Tags:
iPhone
I
can admit it now - I actually do sleep with my iPhone. I didn't in
the beginning, but my wife once caught us in bed together. I was
just reading a book with Stanza,
that's all. Then, while we don't watch TV in bed very often, we started
having trouble with our TiVo remote in the bedroom controlling the TiVo
downstairs so I bought DVR
Remote so I could control the
TiVo with my iPhone via my wireless network. So that was another
excuse for my iPhone and me to spend more time together.
The final straw, though, was this week
when I loaded up the Sleep
Cycle alarm clock. I generally
don't need an alarm clock but this thing tracks your sleep cycles and displays
them in a very cool graph so you can see how well you've slept (a bit more
accurately than just how you feel the next day.) It has been fascinating
to watch the effects of the stress of some major home renovations, client
issues, and the occasional glass of wine. Sleep Cycle works by sensing
motion in the bed with the very sensitive iPhone accelerometer. Of
course in order for it to work the iPhone has to sit on the corner of your
mattress by your pillow. It is amazing how accurate it seems to be.
So yes, I have been sleeping with my
iPhone. And I'm not going to stop!
Tags:
Computers
I
woke up around 5 AM this morning, which really isn't all that unusual.
After failing to fall back to sleep I grabbed my iPhone sitting on
my night table just to see if any interesting e-mail came in overnight.
Nothing much, but one of my clients' servers had a memory issue that
really could have used a reboot. This is a lumber yard and I knew
they open early on Saturday so I figured no time like the present. I
fired up LogMeIn
Ignition on my iPhone and tried
to connect to the server. As much as I love LogMeIn sometimes it
has issues and today it was still snoozing while my iPhone and I were awake.
Plan B was Mocha
Remote Desktop, another great
iPhone application. Plan C would have been secure VNC through SSH
tunneling with iSSH
but I didn't need to go there. Since plan B got me in I quickly rebooted
the server and tried to go back to sleep. Meanwhile my iPhone got
a couple alerts that the server was down and then back up 5 minutes later.
Then I remembered that sometimes one of the Spector
360 services doesn't always start
up, so I went back to plan A, LogMeIn, which worked this time, and quickly
scrolled through to start the sticky service. Then we went back to
sleep. Well, I did eventually. My iPhone got a few more e-mails.
That thing really needs to rest sometime.
Tags:
Hardware
A
few years ago I opened up a new bank account because I was annoyed at some
of my long-time bank's policies (but that's a whole 'nother story.) I
just happened to walk into the bank when they were giving away free 4GB
iPod Mini's (2nd generation.) My lucky day. At first I didn't
even know what to do with the thing, but eventually I ended up putting
all my MP3's and CDs on it and letting it live in my vehicle. It
worked great. For my current vehicle I bought a device that lets
me connect both the iPod and my Sirius satellite radio and even control
the iPod via my steering wheel controls. Bliss.
But eventually the iPod started having
trouble. It would be OK for a while, then suddenly it would reset
itself. Instead of picking up where it left off randomly playing
my songs it would start over at the beginning, playing them in artist order.
Unfortunately that meant I heard Lesson 1 of Pimsleur
Portuguese over and over. Yeah,
that got annoying. One fix seemed to be setting an alarm on the iPod
so it would wake up every day at 7 AM and not go into the "deep sleep"
that caused the reset. That worked for a while, then it started happening
again. I figured that it could be the battery finally giving out
and thought I'd need to get a new iPod.
Not so fast, though. While it
seemed that there was not a user-serviceable battery at first it turned
out that you actually CAN take the iPod apart and install an after-market
battery, which I was able to find online for only about $6. Nice!
It was a little tricky to take the iPod apart but with a little patience
and some very small screwdrivers I got it eventually, popped in the new
battery, and away we go. Or not...
Somewhere along the way I seem to have
broken the click wheel. Or the cable connecting the click wheel to
the motherboard. Not good - I couldn't control the iPod. And
even hooking up to the vehicle control wasn't enough. I could start
and stop, but I couldn't get the iPod to play all the songs randomly, which
is what I want. Occasionally I want to play a specific song, too,
and I couldn't do that. Rats.
Back to the Internet and I found people
selling click wheels and ribbon cables. It seems like a common part
to break when replacing the battery. Prices ranged from about $8
to $25, both new and used. I opted for the $8 new wheel.
And voila - after carefully taking everything
apart again (this being about the 5th or 6th time now!) I was able to install
the new click wheel, along with the new battery. And it worked! Now
I'll just have to see if I get Portuguese lessons on the way to a client
tomorrow morning...
Tags:
Software
So
yesterday a colleague of mine and I set out to build a couple of servers
- one for him, one for one of my clients. Pretty basic boxes with
Gigabyte motherboards, AMD processors, gobs of RAM and hard drive space.
We're using Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) as the host and VirtualBox
to run virtual servers.
So we get the machines built and start
installing Ubuntu with RAID1. It's not a straightforward install
but I've done it before and found some good resources. We're both
partitioning our drives and marking one bootable. Or rather, I am.
The text-based alternate installer just won't let Rob flip the bootable
flag on his. Mine works fine, his just won't go. We try 3 other
versions of Ubuntu, all with the same results.
OK, let's recap - similar (I know, not
EXACTLY the same but really close) hardware, same software, two completely
different results. Some web searches find one complaint with the
same problem but no solutions. Great. This is why we have grey
hair.
Ultimately he ended up installing the
LILO bootloader while I stuck with the more standard GRUB. Both of
our machines are working now and we'll probably never know why he had the
hiccup. Meanwhile, I have another machine that just won't take the
latest VirtualBox upgrade. The one that should fix the bug that's
plaguing one of my networks. Sigh...
Tags:
Avionics
Everything
aviation related is expensive. I once bought a flashlight worth over
$30. Except that I bought it from an astronomy website and paid only
about $12. When I bought my Grumman Tiger I invested in a lot of
new avionics. Very expensive, new avionics. The old stuff that
I ripped out of the plane has been sitting in a box in the attic ever since.
My wife wanted to throw the junk away but I kept it. And just
a few minutes ago I realized with some shock how much this old stuff is
worth on eBay - it's nuts. Sure, it pales in comparison to the cost
of the new avionics, but since my ELT apparently just gave up the ghost
all this old stuff may pay for a pretty good chunk of a new one. For
starters, the very old Narco NAV 121 that I pulled out to make room for
a $10,000+ GPS looks like it might still be worth almost $1000! Who
knew...? Gotta love eBay. I have some work to do now.
Tags:
Telephony
I've
been playing around with Google
Voice for a while now. I
haven't decided exactly how to best make use of it though. My main
phone system is an Asterisk version called PBX in a Flash, which I've written
about before. I've played around with connecting Google Voice to
Asterisk but outgoing is currently not working. Incoming comes to
a trunk I set up specifically for Google voice and goes right to my extension,
bypassing my IVR (auto-attendant..) There is also a great application for
it on the iPhone (although you have to be jailbroken to use it.)
But this post isn't about all that.
This is about my 12-year-old daughter who said she downloaded a free
ring tone and ended up getting on some $10 premium messaging scam. Now
both she and my 15-year-old son have Google Voice numbers that point to
their cell phones. Not that they do this often, but if they ever
need to give out a phone number for any reason, other than kids at school,
they can use their Google Voice number and keep their real phone number
hidden, definitely a good security screen.
As for my usage? I don't know
yet what I'm going to do with Google Voice. Do you use it?
Tags:
Support
My
new Help
Desk went live today. As
per usual I've been looking for a good help desk system but haven't been
able to find anything that I've been really happy with. So I built
it from the ground up in Lotus Notes. The new Help Desk will assist
in easily submitting new issues as well as managing and tracking open issues.
On the back end, it will be integrated with my contact management
system, the Good
Management System, an older version
of which is available on OpenNTF
(yeah, that REALLY needs to be updated as the version on OpenNTF has some
known bugs and issues.) I had been using Spiceworks in a few clients
but while Spiceworks is pretty slick, the interface is slow and the help
desk functionality couldn't be tied into a master database, which is really
what I need to manage everything.
If you have an issue that needs support,
simply go to my website, www.goodcomputerguy.com,
click on "Help Desk" in the top menu, then "Submit a ticket."
You will immediately receive an confirmation e-mail with your ticket
number and a link back to the ticket. Save that e-mail as that is
the easiest way to get back to your ticket online.
You can update your open ticket at any
time by clicking on the link in the e-mail as well. Any updates by
me to your ticket will instantly notify you by e-mail. If you lose
the e-mail with your ticket number, simply go back to the Help Desk and
click on "Resend existing ticket(s) via e-mail" to get a new
message with all of your tickets. Regular rates apply. If you're
on a Good Service Plan, many items may be included. If you have a
pre-paid block of hours then those may be used.
In addition to creating the Help Desk,
I needed a way to let all of my current contacts know about it. But
I didn't just want to send out an e-mail blast blind copying everyone.
To be a responsible e-mailer I needed to include a link for anyone
who wanted to be removed from my e-mail list. So I built both an
e-mail blaster and an unsubscribe application, both in Lotus Notes, too.
I suppose I should put those on OpenNTF, but I started getting lazy
and hard-coded some stuff in there (bad, bad programmer!) So far
the e-mail blaster worked fine and only one person has unsubscribed from
my updates (oh well.)
Tags:
Lotus Domino
I
upgraded my Lotus Domino server recently and realized that I have a complaint.
There's not enough time to make and drink a cup of coffee during
the upgrade. Seriously, try it. Better yet, try that with any
competing product. I continue to be amazed at what an amazing product
Lotus Notes/Domino is. I continue to be more amazed at what a lousy
job IBM has done to market it since oh, I don't know, 1995? I think
I'll go grab another cup of coffee and upgrade another Domino server.
Tags:
iPhone
I
could have sworn that I tried to do this when I first got my iPhone and
failed for part of it. Sure, iPhone Visual Voicemail is great an
all, but it's not useful for me as I want all my voicemail in the same
place. My voicemail is recorded on my Asterisk server, then delivered
to me via e-mail. You may also want to use this if you have Google
Voice and want to have your voicemail end up there (transcribed) instead.
So anyway, the missing links:
To Activate Call Forwarding...
...If Busy (this is when you
are dialing, etc, not when you are actually talking on the phone, if you
have call waiting): *67*hone number to forward to, then hit "Call."
...If Not Answered: *61*hone number
to forward to, then hit "Call."
...If Unreachable: *62*hone number
to forward to, then hit "Call."
To Deactivate Call Forwarding...
...If Busy : #67#
...If Not Answered: #61#
...If Unreachable: #62#
Tags:
Internet
I
just got a ping from a friend who I'm meeting for lunch from Hey
Where Are You (HeyWAY), an iPhone
location app (and it looks like he's running late!) I pinged him
back since I'm still at home and then was a little startled to realize
that the latest Google
Map satellite update of my home
shows my truck outside with remarkable clarity. I have to admit,
it was a little freaky. Now, I can date the picture as being from
over a year ago based on where my truck is, where my motorcycle cover is,
and where the camper is in the yard, as well as the leaves on the trees.
I don't know how Google Maps is updated, but I know that picture
has not been there until very recently, yet it's still pretty old. And
I still feel a little creepy - I think I'll close the blinds before I head
out.
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