I’ve been using Fring to make SkypeOut calls over WiFi. Not only does this shave billed minutes off of my phone bill, but what with the iPhone’s 3G chipset being unreliable as all hell, I honestly prefer to make some of my calls via Skype anyways as long as I know I’m going to be in WiFi range for the duration of the call.
Here’s how to get Fring to work with SkypeOut: prepend the call number a + followed by the country code of the recipient of the call. For example, when calling a phone in the U.S. add +1; (800) 867-5309 then becomes +18008675309. To get the +, I simply press and hold the 0 key on the dial pad in Fring.
I’m not sure that this was always required, as I could have sworn that Fring used to ‘just work’ most of the time, but maybe I’m mistaken. Either way, I’m glad to have it working again!
As a follow-up to my previous post on dropped calls with the iPhone 3G, I’m happy to report that I no longer experience the issue. I haven’t had any major problems with dropped calls on my iPhone 3G, including while switching between EDGE and 3G networks, since I got a replacement unit under warranty from Apple. The ‘Genius’ at the Apple store gave me a bit of hassle the first time and sent me back home with a re-imaged/flashed phone but was happy to replace it right away when I brought it back in the next day with 20% of my calls dropped since the previous day. The replacement unit’s been much better so far — I think now I’m just experiencing the same poor reception that the rest of the iPhone 3G market is stuck with. Hopefully Apple gets their act together soon on this one; it’s been a pretty dismal last few months for them with new launches.
Since I got the new iPhone 3G, I’ve been getting a whole ton of dropped calls. Not just the normal amount that I used to get on the old iPhone’s crappy reception, but even more weirdly so, calls would drop immediately without any warning — no silence on the other end, no garbled sound, no period of inactivity, nothing other than three maddening beeps and a “Call Failed” message on the phone. It seems that others on the Apple support forums are having the same issue and provide some insight as to what might cause it.
Continue reading ‘Dropped Calls, the New iPhone, and 3G’
For bandwidth shaping reasons, I wanted to be able to allow access to my FTP disk (mounted at /var/ftp) only via FTP (hosted by ProFTPd). As it turns out, this is quite easy to do using a couple of UNIX permissions tricks and some ProFTPd voodoo. Read on for the basic description of how I’ve done it. Continue reading ‘Allowing Access to FTP Disk Only Via FTP’
Since I’m now back on Comcast as my backbone to the great intertubes, I’m able to re-enable the FTP server. I’m proud to announce that the FTP server is back and is available for immediate consumption. This should provide an added benefit over SFTP/SCP in that resuming transfers is easier; especially helpful since I get a great deal of dropped connections (Comcast, are you listening?) on long-lived and/or heavy-traffic sockets. Continue reading ‘FTP Server Back!’
When trying to install some software updates deployed using iPatch, I found that the updater(s) would display their license/readme sheet and then exit as soon as the sheet was closed, presenting only for a second the usual ’select application’ dialog that we’re all used to. It turns out that NuclearMouse was to blame – as soon as I disabled it, iPatch applications worked again!
So, a hint to those with similar issues: disable (or uninstall) NuclearMouse before running iPatch update programs. To do so, simply drag the NuclearMouse.bundle out of your SIMBL plugins directory.
I use VideoDB to keep track of my movie collection. When I’m looking for something to watch out of the collection, often I like to perform a search over the database with some advanced criteria. It’s no secret that the current search features built in to VideoDB are simple at best: you select some search fields and provide some search terms, optionally narrowing by category in addition to said terms and fields. What I wanted was something a little bit more advanced in order to answer queries such as “show me all of my movies from last year that I haven’t seen yet.” With my new advanced search, I can. Continue reading ‘Smarter Searching with VideoDB’
Last weekend Tracey, Lina and I went to see Secondhand Serenade live at The Webster Underground and had a blast. Though I was sick and probably shouldn’t have gone in the first place, there was no way I’d miss that show for the world. Tracey and Lina also really enjoyed the show and hope that we can have a repeat experience whenever Secondhand Serenade next goes on tour. Continue reading ‘Secondhand Serenade @ The Webster Underground’
Last weekend Lina and I joined the UConn Ballroom Team for the 17th Annual Harvard Invitational ballroom competition. While we did pretty poorly overall, I honestly think that we did better than I had expected.
We didn’t bother with any pictures or video for this competition, but you can definitely expect some for the MIT Open next month! Read on for a full recap including the usual results breakdown. Continue reading ‘Harvard 2008 Ballroom Competition Recap’
I’ve spent a great deal of time over the last few days cleaning up this blog. With too many things to really list exhaustively, I’ll fire off some of the major changes:
- Clean WordPress Installation
- Updated K2 Theme
- Various Cosmetic Updates
- New, Reduced Categories
More to come as I continue development and deployment. I look forward to complaints, comments and suggestions.
Latest Comments
RSSOctavian Petre, Martijn Bastiaan, Johannes Jensen, balitwilight, Joao Barbosa, Lithium17, gnarly, acmelabs, npcomplete, Octavian [...]
abb
Jim, ed, Hasan, Nick, xrmb
Pak Tam
Steph
Steph