spugbrap’s blog

Lacey and I have had a several different sets of cordless phones over the past 8 years or so. They’ve all had caller-id, and we’ve moved from 900mhz->2.4ghz->5.8ghz.

When I say “sets of cordless phones”, I’m talking about cordless phones that come with two or more phones (and charger cradles) in the box, and only one of the bases needs to plug into the phone line wall jack. The other bases just need to plug into the AC power outlet.

Two or three of those sets were made by Uniden, and I recently re-learned how to do something that I haven’t had to do for a long time. When I wanted to dial a long-distance number that was in my caller-id list, I needed to put a ‘1′ in front of it.

So, I first tried using the directional pad, hoping I could just move the cursor all the way to the left, and then push 1. But the left side of the directional pad is a global hotkey that opens the Phone Book.

Next, I opened the phone’s “Settings” menu, and looked for an option to automatically put a ‘1′ in front of long-distance numbers. Some of the other phones we’ve had allowed you to configure that, but this one did not.

After looking through the settings, I decided to try pushing the button that our last set of phones used for toggling the ‘1′ prefix. With our previous set of phones, if you did not configure them to automatically put a ‘1′ before phone numbers in the caller-id when the area code was different from the one you were calling from, you could toggle it by pressing the pound (#) button.

But, that didn’t work. So I went online and googled for something along the lines of ‘uniden tru9280-4 how to add a 1 before calling from caller id’. I did not get (m)any results, though, so I kept trying variations of that, but never ran across the result I was looking for.

Finally, I went to Uniden’s website, and found the manual for the Uniden TRU9280-4. In the manual, in the section called ‘Using Caller ID, Call Waiting, and Redial Lists’, and under the sub-heading ‘Making a Call from a Caller ID Record’, I found the answer I was looking for.

Here is that paragraph, with the information I needed highlighted:

Making a Call from a Caller ID Record
When the phone is in standby, press [ ] to open the Caller ID list.
Use [ ] and [ ] to find the Caller ID record you want to dial.
To add (or delete) a “1” to the beginning of the displayed phone number, press [*/tone].
Press [ /flash] or [ ] to dial the number.
Note: You can also press [ /flash] or [ ] before you open the caller ID list. When you come to the phone number
you want to dial, press [select/ ].

So, the Uniden has a feature to toggle the 1 from the currently selected phone number, just like the VTech. The Vtech uses ‘#’, but the Uniden uses ‘*’.

Hopefully this information will save somebody some time, someday.

**UPDATE** I just noticed that when I copied/pasted that paragraph from the manual, all of the phone button icons disappeared. So, I uploaded a screenshot of the paragraph, with icons intact.

Read about this on one of my favorite geek/productivity blogs, lifehacker:

Google Maps: Drag and drop to tweak your driving route
Don’t like the driving route Google Maps doled out to you? Now you can change the driving directions by grabbing the blue route line and dragging it to create a new destination point, which will in turn create a new route.

I’ve been wanting this feature from any online mapping service, for *years*. I’ve talked about it countless times with friends, co-workers, classmates, etc. The ability to say “No, dummy, I’m not taking 66. It’s rush hour!” or “Ack! No way, they’re doing road work on that road this week, and it’s a mess.” is something that I’ve always wished for.

I haven’t tried this feature on Google Maps yet, but I look forward to playing with it sometime in the near future!

As a software developer, I don’t like to write help files/documentation/etc. As a picky reader, I also can’t help but spot typos in other people’s writing (but not in my own, apparently!), broken English (like instructions written by people for whom English is clearly not their primary language), and statements that brought to mind a big, fat, “DUH!” when I read them.

Here are a couple of the latter, no-brainer “DUH” types, with my comments below.

– Oh, it won’t turn ON because it’s OFF.. thanks for the insight!

– Wow, that’s a *much* better version number. I hope they can implement a similar feature in the next version, too!

While checking my email this morning, I noticed something interesting about gmail’s “show snippets” feature. It wasn’t something that jumped out at me or anything. In fact, it didn’t really register in my mind until after I’d already clicked to view the message. The words “Bank of America Customer using a laptop” seemed a little strange. So, I went back and looked at my Inbox again, and saw this snippet:

This seemed like an odd bit of text for an email notifying me that a direct deposit just posted to my account. Sure, I am a Bank of America customer, who usually uses a laptop to access Online Banking. But they shouldn’t know that, so I clicked on the message again to see what they had to say about using laptops.

Well, the message, itself, showed no signs of the word “laptop”, but the large header image in this HTML email had a picture of a laptop in it. That’s when I realized that gmail was probably showing the ALT text for the header image! To verify this, I used gmail’s “show original” option, to view the full message source. Sure enough, the header was made up of several images, each of which had ALT attributes, and the header images appeared before any of the actual message content. The ALT text for the laptop image was, as expected, “Customer using a laptop for Online Banking”.

Apparently, to generate message snippets, gmail strips the HTML out of the message, leaving behind the ALT text from any IMG tags that appear in that code.

That makes some sense, since the ALT attribute provides a textual representation of the image content, for accessibility purposes. However, I’d bet that most of the time, images in HTML emails are not meant to be part of the content… Most of the time, they’re probably things like company logos, navigation bars (linking to different parts of a company’s website), list bullet icons, pictures of your [family member/friend]’s children, etc.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining about Bank of America’s email header, or gmail’s snippet generation method. I just thought this was interesting behavior. I have a few ideas for who might benefit from this information, and how they might use it, but I’ll have to save that for another post, tomorrow.

I want icon groups in windows explorer. I haven’t actually researched this yet, to see if anybody’s made anything that can enable the behavior I’m interested in, but it would be nice if it was just a feature natively in windows.

My desktop always gets too cluttered, but I want things handy, and I like some redundancy between start menu and desktop and quick launch toolbar…

So, on on my desktop, I either have tons of icons all over the place (sometimes with “Auto-Arrange” turned off, with similar icons placed near each other in small groups), or i make folders on desktop and group icons into those folders.

With the former, inevitably, the icon arrangement ends up getting screwed up at one point or another, and I end up with an alphabetically-sorted mess again. With the latter, the folders mean that it takes 2 clicks to get to what I want, and 1 click is already mildly annoying (I’m a keyboard guy).

[tangent] Actually, being a keyboard guy is the reason that I usually run programs by pressing the Windows key to pop up start menu, and then a letter/number to run one of the programs in my main start menu folder, which I have named such that most programs have a unique first character (see screenshot on the right). It’s not the ultimate in optimization and efficiency, but it works for me. [/tangent]

So, rather than throw my icons into folders and hide them, it would be nice if I could just group them on the desktop (or whatever folder), and even add a label to the group, and then moving one icon would move the whole group, and you could do something to automatically rearrange the whole folder (desktop in my scenario) with each group’s icons spaced close together, and the groups would get evenly spaced away from other groups, etc.

Just something I thought of a couple days ago. I’m sure it’s been thought of before, but it’s not currently available on my machine, so I wanted to make a note of it. If you know of a good way of doing this grouping type stuff, or if you agree that this would be a potentially useful feature, leave a comment!