Chez Moncef

I cannot believe how hard it was to find this information online. I searched for all kinds of phrases and keywords on Google and AT&T’s forums, but couldn’t find the answer to my specific question. If you’re in the same boat, hopefully this post will save you much frustration.

Joanna and I both had our own iPhone 4S’s in separate AT&T accounts. I wanted to add her iPhone as a second line on my account, and then put them both in a FamilyTalk plan. After a quick trip to the local AT&T store this morning, we learned that Joanna first had to initiate a Transfer of Ownership. The AT&T representative told us that could only be done over the phone, but I knew better.

Once back home, we logged on to Joanna’s AT&T account, and all she had to do was go to the “Wireless” tab and then click on “Transfer Account Ownership” under “Account Changes”. After entering my name and email address, I got an email asking me to confirm the transfer. From that point, I just followed the self-explanatory instructions on the website, and now we’re all set.

By doing all of this online, we saved $18, which is what AT&T charges for performing the transfer of ownership over the phone.

I switched from Comcast to Verizon FiOS today, and everything was running smoothly until I tried sending emails. After a bit of Googling, I learned that Verizon is blocking outbound port 25 in desktop mail apps (unless you’re using a verizon.net email address). If you use web-based email, you won’t be affected.

Here is the solution for Apple’s Mail app (although the same principle should apply to other desktop mail apps):

1. If you didn’t do it during your FiOS installation, create your online verizon.com account, and make note of your username and password
2. Launch Mail
3. Go to Preferences
4. Click on “Accounts” at the top (to the right of “General”)
5. Click on your account in the left pane
6. Click on the “Account Information” tab if it’s not already active
7. At the bottom, click on the “Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP):” dropdown and select “Edit SMTP Server List…”
8. Click on the “+” button
9. Double-click in the “Server Name” column in the middle and type “outgoing.verizon.net” 
10. Double-click in the “Description” column and type “verizon”, then press return
11. In the bottom pane, click on the “Advanced” tab if it’s not already active
12. Click on the “Use custom port:” radio button
13. Type “587” in the text field
14. Select “Password” from the “Authentication” dropdown
15. In the “User Name:” field, type in your Verizon username (from step 1)
16. In the “Password:” field, type in your Verizon password (from step 1)
17. Click OK
18. Verify that the “Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP):” dropdown is now set to “verizon”
19. Close the Preferences window

You should be able to send emails now.

Earlier today, Shawn Blanc linked to the latest version of TextExpander, noting that it now supports AppleScript. I don’t disagree that TextExpander is a great app, but I prefer Keyboard Maestro—which has been supporting AppleScript for over a year now—and is a lot more powerful. You can get 20% off by clicking my affiliate link, thereby reducing the price to $28.80.

Having given my pitch, I’d like to delve into the original intent of this post: I have a solution for the feature request in Shawn’s aforementioned post. He’d like his string shortcut to paste a random variation of his “thank you” note. This can be achieved quite effortlessly with a text file, a script, and Keyboard Maestro. If TextExpander’s AppleScript support is as good as Keyboard Maestro’s, this solution should work for Shawn:

1. Create a plain text file containing your variations, each on a separate line, and save it to your Desktop. I named mine “variations.txt”.
2. Open AppleScript Editor and save a new script containing the following: 
   set v to alias (“” & (path to desktop) & “variations.txt”)
   set theText to some item of (read v using delimiter linefeed)
3. Open Keyboard Maestro Editor and add a new Macro with the following settings:

• Click on “New Trigger” and select “Hot Key Trigger” or “Typed String Trigger” depending on your preference. You can also add both if you want! I chose a hot key and assigned it to control-option-command-V.
• Click on “New Action” and double-click on “Execute an AppleScript” in the “Actions” pane.
• Click on “Execute text script” and select “Execute script file”.
• Click on the “Unknown” button and open the script you created a few steps ago.
• Click on “ignore results” and select “paste results”.

You should end up with something like this:

That’s it. You’re done. From now on, whenever you press ⌃⌥⌘V while in any text input field, one of your variations will automatically get pasted.

After reading about the Onswipe Wordpress plugin on the SoundCloud blog, I decided to try it for They Make Music. When viewed on an iPad, Onswipe turns your Wordpress-powered site into a swipe-able layout, much like the popular Flipboard and Zite apps. This is what They Make Music looks like with the default options:

Installation was a breeze, although I found a couple typos in their instructions: In Step 3, the path should be “/wp-content/uploads/thumb-cache”. Incidentally, Onswipe worked for me without changing those permissions. If you have the latest version of Wordpress, you can install the plugin directly from your Plugins admin page (as opposed to the old method mentioned in Step 1, which requires an FTP client):

• Click “Add New” next to the “Plugins” header at the top of the page
• Search for Onswipe
• Click “Install Now”
• Once the installation is successful, click “Activate Plugin”

If you have WPtouch and W3 Total Cache (both are essential Wordpress plugins) installed and activated, they might interfere with Onswipe. Don’t worry, the fix is quite simple:

• Go to your WPtouch settings, and under “Advanced Options”, make sure the “Custom user-agents” field is empty. I had “iPad” in there at first. Then, scroll all the way down and click “Save Options”.
• Go to your W3 Total Cache Page Cache Settings and make sure “iPad” is included in the “Rejected User Agents” textbox, on its own line, between “dream” and “iPhone”. Click “Save changes”.
• Repeat the previous step in the Advanced section of the Minify Settings.
• Repeat the previous step in the Advanced section of the Content Delivery Network (CDN) Settings.

That should do it. Let me know if it works for you or if I missed anything. I’d also appreciate some feedback on your experience browsing They Make Music on your iPad.

I think the Onswipe team did a heck of a job. The only gripe I have is that I can’t track visits to individual interviews if the user accessed them via one of the “page” URLs (“http://www.theymakemusic.com/#!/page/1”). This seems to be due to Onswipe’s URL manipulation: instead of “http://www.theymakemusic.com/interviews/recloose”, it uses “http://www.theymakemusic.com/#!/entry/134”. However, once you visit a specific post, the navigation links at the bottom do link to the regular URL, which GetClicky is able to track.

I’m not familiar enough with Javascript and web design for the iPad to know whether or not Onswipe’s URL manipulation is necessary. If it is, I’d like to know whether or not GetClicky should be able to track those URLs. If it isn’t, I’m all ears if you know how to bypass it.

I just discovered a pretty nifty YouTube feature: clicking on the YouTube logo in an embedded video (on a site such as mine) will take you to youtube.com and continue playing where you left off! The resulting URL has a parameter at the end that dictates where the video starts playing: #at=x, where x is the start time in seconds. So, if I wanted you to start listening to Kutiman’s “My Favorite Color” right when the sax comes in, I would use this link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=nIl4LkHYRkg&#at=112

Unfortunately, this trick doesn’t work with the HTML5 version of YouTube videos, and neither do these two other Flash-only features on youtube.com: right-clicking to copy the URL at the current time, and using the number and/or left and right arrow keys to jump to various sections of the video. 

I just found out about Tumblweeds, a new user-generated Tumblr directory, so I decided to test it out. Within a few minutes, I found two major bugs:

• When you add your blog to the Tumblweeds directory, it automatically creates a new entry on your blog with a link to the interests you entered. The problem is that those links are all broken for everybody. Even for Morris Singer (Tumblweeds’ lead developer) and Jaclyn Schiff (Tumblweeds’ lead marketer). If you do a search for “tumblweeds” in Tumblr and try to click on any of those links, you will get an error every time. Here’s how you can fix it on your blog:

  From the Dashboard, click on “edit” at the top of your post. Then click on the HTML button in your toolbar (if you’re using the plain text/HTML editor, you don’t have to click a button), and replace all instances of http://www.tumblweeds.com/hashtags/[your interest] with http://www.tumblweeds.com/searches?query=[your interest]

  For example, if you have a link like this: http://www.tumblweeds.com/hashtags/interesting, change it to http://www.tumblweeds.com/searches?query=interesting

• When browsing any of the Popular Interests from their Home page, the “next” (») and “previous” («) buttons result in a 404 error every time. That’s because the URL for those links is wrong. It’s using “search” instead of “searches”. For example, if you are looking at the news category, and you click the » button, you will end up here: http://www.tumblweeds.com/search?query=news&searchtype=&offset=32

  To make the correct page appear, replace “search” with “searches” so that you end up with this: http://www.tumblweeds.com/searches?query=news&searchtype=&offset=32

While reading their About page, I found out that the lead developer is also an attorney “who works with startups and small businesses on corporate legal issues [and] intellectual property.” That’s very interesting because the name “Tumblweeds” is basically exactly the same—except for one letter—as Tumblweed, a Tumblr desktop app that has been available for 2 years now.