I have no idea what I would do without this service.

GrandCentral provides you with a phone number that you choose in your area code. Then you add all of your phone numbers to that provided number. If someone calls you, it rings all of the numbers to make sure you get the call regardless of where you are.

Pretty cool. But that barely scratches the surface.

You can set a preference to screen every incoming call. If there is a caller that doesn’t match your list of contacts, it will ask them to say their name and when you are called you are asked if you want to receive the call or if you want them to go directly to voice mail. The caller on the other end has no idea. You can even listen to the voice mail AS THEY ARE SPEAKING and pick up halfway through!

If you don’t have a pen and paper while you’re speaking to someone to write down a number they’re providing, just hit ‘4′ and the service will automatically record from that moment for you to pick up later on.

When a voice mail comes in or a recording is done, you can have GC send you an email and a text message letting you know that a message is ready. You can call in for the voice mail OR listen to it via a GUI interface on their site.

Say you don’t want to use your cell minutes or have bad service at the time of the call. Just hit ‘*’ and all of your phones will ring while you’re on the call. Pick up the land line and continue the call. No disruption of service.

You can set different rings for different people as they call in. Different voice mail messages for different people too.

I’m using a (919) Raleigh area code right now to forward to all of my phones regardless of what state I happen to be in. Great for a job prospect that might shun the idea of looking at a resume for someone who’s out of state at the moment.

Ok, right now it’s by invitation only…so if you want to try it out, I have 2 invites available for trade. I actually paid for the invite, so the first person to provide me with something useful online or a job prospect in the Raleigh area gets it.

Well, my ancient Motorola v330 finally called it quits. I gotta say, it definitely withstood a beating and lasted…jeez…almost 2 years. Wow. I hadn’t really thought of how long it stuck around. Pretty impressive. Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end and I was forced to go pay full price for a new phone as I was without one.

I don’t need much from a phone. The way I see it, I’m probably going to have to get a new one in a year or so anyway, so I don’t wanna spend too much. All I require is that it has Bluetooth and can sync up with my Mac. That’s pretty much it. Everything else is irrelevant.

So, I bought a new RAZR v3(r). It’s the same phone that everyone and their brother bought and pretty much put Motorola back on the map, so I won’t go into detail about what it looks like and yada yada. I’m sure you have seen it before.

The first thing I noticed when I opened the phone up to make a call is that the outer LCD screen has a huge T-Mobile logo blaring out soaking up my precious battery time. Well, I’m not gonna drop coin on a new phone AND a service plan and throw in free marketing for them. Hell no. You already have my money. I’d rather soak up battery time with one of MY images, thank you very much.

Enter Moto4lin. It’s one of the few apps that you can use a Mac to mod your phone with…but it’s also available for a number of other OS’es. It allows you to connect to your phone via a USB cable (the same kind that comes with most digital cameras) and view the file structure of the phone.

Tiny little write up after the cut.

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I was asked because of this post what the big deal about Quicksilver for the Mac. Well-heh-heh-ell…let me learn you a little sumthin’….

I figured I might as well do a little quickie tutorial to get people started. You can do some searching on your own to find out little things here and there you’re trying to do.

Let’s do this thing….

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A little known ‘feature’ of Apple’s Universal Access is the ability to switch to ‘black on white’ with this keystroke command. Basically it switches everything viewable on the screen to something like a photo negative. Pretty neat.

I like to use it as a night-time mode when there isn’t much light around because it makes it easier to read what’s on the screen without the blinding back light frying your retinas.

I was reminded of this feature via 43 Folders who reports of a Blacktree app called Nocturne that gives you the ability to tweak the settings of this feature. Pretty cool stuff if you use this often.

You might have heard of Blacktree as they’re the people that brought Mac users the ‘hands-down-most-useful-awesome-wonderful-best-coolest-app-EVAR-for-the-Mac’, Quicksilver.

One thing I’ll never understand about iCal is its inability to user it to send email reminders to an outside address. For example, Let’s say I want to send an email reminder to my wife and my Dad to remind them to get a gift for Mother’s Day. Right now, i can only use iCal to send one email to one address listed as my home user account. The ability to send an email to another address simply isn’t there. You would assume that because you can add attendees to an appointment in iCal AND set a reminder to email alarm, that the reminder would go out to all the attendees.

There are a few workarounds for this, mind you, but many of them either cost money, or are not convenient to use (i.e run as a seperate app or as an AppleScript). Neither of those fall in line with my criteria for the resolution of this issue. I’m a big fan of free.

Enter iCalMail. The script creates a seperate calendar in iCal called ‘iCalMail’ that allows you to use the settings of a regular appointment to deliver messages to multiple addresses.

For example, whoever you add to the ‘event name’ will be delivered as the ’subject’ in the outgoing email. The other variables are as follows:

+event name -> subject
+location -> attachment
+attendees -> recipients
+notes field -> message text
+url field -> sender email

As you can see, you can also use it to send attachments out as well.

I’ve already used this a variety of ways. I use it to send appointments to my cell phone at certain times to remind me of an event. I use it to send out messages to a group of people. If you want to go a step beyond, you can create an article for your blog and save the text in the ‘notes’ field of the appointment. Then, set iCal to send this message to your pre-configured WordPress email account…which in turn will post the article to your blog at a specific time. A great tool for those that have writing deadlines.

A great fix for what should have been an included feature. Hopefully Leopard will solve this when it’s *finally* released.

I try my best to lock down my home network as best I can. I’m not a security guru by any stretch of the imagination, but I know what I want from my router and if it’s not provided to me straight out of the box, then I have to find an inexpensive (read: free) way to fix it.

I’m one of the bajillions of people that own a Linksys WRT54G 4 port wireless router. I had found out that it is quite the popular model because it had its firmware released to satisfy the GPL. This means anyone can go in and manhandle the firmware and make changes to it to enhance it and tailor it to their liking.

One of the key features for me was the ability to modify QoS. I tend to have a lot of things going on in the background of my machine…Skype…P2P (legal stuff, thank you. ), so when I use it for basic web browsing, it gets pretty sluggish. QoS gives you the ability to set priority for data flows. Now, I can give my web traffic the highest priority while setting the P2P in the background.

Another feature I really liked about this firmware was its realtime bandwidth monitoring:

I’m able to view each machine and see how much bandwidth I’m using per machine / overall. A great feature if you share with a number of users or if your ISP caps your monthly bandwidth limit.

There are a ton of other features I love about this firmware, but you be the judge. The selling point for this one over the others that are made for this brand of router is the bandwidth monitoring. Others like DD-WRT don’t have that, but have other features that might suit your needs.

Have a look at Tomato here.