Author: Pat Hartl

Visual Voicemail for iPhone with Google Voice

I got an iPhone recently and I noticed a lot of users raving about the visual voicemail functionality. If you’re on a prepaid carrier like I am (net10/Straight Talk), you don’t get this functionality. Luckily we can fake it with Google Voice and conditional call forwarding.

I used to use Google Voice back when I had my Nexus S on Sprint and could do carrier integration. Sadly those days are passed, but I still kept my Google Voice number. I think I can still port my phone’s number over, but I’m not wildly excited about putting all my calling eggs in one basket, especially since Google Voice has been pretty abandoned for a while. It works great for voicemail though!

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Add a toggle for Philips Hue lights in iOS (Jailbreak required)

I recently got an iPhone 6. I’ve been a die hard Android fan for 5+ years and decided to try out iOS finally. One thing that bothered me is that Android is pretty open and widgets for stuff like Philips Hue are readily available. After jailbreaking my iPhone and doing some research, I found out I could add a toggle to iOS’s control center fairly easily.

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PiExpress

Growing up I had an awesome model train set. After some trade show my dad bought us a 3 rail O gauge Lionel train set that came with enough track for a figure 8. It was fairly basic, but I fell in love with it quickly. I was about 7-8 at that time, and over the next couple of years my dad started to buy me more tracks, accessories, and started buying a line of New Haven passenger cars. Then one Christmas he surprised me by buying a matching New Haven engine, a MTH EP-5. Unfortunately I didn’t use it as much as I should have because it had an on board computer dubbed “Protosound” that was basically a micro controller that would control the train’s motors, couplers, and speaker. You could activate the features by pressing a series of buttons on the controller to form a command. Most of the time this was a pain in the butt and my 10-11 year old mind got frustrated so the entire set got boxed and forgotten.

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Convert FLAC library to ALAC for easy iTunes syncing

I have a good size FLAC library that I mainly play using Subsonic or Kodi. In the car, however, I use an iPod Classic that interfaces with the stereo. It’s kind of a pain to manually go through and convert everything by hand and make the artwork match. I made a bash script to run on my NAS running Ubuntu to take care of this for me.

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