How to get a US Google voice number outside the US

Google did all to prevent non-US residents to get a google voice number. But there is a way.

  • At first you need a Google Voice invite (I have three left if you are interested) and this might be the hardest part.
  • You need a US IP address, this can be done by using HotspotShield from http://anchorfree.com. Install the software, connect and go on.
  • Now you can sign up for Google Voice. Choose your number wisely, because changing it costs $10.
  • It will then ask you for a real US Phone number to verify (and redirect) your calls.
  • Get yourself a free number over at http://www.virtualphoneline.com
  • In the Virtualphoneline settings, redirect your Number to your Skype acount.
  • Go back to Google Voice, enter the VPL phone number and let them call you
  • Your Skype will ring and you have to enter the two digit code to confirm the number
  • Done.
  • If you happen to have registered a Gizmo (http://www.gizmoproject.com) account a while back you can add Gizmo as a phone number (http://www.google.com/support/voice/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=115122)
  • Maybe you can simply download Gizmo from e.g. versiontracker.com and register an account inside the app.
  • You still can’t add non-US phone numbers to your account, but you have a free US phone number and as you might know: GV even gives you the possibility to make free US calls e.g. using Gizmo (http://www.google.com/support/voice/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=115123).

So, why not just going with the Virtualphoneline number?
They only have longer numbers for free. The call quality is rather poor. The service is good but a little weird. No customizable voicemail. No free outbound calls.

Any Questions?

Meine Antwort an T-Mobile

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

was mir allein an einem Tag in Ihrem Kundenservice widerfahren ist, ist für mich unerklärlich und in Anbetracht dessen, dass ich jeden Monat 70€ an sie zahle eine absolute Frechheit. Natürlich verstehe ich volkommen dass 70€ für T-Mobile vernachlässigbar und Bestandskunden gegenüber Neukunden nicht wichtig sind.

Nach wiederholten Ausfällen meiner Telefon und Datenverbindung wurde ich von Apple Care dazu aufgefordert einen Ersatz für meine SIM Karte zu bestellen. Das habe ich am 16.11 gegen 09:45 Uhr getan und mir wurde von ihrer Mitarbeiterin versichert, dass mir eine inaktive SIM Karte zugeschickt würde, die ich durch einen Anruf beim Service aktivieren müsse.

Zehn minuten später zeigte mein iPhone nur noch “Kein Netz” mehr an. Da meine Kollegen im Raum nebenan auf ihren T-Mobile iPhones problemlos Netz hatten rief ich wieder beim Service an. Die Mitarbeiterin teilte mir mit, dass es in meiner Region gerade eine Netzstörung gäbe. Auf den Einwand hin dass meine Kollegen Netz hätte meinte sie nur, dass so eine Störung auch mal nur ein Telefon betreffen könne. Wie sich später herausstellte waren diese Aussagen eine glatte Lüge, wahrscheinlich um mich aus der Leitung zu bekommen.

Nach weiteren vier Stunden rief ich erneut an und teilte dem Servicemitarbeiter mit, dass ich vermutete, dass die erste Kollegin die SIM Karte, entgegen Ihrer Aussage, aktiviert und damit die aktuelle Karte deaktiviert hatte. Er liess mich wissen dass ich nun wohl mal 2 Tage ohne Handy auskommen müsse, sicherte mir jedoch auf meinen Protest 15€ Guthaben zu, da er auch nichts weiteres tun könne.

Die 15€ investierte ich dann in eine Prepaid Karte, auf die Anrufer mittels Anrufweiterschaltung geleitet werden können. Was bei einem früheren Vertrag schon Problemlos funktionierte.

Bei meinem vierten Anruf der Servicenummer erklärte ich der Mitarbeiterin, dass ich “gerne eine Anrufweiterschaltung meiner T-Mobile Nummer auf eine andere Nummer” hätte. Es dauerte 3 weitere Anläufe bevor sie überhaupt begriff was ich wollte. Nachdem sie mich dann erst in die Warteschleife gelegt hatte eröffnete Sie mir dann plötzlich, dass sie “das System nicht mehr hereinlässt” und ich bitte in 10 Minuten nochmals anrufen solle. Ich würde natürlich niemals annehmen, dass sie mich nur abwimmeln wollte.

Für den heutigen Tag habe ich mein Anliegen aufgegeben und werde wahrscheinlich auch die nächsten 2 Tage immer mal wieder damit verbringen erbosten Kunden, Kollegen und Freunden zu erklären, dass ich sie nicht absichtlich ignoriere sondern mir vorübergehend die Leitung abgedreht wurde und es scheinbar technisch unmöglich ist eine deaktivierte SIM-Karte wieder zu aktivieren bzw. Anrufweiterschaltungen einzurichten.

Die 15€ sind ein schwacher Trost in Anbetracht dessen was ich inzwischen an Zeit und Telefonkosten (von der Prepaid Karte mal abgesehen) bereits in diese Unternehmung gesteckt habe.

Für den Fall, dass sie meine kleine Erlebniserzählung bis hierhin durchgelesen haben (was ich in Anbetracht meiner Serviceerfahrungen in ihrem Haus stark bezweifle), fordere ich Sie dazu auf meine Kündigung an die entsprechende Abteilung weiterzugeben.

Hiermit kündige ich meinen Mobilfunkvertrag mit T-Mobile zum nächstmöglichen Zeitpunkt. Ich erwarte eine schriftliche Kündigungsbestätigung mit der Information über das Enddatum des Vertrages binnen 14 Werktagen.

Mit verbindlichen Grüßen,


_____________________________________
Bastian Wölfle

My "fun" story with T-Mobile Germany

During the last weeks (since the 3.1.2 update) I experienced that my iPhone lost its data and phone connection, without displaying any error. I was just not reachable and couldn’t make calls. I restored my phone and set it up completely new, but after one day the problem was back.

So I called T-Mobile to ask for help. They directed me to Apple Care. So I spent 30 minutes on the Apple Care Hotline. The result was: Please call T-Mobile and get a new SIM card. So I called T-Mobile. At first they wanted to send me back to Apple but I really didn’t like that, so I was able to convince the lady that she sends me a new SIM card free of charge. Just to be sure I asked what I needed to do when the card arrives. She said “It will not be active when it arrives, so please call us as soon as you have it. It’ll then deactivate your current card and activate the new one” Fair enough. So I left for work.

On my way to work I suddenly realized that I had no cell reception any more. I was just driving through a forest so I thought this might be okay. After arriving in the office I noticed that I still had no reception. So I asked the guys here if they also had no reception, but they all had. So I called T-Mobile again. The lady asked me for my postal code and told me then that there was a network error in my region. I told her that all my colleagues that are on T-Mobile as well did not have any problem. She said “A network error can just affect single phones sometimes.” Even though I thought that was BS, I hung up and waited 4 hours.

It wasn’t better after 4 hours so I decided to call again. The guy just wanted to start telling me BS again but I interrupted him and told him that I was sent a new SIM card this morning and that I suspected the lady did send the card activated (what would deactivate my current card). He looked again in his records and guess what. This was exactly the case. In the next sentence he told me that I now had to wait about two days until my new SIM card arrives. I told him that he can’t be serious, but he was. Once a card is deactivated it can’t be activated any more. So here I am now. I am unreachable during the next two days and I got a ridiculous 15€ extra balance. The worst part is: The second lady simply lied me in the face just to get me off the line.

Dear T-Mobile, the moment my current contract runs out, I will be off (just like 95% of all other iPhone users).

Does anyone have had similar experiences?

How to scan directly to Evernote (Mac)

This a description on how to scan documents directly to the Evernote application on the Mac. If you can’t really see the video, please watch it on YouTube in HD.

The required AppleScript can be downloaded here.

Questions/Suggestions/Improvements anyone?

How to listen to Pandora.com outside the US (without a VPN)

Back in the day, when Pandora was still accessible from outside of the US it was my main source for music recommendations (and I spent a lot of money on recommended music). Then the record industry decided to limit Pandora to the US only.

You can still listen to Pandora if you use a VPN solution like HotSpotShield but this means you will Tunnel all your computers traffic to some VPN and might not be able to access stuff that is on your local network (and you slow down your internet connection).

After a night with little sleep and some help from a very nice Twitter follower (who has a VP Server in the USA) I found a convenient way to listen to Pandora from here.

Step 1) Get a SSH account in the USA. Either you know someone who can give you one, or you get yourself a hosting package with SSH (e.g. hostmonster.com has rather cheap ones) or you try something like bshellz.net, for a one time payment you get a shell account with tunneling capabilities (might not be in the US, I am not really sure. There might be other services like this that are definitely in the US).

Step 2) Establish a SSH tunnel. If you are on a Mac, you can either do this via terminal by typing in:

ssh -D -p <port-number> -D 2001 <username>@<shell-host>


or you simply get the SSH Tunnel Manager freeware app and enter your data.
Be sure to enable “Enable SOCKS4 proxy” in the options. In the Terminal this is the -D switch. The number (in this case 2001) is the port you can access your socks proxy afterwards.
Now connect either using the terminal or SSH Tunnel Manager.

Step 3) You can now launch Firefox, install the FoxyProxy addon and configure it to use a socks proxy on host: localhost and the port you set up above. And you’re done.

Or you get even geekier:

Step 4) Open your plain text editor of choice (SubEthaEdit, Textmate, BBEdit or so) and add the following lines:

function FindProxyForURL(url, host) {
// send all pandora.com requests through our socks proxy:
if (shExpMatch(url, “*.pandora.com/*”))                 {return “SOCKS localhost:2001”;}
if (shExpMatch(url, “*.pandora.com:*/*”))               {return “SOCKS localhost:2001”;}
// All other requests don’t need a proxy
return “DIRECT”;
}

Save this file as proxy.pac. This file will later tell your system to only route requests to pandora.com through the tunnel.
Step 5) Open System Preferences > Network. Now select your active network device (Airport or ethernet). Now click “Advanced” and then select the “Proxies” tab. In here change “Configure Proxies” to “Using a PAC file” and choose the file we just created. Click OK then click Apply. That’s it.
If the tunnel connection is established you are now able to access Pandora.com. To make it even more convenient, I recommend the free PandoraMan application.

Any questions?

Fellow geeks, now I need your help, please!

I need to generate a huge amount of traffic within a short period of time on one of my servers and this is where I need you guys. Everyone who can spare a little bit of bandwidth e.g. at night could help me by repeatedly downloading this file: http://essen213.server4you.de/du.mp4. You can delete the file right after downloading and start over again (it is a recent DigitalUpgrade show, if you wonder what it is about).

If you are using OS X, Linux or Unix you can create a .sh file with this content:

#!/bin/sh
# Loop forever
while :
do
curl http://essen213.server4you.de/du.mp4 -o /dev/null
done # Start over

This loads it right to nowhere and starts over after it has finished.

If you are on windows this won’t work, so I created a folder with 2000 symlinks to that file: http://essen213.server4you.de/download if you grab all these links using e.g. DownThemAll it’ll do the same trick.

(Hopefully) the download speed will become VERY slow sometime, but don’t worry, this is what I hope for.

This is really my own server, so it is really ok to do this, it won’t hurt anyone. This server doesn’t contain anything but this file.

I’d like to ask you to do this for a few days (or nights), this should really help a lot.

How to turn text links into real links on #squarespace

I ran into this issue:

We upload videos to Tubemogul, they distribute our video to blip.tv, and they finally convert it and then cross post to our squarespace site. Crazy workflow but it works and the nice thing is I need to upload it only once to get it to numerous video platforms with a single click.

The drawback is that Tubemogul doesn’t allow for adding HTML, because all the sites other than blip.tv don’t allow HTML. So I just add in required links as text and deploy the video. Blip.tv now takes the text 1:1 and hands it over to Squarespace. Now we have shownotes with un-clickable links and this is bad. Well, just as long until I realized that Squarespace lets you insert javascript.

All you need to do is downloading the javascript from: http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/10958 (don’t install it into Greasemonkey, just save the .js file). Without any modification, upload it to you Squarespace File-manager and then switch to structure editing mode. Now scroll down to the bottom and select “edit website footer”. Into the HTML box, enter the following line at the very beginning:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://YOURDOMAIN/storage/PATH/SCRIPTFILENAME.js”></script>

Of course you need to change the path to the .js file you uploaded, that can be found using the file manager.

Click save. That’s it. Amazing!

Recipe: Great Veggie Chili

This recipe serves about 4 people.

What you need:

  • a few potatoes (6-8 larger ones)
  • a few carrots (about 3)
  • a big onion
  • garlic
  • 2 cans of chopped tomatoes
  • one bell pepper
  • a can of kidney beans
  • a little bit rice
  • red wine
  • sugar
  • parsley
  • cinammon
  • smoked chipotle peppers
  • nutmeg
  • caraway
  • vegetable stock

At first chop the onions into medium sized pieces, do the same with the carrots. Chop the garlic in smaller pieces take one or two cloves depending on how much garlic you like. Chop as much chipotles as you think are good. I’d recommend two. Now heat up some olive oil and fry the chopped vegetables a little bit. Now add as much red wine to cover it all and add some sugar, caraway, salt and black pepper. Now let it boil until the red wine is almost gone.

Meanwhile cut the potatoes into medium sized cubes (dont remove the skin!) and add them as soon as the red wine is gone, now add as much vegetable stock until the potatoes are not completely covered. Add the cans of chopped tomatoes to cover the potatoes. Now cook that for about 30 minutes and stir from time to time to keep the chili from scorching.

Now cut the bell pepper into short slices and put it aside. Wash the kidney beans and get a cup of rice.

After 30 mins check if the potatoes are soft enough to eat them (the still have to be somewhat firm).

If the potatoes are good, add the rice, the pepper, the beans, a little bit of parsley, some nutmeg and a little bit of cinnamon (seriously!) and cook it on low heat for another 30 minutes.

Afterwards check if something is missing and add spices if needed.

Now wait for the chili to cool down. Ideally you should leave it for a night and then re-heat it the next day (add some water if neccessary).

If you want that extra ground meat feeling, get a veggie burger pattie and chop it into small pieces. Then fry it with some red pepper powder and add it.

That’s it, enjoy your meal!

Why I unfollow people

Someone asked me why I unfollowed him on Twitter. Here is what I had to say:

“I unfollowed several people. Since Twitter changed their @replies model, I receive all @replies of users I follow, no matter if they are directed to me or not. This became so much that I completely lost track of the tweets I want to read and the benefit of Twitter was heavily diminished for me. Thats why I started to sort out people. I don’t want the people I unfollowed to take this personal, but if I unfollow someone it just means that their tweets might just not be of so much information for me. But for someone that knows this person better (or in person) it might very well be interesting. For me, Twitter is not a “I know that person so I follow him” tool, this is what e.g. Facebook is for. It’s an information channel.

This is why I am really unemotional unfollowing people and sometimes unfollow people that I personally like, just because there is no added benefit for me. On the other hand I really don’t mind if anyone unfollows me for the same reasons. No one has a special benefit of a large number of followers and being unfollowed doesnt hurt ones reputation or so.

Being unfollowed doesn’t meant one can’t be followed again, does it?

Twitter and the @replies "problem"

Even though some people are arrogant enough to say that no one should worry about the recent @replies issue Twitter had and still has (because they don’t see/understand the problem), I think this actually IS a problem. But honestly I come from the completely opposite way than everyone else…

To be honest: I just don’t care what you (If I follow you) tell someone else. I really don’t. So far I set up Twitter so I only see @replies that are directed to me. Like this I got only the information that is supposed to reach me. I don’t read my neighbours post card either, even though I could. Why? Because I don’t care.

Following ~150 people is “stressfull” (in a good way :D) enough, and so far I was really happy with the solution provided. I just can’t see what problem Twitter tried to solve with that step. What is the consequence? I actually have to unfollow people that @reply rather often because I really want to follow what people I care about have to say.

Is there anyone else who sees this twitter “issue” this way around?

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