JealousGod

I’ve been using Google Voice for the past few weeks and while I’m enjoying incoming of the service, dialing out using your Google Voice number is pretty difficult.  The reason you’d want to do so is so that the people you call see your Google Voice number instead of your mobile number on their Caller ID, and thus use your GV number when calling (or texting) you back.

There is a nice app called iDialer which lets you dial a number and have it call out through GV, except it doesn’t allow you to call your contacts, which is what I, and I assume most people do much more often.  So I whipped up a little app (no I did not put a lot of work into the design or the title) which helps with that case.

Google Voice Phone shows you a list of all your contacts.  You pick a contact, and click the left softkey to call their Mobile Number.  The last-called contact is displayed at the top (persisted when the app is closed), and you can quickly call them by pressing their picture.

Download Google Voice Phone

Note: The mobile number must have an area code, or you won’t be able to dial it via Google Voice.  Also, the GV server is currently pretty slow to dial the number you give it, hopefully that’ll improve soon!

I downloaded the New XBOX Experience update yesterday, and since I had a Netflix limited account, I had to associate my girlfriend’s account with my XBOX Live account.  Today I decided to upgrade my Netflix account to an Unlimited plan, and so wanted to associate my Live account back to MY Netflix account.  I couldn’t find any way to do this, either in the software or at Netflix’s website, so I called MS up and here’s how to do it:

1. On your console, go to System Settings > Memory > Hard Drive > Games
2. Select Netflix
3. Select Netflix Credentials, and Delete it

There ya go, now when you go back into the Netflix blade, it should prompt you to activate an account again.

Download latest version

If you regularly play Facebook Chess, you might wish you had a notifier to inform you when your opponent has made his/her move, signaling your turn, much like the way Google Talk informs you when you’ve received a new e-mail at your Gmail account.  Well, that program is ChessBugger, which sits in your notification tray and pops up a toast (and optionally plays a sound) whenever it’s your turn to move, or whenever a game ends.  It will also display your opponents FB pic, and provide handy links for other fb-chess related tasks.

You need the .Net Framework 3.5 installed to run ChessBugger.  If you don’t yet have it installed, navigate to http://www.hanselman.com/smallestdotnet/ with Internet Explorer, and it’ll show you the quickest way to upgrade.  You may also need to upgrade your Windows Installer.

When you run ChessBugger for the first time, you must be logged into Facebook in Internet Explorer, as ChessBugger uses the same session as IE.  You need to be logged in so ChessBugger can fetch your Facebook Chess homepage, as well as your friends.  After the first run, you no longer need to be logged into Facebook, unless you want it to be able to retrieve your friends.

When starting, it’ll download your game info and if you have any games waiting, will pop up a toast, which you can click on to go directly to that game.  If none of your games are waiting for you to move, you can right click on the ChessBugger icon to see all your current games, and click on any particular game to jump directly to it.

You can also turn sound on or off (this is persisted between program usages), jump directly to your FB Chess homepage, jump to the New Game page, or exit.  If your opponents name is colored blue, that signifies that they are currently online.  If you’re logged into FB in IE, then it will show all your friends who play Chess as well, and you can go directly to their page by clicking on their name.  The program updates every 10 seconds, which is usually faster than the webpage.  Enjoy, and please let me know if you have any problems!

New (at least to me) phenomenon: people donning flying-squirrel suits and adding a whole ‘nother element to basejumping.  Amazing footage, these people are literally flying through the air, held aloft by mere fabric stretched between their arms and legs like a flying squirrel’s or bat’s webbing.  I wish I wasn’t such a weenie and had the nerve to try this

I’d heard about Gmail Drive before, but hadn’t really needed its functionality.  But it’ll work perfectly to allow me to transfer files between home and work or wherever else without having to resort to my FTP server.

It uses Gmail (with all 5330MB of free space and counting) as a shared folder (requiring authentication with your Google credentials to provide security).  You can access it anywhere you install the client, and the coolest bit is it shows as a mounted drive in My Computer so you can drag and drop files, rename, delete, etc. all from the File Explorer UI.

What’s new in Firefox 3?  Tons!  I’ll admit I can’t remember the jump between versions 1 and 2, but this seems like a giant leap, with many different areas getting improvements.  The thing about Firefox is that there wasn’t really anything I could think of missing from the previous version (except for memory usage, and over 300 memory leaks have been patched in the new beta), but when you read the feature list you find things that you never knew you wanted, but in retrospect are great ideas.  A few highlights:

• Easier password management: an information bar replaces the old password dialog so you can now save passwords after a successful login.
• Full page zoom: from the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images.
• Save what you were doing: Firefox will prompt users to save tabs on exit.
• Tags: associate keywords with your bookmarks to sort them by topic.
• Web-based protocol handlers: web applications, such as your favorite webmail provider, can now be used instead of desktop applications for handling mailto: links from other sites. Similar support is available for other protocols (Web applications will have to first enable this by registering as handlers with Firefox).

All of these are great, inspired features and I can’t wait to get using them.

If anyone forgot how much of a dork I was in high-school, or never got the chance to witness it first hand, I dug up my old webpage and put it back up.

The OFFICIAL Union Palenshus Fan Page

Man I really liked Eminem. I thought it was cool how under “My Future Career” I put Microsoft’s homepage, that was junior year, how prescient. And Phil or Randy, if you’re reading this, consider this post my atonement for ever having used HTML frames.