Two:Thirty AM

I have been using Google Voice for a couple days, and I think it is time to step it up! I have been looking into ways to more tightly integrate my new Google Voice service in with my phone. There are a couple of key areas to focus on when trying to seamlessly integrate Google Voice with your cell phone. Phone calls, Voicemails, and Text messages. As you of course know, I use an iPhone; more specifically an iPhone 3G (at time of writing), so I will be working to integrate with that. In time I suspect an Android phone will integrate with Google Voice seamlessly. Hell, they might even just give you a Google Voice phone number when you buy a Google Android Phone.

Stage I – Voicemail
I really like the voicemail in Google Voice, with its ease of use, ability to listen anywhere, and the transcribing features. Before today, if someone were to call my iPhone and I didn’t answer, they would get my AT&T Voicemail. Now don’t get me wrong, Visual Voicemail on the iPhone is great, but nowhere near as powerful as Google Voicemail. Now you may ask why not just give everyone my Google Voice number and problem solved right? Well, yes and no. It is going to take a while to get my new number circulated to everyone, and in the meantime it would be nice if I could start receiving all my voicemail in one place. There is also the problem of relaying text messages between my cell phone and Google Voice, but there will be more on that in blog posts to come. Anyway, back to the matter at hand: voicemail. I needed my iPhone number to go to my Google Voicemail when I don’t answer, and that is precisely what I have done. Here is how I did it.

Some of you iPhone users may know about things like Field Mode Testing which is a diagnostic tool that you can get to by typing *3001#12345#* on the dial pad in the phone app followed by pressing the call button. Nothing too special there, but a similar method to this is used to change where callers are sent when you do not answer your iPhone. Now, if you type *#61# followed by the call button, you will see a screen like the screenshot below, which shows you where your phone is currently forwarded to for voicemail. This is an AT&T central receiving center for AT&T voicemail from what I can tell. In case the regular number isn’t the same for everyone it would probably be a good idea to write this number down, just in case you need to revert back for some reason. The next step is for making the switch. Go ahead and fireup your dial pad again and enter the following:

*61*1<your google voice number>*11*<voicemail delay in seconds>#

If your Google Voice number was 555-555-1212 and you wanted your phone to ring for 20 seconds before going to voicemail it would look like the following:

*61*15555551212*11*20#

That’s it! Your iPhone will now fwd to your Google Voice number and subsequently your Google Voicemail when you don’t answer your iPhone.

Hope this helps you. Check back for additions to integrate the rest of the services more tightly.

As always leave comments, questions, and feedback in the comments below or send me an email twothirtyam@me.com

A little background: We used an AppleTV for a while in the living room to serve all of our media. Well, long story short, the AppleTV sucked one too many times, so in the closet it went, and out came the Mac Mini to take its place on the home theater rack!

Problem: The Mac Mini is a little on the old side. I had already cracked the case and upgraded it to 2GB of Ram, which made it a little more usable. However the real problem was realized when attempting to watch full screen flash video (Hulu). It came down to raw processing power; the older Mac Mini only had a 1.5GHz Intel Core Solo! Yes, a Core Solo! Shame on you Mac Mini!

Solution: The short story, swap the processor! I wasn’t looking to spend a fortune on a processor for this machine since it really only needed to be “good enough”. I decided to pick up a T2400 Intel Core Duo running at 1.83GHz. You can find them for between $30 and $50 on eBay. The install is pretty simple, crack the case open, remove the optical drive and take out the logic board. The worst part is the stupid plastic pins that hold the CPU heat sink on, they are brittle and break easily. The processor is a simple locking socket, so no big deal there. Apply some new thermal grease, and reapply the heat sink, and you are good to go. Reassemble the machine and start watching full screen flash! One last reminder: ensure you reconnect the fan controller cable or your fan will default to full speed (which is your indication that you forgot).

Final thought: It was an easy install, and only took about 20 min (40 if you include having to take it apart again to plug in the fan controller that came unplugged) and best of all, the machine is much faster now and plays Hulu like it’s nothing! If you have an older Mac Mini, I highly recommend the upgrade.

10 months. 6500 tweets. Addicted. Yes.

Ok, now that I have admitted it and it’s out in the open, lets move on. :)

My girlfriend and I went on a vacation to Mexico for 8 days. It was a fantastic trip!! I had been gathering up gear that I was going to need, during which I realized, I would be without the normal means of communication I have now. Internet everywhere I go, iPhone in my pocket, and so on. To normal people, this would be ok, but my addiction to bandwidth wouldn’t allow it! So instead I formulated ideas on how to twitter while being disconnected in mexico (for a reasonable amount of money). Now in all seriousness, I wouldn’t die if I couldn’t twitter (hopefully), but I took this as a challenge / project of sorts, just to see what could be done. Lets get into the details a little, here are the ideas I had..

Options:
- Peek e-mail device (possibly hacked to work outside USA).
- Unlocked / Jailbroken iPhone 3G w/ Mexico SIM card.
- Laptop with rented 3G Card.
- Rent a mexico cell phone.
- Laptop with WiFi (if available).
- No twittering at all. not an option ;)

Right away, let me kill of some of these options. Obviously no twittering at all was not an option, or why would I be writing this! Secondly, WiFi was non existent to say the least!

Ideally, the Peek device would have been perfect. It is cheap, simple, and used cell data instead of WiFi. If you setup an email gateway to sent tweets through email, you are set. The problem is that the unit is locked down to only work with the T-mobile SIM that it came with, and since the SIM is blocked from roaming it made the device completely useless.

Next we have my iPhone 3G. My iPhone is unlocked so all I had to do was get a local Mexico SIM. I got said SIM from a company called Movistar. The problem I found with getting SIMs in Mexico is that they are all pay-as-you-go, so they didn’t seem to have any that included cell data. This knocked out any hopes of using iPhone apps to twitter. Instead I was left with only SMS as an option. Great huh? well yes and no. Twitter uses a US short code which doesn’t work from mexico, so I had to setup a SMS gateway to pass the tweets through. This was the only method I tried that actually worked for me reliably.

On a last note, there was 1 single ethernet cable in the place we were staying that worked most of the time, although it seemed to have the slowest DHCP server on the face of the planet, so that was an option as well, sort of, although it didn’t allow for mobile twittering

Long story short, if you can’t get international data, SMS is totally the way to go!

Recently I have been feeling the need to build something tactile. I create and work on projects everyday on the computer and online, but nothing analog. I have been very interested lately in building and programming robots. A large part of the robot is the code you write to control the robot, but the part I am going to be working on first is the actual fabrication of the robot. As you may or may not know, robots can grow to be very expensive hobbies, so I am going to start off on some cheaper projects to work on skills without harming expensive parts.

I recently went to the local Fry’s to look for some robot kits and came across some really cool little electronics soldering kits. Needless to say I picked up a couple to practice soldering!

I picked up 2 kits:
Sound-to-Light Kit
Dual Electronic Dice Kit

The first project (this post) I did was the Sound-To-Light kit. It is a pretty simple kit that only serves one purpose, not totally useful in daily life, but fun none the less! So lets get into it.

Kit Maker: Velleman
Kit Name: SOUND-TO-LIGHT Kit
Price: $5.99
Items Needed: Soldering Iron, Solder, 9V Battery.

Four high-intensity LEDs light up and react simultaneously on every sound. For different funny and practical applications, such as : sound indicator, simple sound-to-light unit for music, for the hearing impaired : can be used to indicate the telephone, door bell. Adjustable sensitivity with potentiometer. Built-in microphone.

From start to finish this kit took me about 30 minutes to complete. The instructions were a little confusing as first, but are actually really well laid out. You do really need to pay attention to how they lay the instructions out. There are minimal written instructions, most of the instructions are in picture form. The kit came with everything you need as far as parts go. If you are looking to get into electronics or just want to learn more about soldering and electronics, these kits are a great place to start. They have MANY different kits to choose from, check out their catalog.

I will be posting more projects as I get through them and try out some more kits. It was very fulfilling working on this project. I can’t express how good it feels to get away from the computer for a while and get into the analog world of building something with your hands.

Here are a couple pictures of my finished project and a short video of it working.

circuit-1 (link to short video)