Eric Mills

Ok, I could tell you all the myriad reasons why you should (or might want to) use Google Voice. But, a friend of mine basically said, “make me care.” So I’m going to tell you a couple real life scenarios where Google Voice just about saved my buttocks. If you don’t know what Google Voice is, you can start by reading this article and decide if you want to come back and let me convince you to use it.

Use case #1 – Telephone overload. My wife and I acquired a free baby grand piano. It’s sweet. But we already had an 1863 upright grand that has seen better days. We originally got the first piano on Craigslist under the free section. I thought, let’s give it back to the community for free, too, so someone else can have a starter piano (it’s not in the best shape, but would be a great candidate for restoring). Little did I know that 4 seconds after I added the posting to Craigslist, my phone would start ringing off the hook. (Sure, I could have said for people to email me, but let’s face it, when you want to arrange something to be picked up, email is not the best option). I received 47 calls about the piano within the first 24 hours. You do the math, that’s a lot of phone calls every couple minutes.

Solution: “Do Not Disturb.” By enabling the do not disturb mode of Google Voice, I was able to have the calls routed straight to voicemail and still transcribed and sent to me as a text. Getting a text once in a while is not nearly as bad as your phone ringing off the hook. (Especially when you have some parents or others around who can’t stand that some people actually ignore incoming phone calls, grab your phone, and bring it to you in the backyard where you’re busy weeding the garden).

Use #2: Texting. I text with some people alot. As in, we have the same amount of conversations over text as others would normally have over Instant Messaging. Here’s the deal: I have an iPhone, so I already sync my contacts with my gmail account, so getting all my contacts into Google Voice was a snap. Sending an SMS from Google Voice is simple: you start typing the name or number and it auto completes. And, since I work from the computer a few hours each day, I’m always around one. If I’m upstairs in my office, I can send a text. If I’m on the back patio where my laptop likes to hangout on nice days, I can send a text. In fact, it’s faster to open the laptop, fire up Google Voice and send a text than it is for me to find my cell phone (damn thing has a mind of its own), bring it down to where I’m working, and send a text over the phone. Are you a fast typer and do you hang out near a computer? If yes, get GV just to send some texts. Oh, and did I mention that your text messages and transcribed voicemail are kept in an inbox? Can you say searchable? Take a look at this screenshot, you can’t do this with your current voicemail, trust me.

Now, I know what you’re saying: Turning on “Do not disturb” might make me miss an important phone call. Well, if something is so important that you can’t miss it, you should still give out your real phone number, not your Google Voice number. Google Voice doesn’t support porting yet, so you’ll have to managed 2 phone numbers or tell your contacts to change you number. Then they’ll get all confused when you forget and call them from the older number. Especially now that Apple has rejected the iPhone app for Google Voice, GV is not a viable alternative to your real phone.

It is, however, a very powerful tool to have in your arsenal. Just like you have a need for Firefox and sometimes perhaps Opera or Flock as web browsers, you should grab a Google Voice number and hang onto it.

Your first stop should be open source mac, where you can load up on the essentials. I’d choose Firefox over Camino, because even though Camino is “more native” there isn’t a noticable speed increase or any shinier chrome. The next three on the open source page, Miro, Adium, are a must, and I find that Mac’s built-in Spotlight works well enough as an application launcher that I don’t need Quicksilver (although 99% of mac users swear by it). Add Handbrake, Burn, and Audacity and you can do just about anything.

Next up, I’d skip all the open source html editors, and get yourself a copy of Adobe CS3 or 4. To help with this, you can look for torrents in all the usual places, and a little app called iserialreader will assist in your serial activation. If you go this route for adobe or any other software, you’ll want little snitch, which is essentially an outbound firewall or whatever the proper term for such a thing is. Get version 2.0 or 2.0.1 because the newer version has a nagging feature. Use serials from iserialreader.

Because I’m the kind of guy who likes to see what’s going on underneath the hood, I install iStats from iSlayer, and activate the cpu, memory, and network montior in my menu bar (kind of like in Linux distros). This is a shot of what it looks like. That’s really it, because OSx is pretty cool.

Yay!

A redeign should be as much about functionality as it is about the looks and feels of the pages. I meant to pluralize those words. Yesterday, Toggl, the insanely functional time tracker I use to track all my clients and projects and hours of web consultantcy redesigned their easy-to-use site into a monster of esoteric navigation and idiotic back pedalling in terms of editability and ease of use. I can no longer recommend Toggl.

Sorry for the LOLCats speak. I’ve had some difficulty getting GNU Emacs to work properly in Windows XP. The version I downloaded here, so far works the best.

A few weeks ago, my aging 5th Generation iPod Video stopped playing video. I decided, therefore, to start messing around with it out of spite. Using this file, placed in this program, you can mess with some fun stuff. You can also completely destroy your iPod. Today, I learned a new button combination never before encountered: hold down the middle button and the play/pause button, after plugging in your iPod to the computer, and it will boot into disk mode directly. This enables many other options, such as reformatting (which I’m doing as I type this). It’s also great news for when you bork the iPod trying to install the classic theme.

One evening while wondering along the streets of Dubrovnic, Croatia, my friend Chris happened upon a sign and took a picture of it. As you can see, they really do have “internets” in Croatia.