The “Ultimate” Google Voice Home Phone Setup

This post discusses porting a landline telephone number to Google Voice (“GV”) and setting it up as a home phone using an OBi VoIP adapter. My configuration adds some extra features that aren’t included in the usual setup.

I have been using Google Voice to unify my cell phone and my work line since before Google acquired it, and have recently been using my GV number as a landline in a home office with an OBi100. The quality of calls is excellent, and I’ve encountered zero problems.

I liked the idea of a VoIP home phone line, and initially explored the Ooma service. Ooma offers a high level of features at a very low-cost when compared to traditional telco service and established VoIP providers like Vonage.

But, it is difficult to compete with free, and GV does some things that Ooma doesn’t. So, GV ultimately won out. That said, a Google Voice-based solution entails a greater degree of technical implementation than Ooma, and Google provides limited support, which may be an impediment for some.

Google Voice offers some great features for a home phone service, above and beyond the free US/Canada calling. These include iOS and Android apps (so you can get a push notification when you have VM on your home phone), voicemail-to-email transcription, and call blocking and spam filtering that crush dinner-time telemarketers.

Probably the best feature of GV, particularly for a shared home phone, is the way Google implements call screening, which verbally announces the caller and gives whomever answers the following options:

  • Accept the call (press 1)
  • Send it to voicemail (press 2)
  • ListenIn(TM) on the voicemail (press 2 and stay on the line)
  • Accept and record the call (press 1 then 4)

ListenIn is my favorite GV feature. It’s like listening to the caller leave a message on an old-school answering machine and having the option to pick up. This is great for a shared line, or for a household with kids, who might otherwise end up on the phone with someone they or their parents would prefer they not talk to. The problem is that GV’s call screening feature is typically lost when using an OBi, due to the way that the OBi connects with the Google Voice service. Another issue with Google Voice is that it only provides incoming caller ID numbers, not names (because CNAM lookups costs money). The good news is that there is a free workaround to both of these issues that I’ll cover below.

Another issue of using Google Voice for a home phone is that currently, only wireless numbers can be ported to GV. This means that any landline number needs to be first be ported to a wireless carrier, and then to GV. While this additional step can be accomplished for $10, it does create one more hurdle to clear.

The system I utilize was designed to meet the following requirements:

  1. Retain our landline home phone number
  2. Utilize the Google Voice service for calls and voicemail
  3. Retain the call screening features of Google Voice (which are typically lost when using an OBi adapter)
  4. Provide incoming caller ID support for both numbers and names (the latter of which Google Voice does not have)
  5. Provide for E911 service (which Google Voice does not have)

The components used to implement the system are:

  1. Google Voice account ($20 to port in my number, free thereafter for calling in the US and Canada)
  2. Prepaid AT&T wireless SIM card (free from a corporate AT&T store) with $10 of calling credit, used to port my landline number away from our telco
  3. Disused GSM phone (free, since I already owned it), used with the SIM card during the number porting process
  4. OBi VoIP adapter (approx. $40 to $80 depending on model)
  5. Callcentric.com incoming VoIP line (free)
  6. E911 service (80 cents to $1.50 per month, depending on provider)

Step one – Sign up for a Google Voice account:

You can sign up for an account here. If you’re NOT going to port in a number you already have, you may want to get a new GV number in your local area code (which can be hard to come by), otherwise it doesn’t matter.

Step two – Port your landline number to AT&T Wireless:

Get an AT&T SIM card for free at any corporate AT&T store (if anyone tries to charge you for this, you’re probably at a reseller, not a corporate store). Put $10 of credit on it using a pay as you go plan.

Put your SIM card into an old GSM phone and call 611. Navigate to a human being and ask for your account number (which is not your phone number) and set an easy to remember PIN. If possible, try to get your account number and set your PIN at the time you buy the SIM card.

Now call (866) 895-1097 to initiate the port of your old landline number to your new AT&T prepaid account. You will need your landline’s full account number and its PIN (if applicable).

While you’re waiting for the port, go ahead an order an OBi adapter. I recommend the OBi202 since it has the most flexibility.

The process to port my Centurylink landline number to AT&T took approximately 7 days, and I received a text message from AT&T once it was done.

Step three – Port your new AT&T wireless number (a.k.a. your old landline number) to Google Voice:

This part was easy and took exactly 24 hours, to the minute. Once you receive confirmation that your landline number has been ported to AT&T, login to Google Voice, click on Settings and in the Phones tab click on Change / Port to port your number to GV.

Follow the prompts to verify your AT&T wireless number and account, and pay your $20 to Google. You will receive an email from Google when the port is complete.

Step four – setup a free Callcentric.com incoming DID number and E911 service:

If you want to use call screening, you’ll need an additional VoIP line above and beyond your Google Voice account. This VoIP line will be where you route your incoming calls. Outgoing calls will be made using your GV account. Callcentric.com will give you a free incoming line. An added benefit of this setup is that the Callcentric line will also pass through incoming caller ID names, not just numbers. So, even if you don’t want to use call screening, there is some benefit to routing calls through Callcentric. If you don’t care about either call screening or caller ID name, there is no need to sign up for a Callcentric account.

If you want to add E911 service, Callcentric will provide this as an add on to a free account for $1.50 per month. You can get a less expensive E911 service through Anveo.com at 80 cents per month, which can be used alongside your GV and Callcentric accounts. But, having three VoIP services on your OBi will require you to have an OBi200 or 202 model, since the OBi100 is limited to only two VoIP services. Unless you really want to save the $8.40 per year, I’d suggest adding E911 service to your Callcentric account, just for simplicity’s sake. I signed up for Anveo before I discovered Callcentric, so I have an additional account hanging off of my OBi, along with my $8.40 of annual savings. When you sign up, you will provide your E911 service provider with your physical address. Once your OBi is setup you’ll be able to place a test call to ensure E911 is working properly.

Step five – setup up your OBi adapter:

If you are likely to want to add additional Google Voice lines, I recommend you purchase an OBi202 which can handle four VoIP services. If this is unlikely, the OBi100, which can handle two VoIP services will work great at a little more than half the cost of the 202.

The OBi setup is very simple. Follow the provided and on-screen instructions. First supply your Google Voice login credentials, then your Callcentric.com and Anveo.com (if applicable) credentials. Check the box for outgoing E911 calls on the appropriate service (either Callcentric or Anveo). Now is a good time to test your E911 service by dialing 933.

Step six – configure Google Voice:

To use the call screening and caller ID features discussed above, you will need to configure your Callcentric.com number within Google Voice (go to Setup, Phones, Add another phone). This is done by inputting the number into GV, and answering a call to provide a verification code. Once the Callcentric number is verified, check the box next to it and then uncheck the box next to Google Talk (the service the OBi typically uses for incoming calls). This will route your incoming calls through Callcentric, providing both full caller ID and call screening. Outgoing calls will go through Google Voice.

If you’ve followed these instructions, you will have associated your landline number with your Google Voice account, enabled E911 and full caller ID support, and retained Google’s advanced call screening features. From here, you can explore different GV features like custom voicemail greetings or the ability to bypass call screening for certain caller groups.

If you’ve gotten to this point in the post, it’s time to go make some phone calls.

Cold turkey

I must have been living under a rock in 2007 because I completely missed the launch of the iPhone.  Watching the video of the launch, over five years later, I realized that the major tectonic shift occurred back in 2007 by simply bringing the original iPhone to market and that since then the progress/improvement/evolution of the device itself has been relatively minor and incremental.

While it was beautiful, the original iPhone didn’t do a whole lot. It started to get interesting with the App Store when it was released in connection with the launch of iOS 2.0, but things really started to come off the rails for me with the advent of push notifications in iOS 3.0.  While the device itself hadn’t changed, with basic email and SMS, plus the vast content of the App Store harnessed through push notifications, the impact it had on me had increased dramatically.

I recall standing in the hallway of my home during the summer of 2009, staring at the screen in my hand when my son, then five going on six, broke my trance saying quite firmly “dad, put down your thing and listen to me.”  He didn’t know what it was but he knew it was bad news.

Of course, he became fascinated with it and eventually inherited that iPhone when I upgraded, removed the SIM card and rendered it in essence an iPod Touch.  While I thought he spent too much time on it, at least he had to share it with his younger brother and later his little sister.

At the beginning of this year, I upgraded yet again, replacing my and my wife’s phones with the newest version.  That brought the ratio of hand-me-down iPhones to children in our home from 1:3 to 1:1.  Three screens, no waiting.

That. Was. An. Utter. Disaster.

And, it was a huge wake-up-call.  As much as I love them, when it came to their interaction with their iPhones, my two sons became exaggerated caricatures of what I can only imagine was my own awful behavior and our “baby girl” wasn’t too far behind them.  The phones seldom left their hands or the screens their gaze.  Conversation, direction and instruction became impossible.  When one’s phone died, a veritable prison riot ensued as those still with a charge repelled the attempted theft of their own precious devices.

It was chaos.  And it was a powerful mirror with which to reflect on how these devices had impacted us.  What was the true cost of the many digital wonders they’d bestowed upon us?

Locking the phones or limiting the time spent on them didn’t work well as it was impossible to track which child had spent what amount of time doing what.  No, it was an all or nothing proposition.

Cold turkey is a phrase used to describe how an addict’s skin reacts to heroin withdrawal.  As an addict stops using the drug, blood is drawn toward the internal organs, thereby leaving the skin to resemble a cold, plucked turkey.

That sounds ugly, but taking the iPhones away from my children after one particularly maddening dinner at a family Mexican restaurant was cold turkey in reverse.  The ugliness was in how they’d behaved when they had unfettered access to the phones.  Once they were passcode-locked and stuffed in an out of reach drawer, the children I’d adored came back almost instantly.  For a couple of weeks they asked once in a while if I was going to give their phones back, but now they rarely mention them and only ask to see our phones infrequently and for a specific reason.

The 1:1 ratio had lasted only two months, which was long enough to indelibly impress upon me the impact these devices have on our attention and behavior.

Since then, I’ve been on a personal mission to reign in my own distracted-ness and bad phone/screen behavior.  dumbPhone weekends are a part of that.  So has been a process of what I call de-notification.  More on that later.

dumbPhone weekends – unplugged but not unreachable

A few months ago I wrote about using Google Voice and a dumbPhone to unplug from my iPhone during the evenings and on weekends.  I started doing this in response to the types of distraction discussed recently in this great talk by Joe Kraus.

Lately, I’ve refined my techniques and also become pretty religious about ditching the smartphone outside of work hours when I don’t anticipate needing it.  This has been great and I find that time spent with friends and family is a lot more focused and a lot less fragmented.

While this post focuses mainly on the technology I’m using, I’ve come to really value my “dumbPhone weekends” and the other time I spend without a smartphone.  That said, it is difficult to go off the grid completely, so while my setup helps keep me from filling up every spare moment with some sort of distraction, it also keeps me reachable when I want to be. Here are the key features:

  1. I can receive calls on my dumbPhone no matter which one of my numbers the caller dials (Google Voice number or iPhone)
  2. I only have one voicemail box to keep track of
  3. I can receive text messages sent to either my iPhone or Google Voice number when I’m using my dumbPhone, but only when I want to

The components of my setup are:

  1. Google Voice
  2. My dumbPhone, a Motorola RAZR v3xx (prepaid on AT&T)
  3. My smartphone, an iPhone 4S (jailbroken)
  4. biteSMS, an iOS text messaging app

Google Voice is the central component and it does two main things for me.  One, it gives me a number that directs calls to all my phones, including my iPhone and my dumbPhone.  The other thing it does is consolidate my voicemail by replacing the standard carrier voicemail on both my iPhone and my dumbPhone.  This second item is important because while I mainly give out my Google Voice number, plenty of people also have the number to my iPhone and they tend to call it.  To avoid missing important calls when leaving the iPhone behind, I forward it to the dumbPhone and if a forwarded call goes unanswered it ends up in the same Google Voice mailbox as if the caller had dialed my GV number or reached my iPhone.  Having one voicemail box is great, particularly given all of Google Voice’s features.

For my dumbPhone, I bought a 2006-era GSM Motorola RAZR v3xx on eBay. I selected this phone for several reasons.  First off, I knew how to use it as I had used a v3i during the early 2000’s.  Additionally, this v3xx is GSM and unlocked which gives me carrier flexibility and they also charge conveniently with a standard mini-USB cable (plus, I already have a car charger).  The v3xx is also 3G, which is important now that AT&T is phasing out 2G coverage.

When I first got the v3xx, I used it with T-Mobile’s prepaid service but later switched to AT&T since the voicemail on T-Mobile prepaid accounts cannot be forwarded to Google Voice.  This limitation created the hassle of either an additional voicemail box to keep track of when calls forwarded from the iPhone went unanswered or no voicemail box at all, which when I tried it confused and sometimes irritated callers.  Using AT&T, this is a non-issue as AT&T voicemail can be forwarded to Google Voice.  To avoid another opportunity for confusion, I also set the dumbPhone to block its number on outgoing caller ID.  I rarely use it to place calls, but when I do, this prevents anyone from getting ahold of the dumbPhone’s number and then potentially getting frustrated when they try to reach me on it later and it’s not with me.  I am generally very happy with the RAZR v3xx, though it did help reveal the depths of my smartphone distraction – sometimes when carrying it, I’ll take it out of my pocket, flip it open and check it, even though I know full well there is nothing on it to check.

My smartphone is an iPhone 4S.  It’s a great phone and features all of the distractions this whole setup was devised to rid me of.  It is also jailbroken, which means I can use, among other apps, biteSMS, which is a feature-rich replacement for iMessage.  One of biteSMS’s features is SMS auto-forwarding.  This is useful when I want to receive both forwarded calls and text messages on my dumbPhone.  Google Voice can also be configured to forward text messages.  Between biteSMS and Google Voice’s text messaging features I can opt-in or out of receiving texts on the dumbPhone depending on what I’m planning to do.  Were I to reply to a biteSMS-forwarded text message from the dumbPhone, this might confuse the original sender as replying number would be unknown.  So, I usually just call people back in response to texts.  Replying to a text sent to my Google Voice number displays that number, so there’s no confusion.

The key refinement from my original setup is forwarding calls from the iPhone to the dumbPhone without any voicemail issues and also forwarding texts sent to the iPhone.  So, while it has a more things to keep track of (mainly the forwarding toggles), this refined setup lets me switch seamlessly between my iPhone and my dumbPhone depending on my situation and needs with no impact on the people that might try to call or text me.  And while that is great, the key benefit of the setup and the resulting dumbPhone weekends is being able to unplug and get out from under the many distractions of a smartphone, while still being easily reachable.

Update (December 8, 2012): I learned that I can have phone calls to my iPhone forwarded to my dumbPhone automatically simply by configuring Google Voice to “Ring my other phones before going to voicemail” for the dumbPhone under “Show advanced settings.”  This eliminates the need to toggle call forwarding on the iPhone, instead I just turn it off (to lessen the number of rings before my dumbPhone starts ringing). Neat.

My not so New Setup

Almost a year ago, venture capitalist Fred Wilson posted a blog entry called My New Setup describing how he’d almost fully shifted his computing setup to the cloud using Google Apps, Dropbox, Macs and Android devices.

I’ve been a Google Apps user for several years now, hosting my family’s email on it as well as using it for business and I have a similar setup to Fred’s, albeit with more components and operating systems. This past week, the cloud storage “wars” really started to heat up with the launch of Google Drive as a competitor to Dropbox, Microsoft SkyDrive, Box.net and SugarSync, as well as others. Though SugarSync seems a laggard as of late and hasn’t received many mentions this week as media outlets chatter about Google Drive, I call it out here as it’s become an integral part of my setup.

For me, the promise and reality of the cloud is “all my information on any device I use, fast.” I use both Macs and Windows machines, as well as an iPhone and with them I can get to all my stuff, pretty much instantly.

One of my favorite authors, William Gibson, remarked “(t)he future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” I think this has been true of cloud synchronization services for some time and that we just recently hit an inflection point where usage will become a lot more evenly distributed with increased consumer adoption as smartphones and tablets continue to proliferate and companies with products that most people already use, like Google and Microsoft, get into the mix.

So, here’s how I roll:

Cloud Services & Synchronization

I use Google Apps for email, calendaring, contacts and some document composition and editing. Now with Google Drive, the Google Docs from my main account also sync to my Mac and PC (no iOS support yet), which is fine as I’ve never liked having my data only in the cloud, though I still keep my non-Google Docs files in Dropbox, with one important caveat.

Because I use multiple computers, my Downloads folder is very important to me as items that I receive via email or download from the web often end up there, sometimes edited. So, I need to synchronize the content of my various Downloads folders between computers. To do so, I have two basic choices:

  1. Re-map the Downloads folder locations of my browsers, email clients and chat clients for each computer I use to a folder inside of Dropbox and hope I didn’t forget an application, or
  2. Use a synchronization service that doesn’t care where my Downloads folders are located.

I choose #2 and for this I use SugarSync. I used to choose #2, but since SugarSync dropped paid accounts, now I choose #1.

While the company that became SugarSync goes back to 2004 and Dropbox was founded in 2007, both neither really got going until 2009. The firm I worked for at that time used Macs exclusively and SugarSync was one of the first to support OS X, so we chose it for file storage and backup. It works fine, but because it can synchronize any folder on a computer, it’s nowhere near as simple as Dropbox (or SkyDrive and Google Drive for that matter). But, for my use case – synchronizing a specific folder, it works worked great. I also used to synchronize each computer’s desktop using SugarSync in case I leave left a file there, so that‘s was two folders, total.  SugarSync is probably still the best tool for syncing Downloads folders between multiple computers, but its smallest offering is 60GB at $74.99 per year, and I don’t need anywhere near that much storage for Downloads.

Until recently, most everything else went into Dropbox. I use the Teams version at work so we share 1000 GB between 5 people, so I’m not very worried about running out of storage. I also have a personal Dropbox account that has 35.25 GB of free storage that I got mostly through running a Google AdWords campaign, though Dropbox clients only synchronize with one account at a time, so I don’t use this account.

Now, with Google Drive coming out with 5 GB free and Microsoft SkyDrive offering 25 GB free to those with an existing account (and finally launching Windows and Mac clients this past week), I’m considering parceling out my files between the services, as to not hog so much space on my work Dropbox account. That said, the downside of this would be running multiple synchronization clients on each of my computers, which could bog them down, so we’ll see how that evolves.

Mail Clients and Productivity Applications

While all my files and information are available in the cloud, I still use certain clients and applications to access them. I use Gmail in a browser (Google Chrome) a lot, because of all the apps that plug into it, but I also use Sparrow on my Mac and iPhone and Thunderbird on my PC, so I can unify my email accounts. Google Chrome Sync, LastPass and XMarks make sure my browsers are setup the same on any computer I use. Evernote or Pocket (formerly Read It Later) gets my notes or clippings from the web.

Microsoft Office still gets a lot of use for polishing final Word documents (though composition now often occurs in Google Docs) and creating PowerPoint presentations (sorry Google, but the templates just aren’t there yet), and as a “numbers guy” I have a hard time imagining life without Microsoft Excel. That said, the collaboration features of Google Docs are magical for composition and the price is right for personal use or anyone with a side project or early stage business. Were Office365 to offer a freemium model similar to Google Apps, I would seriously consider it as the paid version’s collaborative features seem to rival if not exceed those of Google Apps.

One of the things that I really do appreciate about Gmail and Google Apps is that because Google’s revenue model differs from Microsoft’s, its applications change in an evolutionary rather than revolutionary fashion. Since one doesn’t need to shell out $200-$350 per copy every few years, Google doesn’t feel the need to radically overhaul the look and feel of its productivity suite just to make it seem “new”, therein justifying the purchase. As a result, I don’t have to relearn it. Hopefully Office365 will eventually take a similar approach. Once most productivity apps are used in a browser, then the OS really won’t matter to me anymore.

Search

One of the challenges of the cloud is having data spread across multiple services. When using one’s regular laptop or desktop, any synchronized files should show up inside of Spotlight or Windows search, however not all of my cloud services are synchronized to my computers. A new app for Mac OS X, FoundApp helps solve this issue by integrating cloud search (multiple Google Apps accounts and also Dropbox) with desktop search for a more unified view.

On my iPhone I use CloudMagic or Greplin to search my data within the cloud. Greplin indexes Google Apps, Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn with the free version and additional services with the paid offering. CloudMagic, which I use more, is similar to Greplin, but with what I consider a better UI. While it taps into fewer cloud services (in particular, no Dropbox support), it will search Microsoft Exchange-based email accounts, like Office365. Anyone who has tried in frustration to find a specific email using the iPhone’s native mail app would likely benefit from the speed of CloudMagic or Greplin.

While Greplin searches more services, I find that I usually know which Dropbox folder to look in within the Dropbox iPhone app (which also has search) to find a file. With fewer services, CloudMagic provides less cluttered searches of my Gmail/Google Apps content and the ability to confine searches to say, just mail or just docs, so I use it the most. SkyDrive and SugarSync also have iPhone apps with search functions.

The Benefits

For me, the benefits of being able to access one’s information from anywhere really comes in the form of feeling less tied down to a specific place (like the office) or a specific piece of hardware. Most days, my laptop just stays in my bag unless I end up working in the conference room or at a coffee shop. At home, I often use my wife’s computer to dash off emails or review documents, rather than booting mine up. The hardware, and for me, the OS, just fades into the background and I end up focusing on the data and whatever task is at hand.

Update, April 16, 2014:

SugarSync is no longer free, so Dropbox is used in its stead because I don’t need that much storage space for my Downloads folders.  There is now a Google Drive app for mobile devices.  CloudMagic is now an iOS email client which offers a good unified search function, but it does not go as far back in time as the Gmail app does.  Greplin became Cue and then shutdown.  A number of contextual apps have taken its place, but at the moment I am not aware of a good unified cloud search app for iOS.  If you know of one, please let me know.

Remember the blue bike

Last weekend, on a sunny spring day, I went to the garage to retrieve my two sons’ bicycles so they could ride to the park. When I opened the door, to my surprise and disappointment only my older son’s bike was there.

The missing bike was a hand-me-down, but an excellent one. A blue and silver Trek MT-16, it was lightest 16 inch-wheeled kid’s bike I could find in 2008 when we bought it for my older son — he is on the small side for his age so the heft of the aluminum frame was more manageable than more pedestrian high-tensile steel offerings. He had learned to ride it without training wheels (using a wooden balance bike at first) as had my younger son once he assumed ownership.

After a frantic search of the yard and surrounds I went back inside and informed my wife that the bike was gone.

She frowned sadly, while my older son (age 8) arched his eyebrows in recognition of the issue and my younger son (age 5) more slowly processed the implications.

He asked me “will I ever see my blue bike again?”

Painfully, I told him that was unlikely.

Tears and wailing followed.

I love bicycles and have been thankful to pass along that incomparable liberation to my children. It makes me smile to know that riding their bikes is among their favorite activities.

In grade school, I once rode my first real bike, an oxidized Mongoose, to a friend’s house to play. Upon going outside to leave, I found it missing. After what felt like a panicked eternity, my friend’s smirking brother pedaled up to the house after having taken it for a “test ride”. I had wanted to punch him in the face. That was the closest I’d come to having a bike stolen, until this morning.

The pit in my stomach that I’d felt that day in grade school welled and I started to feel like I’d let my son down. But, at the same time I was angry that he’d not put it away. He has a habit, you see, of parking his bike in the front yard of our house, on a flat street that runs into a park and forgetting he left it there. I theorized that it had been taken by someone who saw it there while walking by.

I tried to recall the last time that I had seen him riding it as I interrogated him and his older brother, less gently than I would have liked. The best we could determine was that we had seen it some time two weeks prior. My older son received a stern lecture about looking out for the rest of the family and helping his younger sibling remember to put things away.

The first bike we’d gotten for any of our three children and the one my two sons had learned to ride on was gone and I felt an end-of-the-world like sadness, the overreaction of which just bummed me out more.

I sulked in a corner with my laptop to research a replacement and after looking at a few manufacturers’ sites, filed an online police report, posted a Craigslist ad and emailed our neighborhood blog about the loss.

The rest of the day was spent dragging the family from bike shop to bike shop, vainly searching for a bike that bridged the gap between the one that was lost, which was on the cusp of being outgrown and ones that were still too tall to straddle.

A family dinner out, finished with ice cream sundaes, did little to make me feel better, though my more resilient children seemed to have moved on by then. I was grouchy and helped put them to bed quickly after bristling at the notion of letting them stay up late to watch a movie.

I sat for a while until it got late and on the way to bed checked my phone. In my inbox, gleaming, was an email from our neighborhood blog forwarding a report from a neighbor down our street who had found the bike, left on the sidewalk, the week prior, on Easter Sunday.

I shared the news with my half-asleep wife then went and whispered to my sleeping son, “we found your bike.”

After a thankful email to the neighborhood blog, I went to sleep, relieved.

I woke before my alarm and concluded it was too early to text message my neighbor about the found bike. As a more civilized hour arrived, I pinged him and learned that while he was out of town, the bike was in his yard behind a gate and that “Gramps” was watching the house.

I heard the children waking up and told my younger son, still in his pajamas, to get his skull and crossbones bathrobe because we were going for a walk. In flip-flops and furry kid’s Crocs, we walked down the street as he remarked that it was a “nice morning for a walk” as if strolling in his PJs and robe with his dad was the most normal thing for a five-year-old to do.

As we rounded the corner, I could see his bike barely peeking through the leaves of our neighbor’s hedge. I stopped and opened the wooden gate, and asked him what he saw inside.

“My bike” he exclaimed.

I ventured inside the yard to retrieve it, as our neighbor’s dog started barking. “Gramps” gave us a thumbs up as he pulled the dog down from the living room window.

“Would you like to ride it home” I asked.

A smiling face nodded and he hopped on and pedaled down the block, helmet-less with the bathrobe trailing like a cape.

He parked it as he usually did, in the front yard and ran inside yelling “we found my bike!”

We’re not sure if the bike ended up down the block as a result of mischief or if he rode it there and left it in the commotion of Easter Sunday. I suspect the latter.

Later that day, I sat with each of my sons and shared a lesson that I’d learned:

I had thought that we would never see the blue bike again and I had told them so. I had been wrong and I should have been more hopeful. I should have left room for the possibility of a better outcome. I told them this and that when things seemed bad or hopeless or unlikely to work out that they should remember that morning. That they should remember the blue bike.

Using Google Voice to Unplug

A few months back, on the day of the latest iPhone launch, I read an article entitled Why I Dumped My iPhone – And I’m Not Going Back. It chronicles one man’s journey from being an iPhone user, to an early morning bicycle ride to Walden Pond, to the AT&T store to trade away his smartphone for a “90’s era Nokia”.

I liked this article. I probably like it more than I like my iPhone, but not quite enough to actually get rid of it. The article did get me thinking and I came up with a workable compromise.

A couple years ago I took the family to Disneyland and in an effort to unplug I bought a simple prepaid mobile phone, the number of which I gave only to my family members and my assistant. Having this “dumbphone” with me let me shut off my iPhone (along with my work email) and check it only periodically. It was a good solution. I still had this phone, and after reading the article, I dug it out of a box in the basement. After a quick reload of minutes via the carrier’s website it had a new number.

I’ve been a Google Voice user since it was GrandCentral and these days, my GV number is the only one I give out. When I send an email from my iPhone, the number in the signature is actually my GV number. Call my GV number and it will ring my office desk phone, my iPhone and during certain hours, my home phone. Now, it also rings (but does not forward texts to) my prepaid phone from that Disneyland trip, which I carry on weekends and evenings when I don’t want the distraction of my iPhone and other times when I don’t need its functionality.

There are some drawbacks, like not having a camera always with me. But I figure I can’t take pictures of something I miss on account of being glued to my iPhone anyway.

I’ve recently started using the dumbphone for work so I’m reachable while in meetings where I don’t want something with me “blowing up” with notifications or that I might be tempted to “check”. I still use the iPhone and it’s never too far away, it’s just not with me in situations where it could become an unwelcome distraction. In many ways this is similar to the early days of mobile email when I had a cell phone and a separate BlackBerry, although then I never talked on my BlackBerry and now, thanks to GV, I have a unified number.

Overall this setup has been working well and I’m considering getting a better dumbphone – maybe I’ll take a look at the latest iPhone while I’m at it.

Using Google Voice, VoiceCentral and Whistle to make free calls on an iPhone

I’ve been a Google Voice (“GV”) user since it was GrandCentral and with all the buzz lately about Google Voice apps returning to the iOS app store, I’ve been pretty excited to try out the new native apps.

As I was waiting, over the weekend, for Sean Kovas’ GV Mobile + app to hit the app store, I read in his Twitter feed that his app didn’t work with Google Account multiple sign in.  I use multiple sign in because my GV account is associated with my personal Gmail account and my main email runs on a separate Google Apps account, and I didn’t want to disable this feature, disrupting my workflow, just to try GV Mobile +.

So, I figured I’d wait for an update and in the meantime started looking around for other solutions.

I came across Black Swan from VoiceCentral which runs on HTML5 and appears to be a major improvement over the Google Voice mobile website, for a number of reasons, including that it gives you a choice of which number to ring back on when placing a call.

This got me thinking about free SIP services and wondering if I could set things up to make free calls from my iPhone.  Well, you can.

With this set up, you will use the Black Swan iPhone app to initiate a call that will ring back on the Whistle iPhone app (for free) and then be put through to the party you are calling.

Step 1:

Get a Google Voice account.

Step 2:

Install the VoiceCentral Black Swan “app” on your iPhone. 

There is a free version and a premium ($6/year) version, I opted for the free version.  For flexibility, it important to configure VoiceCentral to let you choose which number to call back on.  This is under Settings, Call Back which should be set to “Ask every time”.  Dialing Method (just below) should be set to “Call Back”.   Be sure to bookmark it on your Home Screen.

Step 3:

Download the Whistle iPhone app and sign up for a phone number/log into the app.  Accept the request to enable on push notifications, then close out of the Whistle app (exit the app, then double click the iPhone home button then press your finger on the Whistle icon until the minus sign appears, then tap on the minus sign).  Then relaunch the Whistle app.  This step will make sure that push notifications are working when you place a call. Under this configuration, Whistle, which is ad-supported, only receives calls, so you don’t end up hearing the ads.

Step 4:

Associate your Whistle phone number with your Google Voice Account (inside Google Voice under Settings, Voice, Settings, Phones).  When you do this, the call should ring on your iPhone via the Whistle app.  Press “answer” and then key in the two digit code supplied by Google Voice.

Now to place a call:

Launch the VoiceCentral app, and place a call either from Contacts or the Keypad.  When the “Select Call back Number” dialogue box opens, tap on your Whistle phone number.  

Next a Whistle dialogue box should open giving you the option to answer.  Tap answer and the call should go go through, for free.

No sooner than I posted this, someone rang my Google Voice number and I learned, quite obviously, that this also work for incoming calls.  Over wifi the quality seemed quite good.

 

I look forward to testing this out with GV Mobile + once the multiple sign in issue is resolved.