed dropped — FAST.

Success [sort of] — problem identified.  Somehow and for some reason, Entourage was slow my internet to a snail’s pace.  My internet was slow.

Fix — my Entourage has two email accounts — 1. gmail, 2. hotmail.  Gmail was storing thousands of my messages on my hard drive.  I liked my set up even though it took up a lot of disk space.  I was also desperate to fix the problem.  I didnt need those messages on my hard drive.  I did need fast (i.e. usable) internet.

For those who have yet to do this — IN ENTOURAGE, LOCK YOUR SETTINGS TO SAVE ALL THE EMAILS IN THE GMAIL FOLDERS AND NOT LOCALLY.  To do this, go to entourage, account settings, choose gmail, go to the advanced tab, for all of the special folders, choose the [Gmail] folder.  Do the same for the deleted items folder.

My internet is now fast[er] and usable.  My hard drive has a lot more space.  Problem, thankfully, solved.

Why I don’t care about the “Genius” Feature of Itunes 8

I have iTunes 8 and I have a lot of songs.  iTunes new “Genius” feature, where the program is supposed to figure out which songs go together, a-la-Pandora or Last.fm, does not interest me.

Why?  Simple — I never listen to my iTunes songs.  I hate trying to find music that I enjoy or want to listen to right now.  I would rather spend my time reading than finding music.  I know that is just how I work but I am a lazy music-listener.  I want the music I like without the work or hassle.

Now, all of my music listening is done through a) AOL Radio, b) Pandora, C) Last.fm.  These services are similar to many subscription services except they are all free (with some advertisements).

I no longer have any need for ownership of my music.  I am sure that statement would scare the music companies (especially since they are, supposedly, not receiving a “fair” amount for the music that these online stations play — see politics).  That sort of statement has obviously scared Apple (and the Microsoft Zune team), which is why they came up with the “Genius” feature.

The feature is a good idea in concept and should stem some bleeding of users towards these services.  However, if you want to listen to any new music (new being a) anything not in your library or b) recently released), the “Genius” feature still requires work on your part.  You have to buy the music.  With each of these services in my pocket (a la iPod Touch/iPhone) and on my computer, why would I ever need to buy new music and then use Apple’s “Genius?”

Networking Fiend

I moved into a new place in May.  It is a new building and every apartment is wired with CAT5e ethernet [rather than phone lines].  The builder put in telecom routers.  Despite my best efforts, speaking with the ethernet subcontractor and a number of electricians, I could not set up a network. What did I do?

I took down their telecom routers, I cut and crimped my own ethernet wires and then hooked them up to one of the three wireless routers I have in the apt.  I now have a beautifully fast ethernet network (30Mbps down and 2Mbps up).

As one would imagine is required with a good network, here is what I have hooked up to it:

1. Xbox 360

2. Tivo HD (and now have Tivo Connect setup with my network so that I can view my photos and listen to my mp3s).

3. Vonage

4. Wii (using my Tivo’s wireless G network card — I did not think it would work but it did, right away).

5. Old laptop computer, which is hooked up to the TV via S-video (doesnt look great but I am working on that) and using wireless keyboard/mouse.

6. Two other computers hooked up wirelessly.

Phew…