Sep 062012
 

After getting my latest bill from Comcast and seeing the price I am paying for a home phone I rarely use, I decided to port my Comcast phone number to Google Voice. Well, not exactly that path. Since Google Voice can only accept numbers ported from cell phones at this time, I had to port it to a pay as you go cell phone first, then to GV.

I chose a Verizon prepaid phone that came with 10 minutes of talk time included for a total price of $14.99. It took about 48 hours to port my Comcast number to the Verizon prepaid.Then I ported my number from Verizon to Google Voice, which Charges $20 for the porting service. This was very fast, taking less than 24 hours.

The final step was adding an awesome device to my home network called an OBi which cost me $40 at Amazon. This device connects to your home network, and then you connect your home phone to it which enables your Google Voice number with your home phone. Extremely simple to setup, nearly plug and play.

I’ve had this setup running for nearly two months now and it’s worked flawlessly. The whole setup ran me about $75, a one time cost that will pay for it self in about 3 months of usage. I love the benefit of being able to flag and block telemarketer calls in Google Voice. Most of all, I feel great giving Comcast less of my money.

Update: I have had this setup running for nearly 5 months now without a hiccup. If you are sick of paying comcast for bogus phone service, make the switch!

Sep 052012
 

I just upgraded my Macbook Pro with a larger SSD drive. I stuck with Crucial, upgrading from a M4 256 GB to a  M4 512 GB. After a cloning the drive with SuperDuper, I installed the new, larger drive in my MBP. I immediately noticed it took significantly longer to boot up, specifically, it spent a longer time on the white screen, before the gray apple is shown. I tried a few things for troubleshooting, including setting the startup disk in preferences, but still no joy. Finally, I tried a trick from the old days, zapping the PRAM.  I say old days, because I haven’t zapped PRAM on any of my macs for years. Anyway, that worked perfectly and it’s back to booting quickly again.

Zapping your PRAM is done by pressing your command, option, P and R keys all at once right after power on. Keep them pressed until you hear a second start up chime.

Jun 052012
 

I would like to introduce my new community site, Boston Sports Fans, which as it sounds, is a community to talk about Boston sports teams. I said I would never create another community forum site, mostly because of the huge amount of time it takes to run it successfully. I sold off my other forums over the last couple of years. But I am passionate about Boston sports, so I decided to give community building another go. If you are into Boston sports teams, stop by and join the discussion.

Mar 212012
 

Almost mid-way through Drupalcon and it’s been very interesting. It’s pretty clear that responsive design is really taking hold in Drupal community. This is a good thing. It was interesting to learn of the W3C’s work on a whole new batch of API’s that will further assist responsive designers in the future.