jamezpolley.com

18 months ago, I ended up with an Optus account — I was on a 12 month con­tract in order to receive an iPhone. For var­i­ous rea­sons, I decided not to port the num­ber I’d been using for almost a decade to Optus, but keep it active on another car­rier instead. As of a few weeks ago, I’ve now migrated away from Optus, and I want to switch back to my orig­i­nal num­ber. I want to keep the num­ber I’d been using on Optus active for a while, but I don’t want to be answer­ing it — I just want peo­ple who use it to be noti­fied about my new number.

This is made eas­ier by the fact that the SIM lives in my Nexus One (given to me by my employer as a Christ­mas gift last year, but this post, as always, is entirely my own opin­ion), which runs Android 2.2. Unlike on an iPhone, this means I can have all sorts of appli­ca­tions always run­ning in the back­ground — and those apps can take access the SMS data­base, respond to incom­ing SMSes, and send­ing out­bound SMS.

I tried a few apps, but ended up set­tling on Ulti­mate SMS. This app allows me to set an auto-response sent in reply to any incom­ing SMS (‘James does not use this num­ber any more; he can be reached on 0407123456 instead). This app also for­wards a copy of the inbound SMS on to my new num­ber — so I usu­ally get it, and respond to it, while the per­son who mes­saged me is still read­ing my auto-reply.

One last spe­cial fea­ture from Tel­stra makes this twice as use­ful: SMSes sent from their Message2Text ser­vice show the orig­i­nal caller’s num­ber as the ori­gin of the SMS. This means that if any­one calls me and leaves a mes­sage, they still get an SMS in response noti­fy­ing them of my new num­ber. Even bet­ter, Ulti­mate SMS includes the orig­i­nal num­ber when it for­wards that SMS to me — so even if their call was from a num­ber that can’t receive SMS, I still get their mes­sage on the phone I do carry, and I know what num­ber the mes­sage came from.

–

Update: Between draft­ing this and post­ing it, my Nexus One went miss­ing. I’m now doing the same thing on my G1 run­ning Android 1.6.

In the last few months of being with Optus, I tri­alled a ser­vice they offer which tran­scribes voice­mails to text and sends and SMS. I loved this fea­ture — even when it’s not entirely accu­rate, the tran­scrip­tion is enough that I can fig­ure out who the mes­sage is from, what it’s about, and how urgent it is that I call back. In a lot of cases it’s just some­one pass­ing on some infor­ma­tion and there’s no need to call back at all.

When I ported my first mobile ser­vice to Tel­stra pre­paid, I was delighted to find that I was get­ting this ser­vice for free. I had seen Voice2Text men­tioned on Telstra’s site and assumed that this was the ser­vice I was getting.

A few weeks later I ported my sec­ond ser­vice to Tel­stra pre­paid — but on this ser­vice, reg­u­lar voice­mail was in effect. I sent Telstra’s Twit­ter team a mes­sage ask­ing how to acti­vate this:

I have voice2text on my first pre­paid account (0407123456); I’d like it on my sec­ond pre­paid phone (0403654321) as well.

Unfor­tu­nately the team were only able to tell me that Voice2Text wasn’t active on my first ser­vice, and they guessed that ‘It may only be avail­able for Post-Paid accounts’. They sug­gested I call the stan­dard sup­port num­ber just in case they were wrong.

All of this was a shock com­ing from Optus, where the team who run the @Optus account are knowl­edge­able about their prod­uct range and proac­tive about solv­ing prob­lems — their response would have been to call me and ask for more infor­ma­tion to find out what I was actu­ally see­ing on my phone; they never wasted my time with guesses about what ser­vices might be offered, they would make sure they had all the infor­ma­tion to hand before they called me — and they would never tell me that a ser­vice I’m receiv­ing doesn’t exist.

(dis­claimer: I worked at Optus 3ish years ago, my old team worked some of the backed that the @Optus team use — but as far as I know this had no bear­ing on the ser­vice I received from the team. Please don’t con­fuse my love of the @Optus team with an endorse­ment for the com­pany over­all — I had ter­ri­ble cov­er­age issues which they were unable/unwilling to address, which is why I’m now a bit­ter ex-customer of theirs. It’s a shame that such qual­ity cus­tomer ser­vice couldn’t be backed by a net­work that has a sem­blance of cov­er­age and the abil­ity to make and receive the occa­sional phone call. But I digress…)

Today, a friend pointed me at a dif­fer­ent Tel­stra ser­vice called var­i­ously ‘Call Back Noti­fi­ca­tion’ or ‘Message2Text’. This ser­vice offers peo­ple leav­ing me a voice­mail ‘the option to leave a short 10 sec­ond mes­sage that is con­verted to text and sent to you as an SMS’. Sound famil­iar? This is iden­ti­cal to Voice2Text — except for the 10-second time limit, and the fact that it’s com­pletely free and avail­able even on prepaid.

To acti­vate this, you need to dis­able the Mes­sage­bank ser­vice on your account. The Tel­stra site says that thai requires a call to their call cen­ter; but I can con­firm that dial­ing ##002# turned off Mes­sage­Bank (and thus turned on Message2Text) for me. I’m not entirely sure how to turn Mes­sage­Bank back on — but as I don’t intend to use it, I don’t care.

Update: It turns out that the $49 for 2Gb was way too much — my actual usage is less than 700Mb a month.

Instead of the com­pli­cated shenani­gans below, I now just add $40 of credit once a month, and con­vert $39 that to 750Mb of data. This means I’m pay­ing just over $480/year, down from $708 on Optus.

—–

I’ve recently switched my iPhone from an Optus post-paid plan to Tel­stra pre­paid. The pri­mary moti­va­tion for the switch was cov­er­age — I work only 500m from my home, and Optus cov­er­age in the area ranges from poor to non-existent — but it turns out that Telstra’s pre-paid plans are bet­ter value (for my needs) than Optus’ post-paid con­tracts anyway.

On Optus, I was pay­ing $59/month every month. This gave me 500Mb of data, of which I used around 300Mb/month on aver­age. I was also mak­ing around 80 min­utes of calls per month and send­ing around 120 SMS/MMS — I could have used around 4 times as much with­out exceed­ing my cap. In short, Optus were giv­ing me lots of unneeded credit to spend on calls/SMS/MMS, but not as much data as I would have liked.

By con­trast, I’m now pay­ing $12.50/week to Tel­stra for a ser­vice that has ridicu­lous amounts of calls and SMS — even more than then the ridicu­lously high Optus cap, which I never man­aged to get close to using. Impor­tantly, it also has 4 times as much data as the Optus plan did — and even bet­ter, the cov­er­age and net­work qual­ity is so much bet­ter than on Optus that there’s some chance I might use a good chunk of that data!

Telstra’s pre-paid ser­vice options are broad though, and it took me a while to fig­ure out exactly what I wanted (even after I had help from work­mates who’d made the same tran­si­tion ear­lier). Largely this is because adding data onto the account is a sep­a­rate step from recharg­ing the rest of the account — but also it’s not clear when var­i­ous things expire. This post is my attempt at mak­ing it eas­ier for other peo­ple to nego­ti­ate the maze of Telstra’s pre­paid options.

In order to end up with this, I have to:

1. Apply a $60 recharge to one of the pre­paid plans — specif­i­cally, I choose the “Talk & Text+” plan as it’s the clos­est match to my needs. After apply­ing the recharges, this gives me 300 min­utes of calls and 600 SMS to use — as well as $60 credit. This credit can be used once I’d run out of free things — or it can be used for things that aren’t cov­ered by the free calls, such as call­ing Telstra’s pre­paid ser­vice num­ber (Yes, that’s right: when I was acti­vat­ing my iPad sim, Tel­stra charged me $0.25 for the priv­i­lege of hav­ing them set up another source of income for them — call­ing Tel­stra for help from a Tel­stra ser­vice is not a free call)
2. Yes, I know I said I was pay­ing $50/month and I’ve just started by pay­ing $60 all at once.
3. So at this point, I have $60 of credit, and I have insane amounts of free calls/sms, but I don’t have any data to use. To get the data, I have to buy a Plus­Pack — pay­ing for it out of that $60 credit cur­rently in the account. In my case, I choose the $49 pack, which gives 2Gb of data.
4. At this point, I have: 300 min­utes of calls, 600 SMS, 2Gb of data, and an extra $11 credit sit­ting on my account. All four bal­ances expire in 30 days time. I’ve paid $1 more than I would have paid on Optus

28 days later, those bal­ances are about to expire, so I go through much the same process:

1. Pay $60 to add $60 credit to the account. This extends the life of the pre­vi­ous $11 so that it expires on the same day as the new $60 — so I have a total of $71, expir­ing in 30 days.
2. Because I’ve chose the “Talk and Text+” plan, this adds another 300 min­utes and 600 sms to those bal­ances — and as with the main credit bal­ance, the life of the exist­ing cred­its gets bumped to the new expiry date, 30 days from today.
3. Con­vert another $49 of credit into another 2Gb data pack. This does *not* extend the life of the pre­vi­ous data pack. How­ever, the new data pack won’t be touched just yet, as you still have an exist­ing pack active — you need to exhaust the old pack first. If you’re ded­i­cated to get­ting the best pos­si­ble value from Tel­stra you could do your best to suck up the rest of the 2Gb by the time the data pack expires — or you could just let it expire at the end of the day.
4. At this point, you have 600 min­utes (minus what­ever you used dur­ing the month — so in my case, around 500 min­utes) and 1200 SMS (minus what­ever you used dur­ing the month — again, in my case, that’s about 1100 left), 2Gb of data (plus what­ever is left in last month’s data pack — after my first month, that was a tad over a Gb left), and $22 of credit — all expir­ing 30 days from today.

28 days later, it’s time to renew again — but this time, only a $30 recharge is needed. Added to the exist­ing $22, that’s still $3 more than is needed to top every­thing up by the usual amounts. This only adds an extra 100 min­utes of calls and 200 SMS to the bal­ance — but that’s going to leave me with around 400 min­utes of unused talk time and 1100 SMSes at the end of the 28 days

28 days after that, I’ll have spent $150 in 12 weeks (com­pared with $177 I would have spent on Optus in the same period); I’m left with a large bal­ance of free minutes/SMSes in case my usage ever increases (on the Optus plan, any of the free­bies you didn’t use within the month just van­ished), and if I try hard I might have used at least half of the data pro­vided. After a full year, I’ll have paid $637 to Tel­stra, instead of $708 to Optus. If you recharge every 30 days instead, that would be just $600 (and a tidgy bit more for the extra 5 days).

Sheesh. 900+ words to explain the gym­nas­tics I have to go through in order to save $100/year? If it wasn’t for the fact that this also gives me access to a mobile phone net­work that actu­ally works, it wouldn’t be worth it!

PS: I believe my $59 plan was an older ver­sion; I believe the cur­rent plans give you 700Mb of data for the same price. Optus never both­ered to sug­gest I move onto the better-value plan — and as far as I know the only way to do that would have been to sign another 12 month con­tract, which I wouldn’t be will­ing to do until they can pro­vide cov­er­age around the area where I live/work. Even so, more data (750Mb) can be had for just $39/month on Tel­stra pre­paid — much bet­ter value.

Sim­ple task: set up my wrt-54g (run­ning open­wrt) with mini­up­npdlin­ux­igd so that “Back To My Mac” works[1].

mini­up­npdlin­ux­igd: triv­ial. Click a few but­tons to enable it, done. I tried mini­up­npd first; but althought it ini­tially looked good, I couldn’t get it to work consistently.

How­ever, that’s when I start get­ting the MobileMe pref­pane telling me that BTMM couldn’t start because “Your DNS server isn’t respond­ing”. A lit­tle bit of search­ing on Google finds me pages like this one, which baldly state that “Back to My Mac isn’t com­pat­i­ble with dnsmasq.”

Well, dear inter­nets, I’m here to tell you that you are wrong. BTMM is per­fectly com­pat­i­ble with dns­masq. Sure,openwrt’s default set­tings don’t work, but that doesn’t make the two incompatible.

It did take me a while to fig­ure out what was going on. The clue also came from Apple’s forums, which told me to do this:

betelgeuse:~ james$ echo "show State:/Network/BackToMyMac" | scutil

<dictionary> {

  zhasper.members.mac.com : <dictionary> {

    ExternalAddress : 143.211.101.234

    StatusMessage : GetZoneData failed: _afpovertcp._tcp.username.members.mac.com.

    AutoTunnelExternalPort : 4500

    StatusCode : -65554

    LLQExternalPort : 5353

    RouterAddress : 192.168.0.1

    LastNATMapResultCode : 0

  }

}

The vital clue was the Sta­tusMes­sage, which tells you exactly which DNS lookup failed. The impor­tant thing is that the host­name starts with an underscore.

Take a look at the dns­masq man page, specif­i­cally the filterwin2k option. Once upon a time, SRV records (and records with under­scores) really were a sign that you had win2k machines on your net­work. Once upon a time, “trig­ger­ing dial-on-demand links” was actu­ally some­thing to be wor­ried about. Those times are long past.

I turned this option off (vi /etc/dnsmasq.conf, add a # at the start of that line to com­ment the option out, save the file, and run /etc/init.d/S65dnsmasq to restart the ser­vice). As expected BTMM now works fine. Well, as fine as you could expect.

[1] I’m ide­o­log­i­cally opposed to all things UPnP, and BTMM in par­tic­u­lar. What’s the point of hav­ing a fire­wall if you’re going to allow every­thing inside to poke so many holes in it it may as well not be there? There’s noth­ing BTMM can give me that a small fire­wall hole (to allow SSH on a non-standard port) + ssh port­for­ward­ing can’t give me in a more con­trolled way — and with­out shelling out $$$ to Uncle Steve, too. Nevertheless…

Also — how to make it self-destruct in <10 invalid pass­code attempts.

Shtep One: Down­load the iPhone Con­fig­u­ra­tion Util­ity from Apple

Shtep Two: Futz with the Stuffz

Not shown: there’s an option at the bot­tom where you can stip­u­late self-wipe after as lit­tle as 5 incor­rect passphrase attempts.

Shtep 3: Upload con­fig as per instruc­tions in the “Installing Con­fig­u­ra­tion Pro­files” sec­tion of the Deploy­ment Guide.

Phdone.

I’ve noticed a trend where a lot of feeds are includ­ing large blocky ads at the bot­tom of each feed item. I can live with that; a lit­tle ugly, but I can skip them easily.

Today I saw some­thing new:

That’s right: two com­plete posts con­sist­ing of noth­ing more than the same ad.

Scrolling down shows me that the very next item is exactly the same add from “The Fail Blog”, another site oper­ated by the same company.

Ads with con­tent I can stand. Ads with­out con­tent?  *unsubscribe*

Not much time to write. Busy watch­ing great Aussie movie I’d never heard of till you rec­comended it, on the crys­tal clear big wide screen.

All is forgiven.

PS phone is charg­ing off the USB port, a nice touch. Pic related, droid included for scale.

Dear Sin­ga­pore Airlines,

I love you. Really I do. Out of all two inter­na­tional air­lines I’ve flown, your by far the best. I’m only fly­ing cat­tle class, in your planes cat­tle can only be a ref­er­ence to those Japan­ese cows that live a hand-fed, daily mas­saged life.

It’s the lit­tle things you do so well that make the dif­fer­ence: the hot towel imme­di­ately on take­off, recog­nis­ing that just get­ting to the air­port can be a hard day. The fre­quent — it feels like every ten min­utes, but is prob­a­bly more like once an hour — offers of a juice or water. I don’t do booze on flights, but the cou­ple beside me do, and your staff have kept them sup­plied with beer and Bai­leys until they stopped whin­ing (the cou­ple, not the staff — as far as I can tell, bring­ing a con­stant stream of booze for this cou­ple ful­filled the child­hood dreams of the staff, judg­ing by the looks on their faces)

I do apol­o­gise — turns out they weren’t sated, just rest­ing — but once again the host­ess bring­ing the booze seem thrilled to be of ser­vice. It’s lit­tle things like that that make me return every week­end to my favorite local cafe, and will keep me return­ing to your airline.

You get the big things right too — last time I flew SQ, I had the absolute plea­sure of rid­ing in an A380 from SIN to SYD. Being first to fly that plane, some­thing you’re right­fully proud of, is just a small demon­stra­tion of your comitt­ment to remain­ing one of the world’s lead­ing airlines.

Right now I’m treat­ing myself to a run­through of my Liv­ing End albums on my iPod. This is a real treat — their early work remains some of my favourite music of all time, and I don’t get to lis­ten to it often enough.

As nice as this is, it’s not what I had in mind when I boarded your air­craft. You see, you’re famous for your entairn­ment sys­tem, and again, rightly so. The games leave a bit to be desired, but your movie and TV selec­tion is sec­ond to none. It’s not just the num­ber of pro­grams — it’s the vari­ety! Hol­ly­wood, Bol­ly­wood, Euro­pean and Chi­nese — you have a vast range of pro­gram­ming from all over the world. The first thing I did on boad­ing the plane was to peruse your enter­tain­ment guide and plan my next 8 hours of relaxation.

So why am I lis­ten­ing to my own music? Because your entairn­ment sys­tem has failed me. It’s been off for over half the flight. It was off for over 90 min­utes at the start of the flight. Even­tu­ally it came up, but minus the Video On Demand. Even so, I man­aged to watch some of Gomor­rah on broad­cast chan­nel 13 — but before the movie ended, the sys­tem rebooted again.

After a con­sid­er­able time with no enter­tain­ment the sys­tem came back. This time I decided to go for some­thing shorter, so I started on some of the TV doc­u­men­taries. I man­aged a show about gar­dens in India, and most of another show, before the sys­tem crashed entirely. Still about 2 hours from Sin­ga­pore, and my only enter­tain­ment is pro­vided by the music I pro­vided my self, and writ­ing you this rant.

I’m not going to pre­tend this means I won’t be back: an SQ flight with no enter­tain­ment still beats most car­ri­ers. I just want to let you know that flight SQ232 today was almost the per­fect flight — it was only your enter­tain­ment sys­tem that let you down.

I loom for­ward to fly­ing SQ again soon — my next three seg­ments are already booked, the last one once again on your A380, the first mere min­utes after I get off this flight — and look for­ward on par­tic­u­lar to being reminded just how good your sys­tem can be when it’s working.

I just bought myself a QNAP TS-409 Pro from Sky­comp. Very happy with both the device and Sky­comp so far.

How­ever, the ini­tial setup was a struggle.

The device has a very lim­ited openwrt-style firmware. Very, very lim­ited: it con­tains the bare min­i­mum func­tion­al­ity to be able to boot­strap the device with a more capa­ble OS once you have disks installed.

The doc­u­mented way of doing this is via a “Quick­In­stall Wiz­ard”, that comes on a pro­vided CD in Mac and Win­dows fla­vors. I only have Macs on my home net­work, so the win­dows fla­vor wasn’t use­able for me. The Mac fla­vor is… inter­est­ing. I ran into the prob­lem described here: In short, the full firmware isn’t pushed until after the dri­ves are ini­ti­ated; but the Wiz­ard gets stuck at the “Ini­tial­iz­ing dri­ves” stage, so the full firmware is never pushed.

I got around it using these instruc­tions — they’re described as being “For linux”, but as it just uses basic tools like tel­net and ftpd, it will work on any *nix.

Some notes:

• Obvi­ously, had to enable file shar­ing via FTP on my mac first. Did this under “Shar­ing” pref­pane, “File Shar­ing”, “Share files and fold­ers using FTP”. As the warn­ing states, this involves trans­mit­ting your user­name and pass­word in clear­t­ext: only enable this if you’re con­fi­dent you’ll only be trans­mit­ting them across a safe net­work. Bet­ter, use a username/password you cre­ated just for this pur­pose; which has no spe­cial priv­i­leges, and which will be turned off as soon as you’re done.
• Out of the box, the device lis­tens for tel­net con­nec­tions on port 13131. User­name and pass­word are “admin”.
• Once you’ve suc­cess­fully updated the fir­mare and rebooted, you won’t find a tel­netd on 13131 any more. THIS IS NOT AN ERROR, DON’T PANIC. Instead, you’ll find an sshd lis­ten­ing on port 22.
• You’ll also find a web inter­face lis­ten­ing on port 8080. If you visit that, you can start the process of set­ting up the device.
• It may be help­ful to have let the wiz­ard run at least to the “Ini­tial­iz­ing dri­ves” stage at least once. After I thought I knew what I was doing I switched to a new set of disks and tried again; and this time the hard dri­ves weren’t mounted at all, so I couldn’t go through the doc­u­mented process.

It’s not clear from the doc­u­men­ta­tion, but the device cre­ates a RAID-1 seg­ment 500Mb in size on each disk you insert (/dev/md9 in my case), and mounts this on /mnt/HDA_ROOT. This is where con­figs for the device, pack­ages you install, and so on are stored.

The device can han­dle mul­ti­ple raid­sets — although with only 4 disks to play with, you’re not likely to end up with >2 sets. In my cause I cur­rently have 3 1Tb dri­ves in a RAID-5 set, and a sin­gle 500Gb disk sit­ting on its own.