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.

When opening a new container of deodorant, it used to annoy me that the first one or two times I used it, it was not easy to dispense the proper amount. I like the “soft solid” type of deodorant, which pushes the white goop through tiny little holes in the top, when you twist the bottom of the container. Each time you twist it, it makes a clicking sound, and–in theory–it dispenses a consistent amount of deodorant.

However, when you first open it, it takes quite a few clicks before the deodorant actually starts coming out of the holes. When it finally starts coming out, it only comes out of the edges; nothing comes out of the center for quite a few *more* clicks. In the mean time, it’s hard to gauge how much you need, when it’s only coming out of the edges.

One day, I decided to try something new. I left the plastic seal on the top of the container, and started twisting the bottom (clicking it).

The plastic seal helped to contain the deodorant, as it tried to come out the holes on the edges. I kept on clicking it until the goop looked ready to come out the holes in the center, too. It got more and more difficult to twist, the more I clicked it, because the seal was holding it back.

By the time the deodorant was coming out of all of the holes–but still being held back by the plastic seal–the goop from the edges was starting to come out.

When I finally removed the seal, it just took a couple clicks, and I was able to easily get the amount of deodorant that I wanted.

Tissues work very well for erasing dry-erase marker!

Specifically, I’ve tried it with Kleenex regular unscented ones, but I assume others probably work, too.

I used to get frustrated, sometimes, trying to erase dry-erase marker off a kids’ workbook that had laminated pages. The first method I used was using a dry paper towel. It worked fine, for a long time (but sometimes it didn’t). So, I tried a wet paper towel, and that would usually do the trick (but sometimes it wouldn’t). So, I tried a wet dishwashing sponge, which usually did pretty well (but not always). The last resort was a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser (awesome product!), which always worked. But that seemed overkill, and I hated to waste it on something that should be easier to clean, so it wasn’t an everyday solution.

Lacey saw me struggling with this, one day, and told me about the tissue thing. I’m not sure where she learned about it, or if she figured it out, on her own. But I always use a tissue to erase it, now, and that works like a charm.

I also tried this on my whiteboard, at work, and it works on that, too. Much cleaner than using the whiteboard eraser, which just pushes the dust around and leaves a line of it wherever you stop erasing.

I’m a big fan of cygwin, so most of the time I have countless small-but-useful utilities at my disposal, without having to think twice. But, when doing system administration on a client’s server in an off-site data center, I’m very limited in what software I’m allowed to put on the machine. For sysadmin tasks, though, unix utilities are pretty hard to do without.

For instance, one of my favorite tools for watching log files is tail, usually with a -f or -F parameter (”follow” and “follow+retry”, respectively; both let you see new lines as the file(s) grow, the latter keeps trying in case the file doesn’t exist yet). Unfortunately, vanilla Windows installations still don’t come with a tail utility. So, I went searching for other ways of tailing files, besides installing cygwin.

One method that I found can be used without any additional software. It’s just a batch file. It can’t follow changes, but you can at least view the last N lines of a file. Here it is, from a FAQ on Microsoft TechNet, by Jerold Schulman:

@echo off
if {%1}=={} @echo FileName parameter required.&goto :EOF
if not exist %1 @echo %1 does NOT exist.&goto :EOF
setlocal
set file=%1
set /a number=10
if not {%2}=={} set /a number=%2
for /f %%i in ('find /v /c "" ^< %file%') do set /a lines=%%i
@echo %lines% lines in file %file%.
if %number% GEQ %lines% set /a start=0&goto console
set /a start=%lines% - %number%
:console
more /e +%start% %file%
endlocal


I really missed tail -F, though, so I went looking again for some way to tail -F without cygwin. There are plenty of freely available utilities out there that should do the trick, but I wanted to find the simplest, safest one, from a trustworthy source, preferrably open-source so the integrity is verifyable. After looking at a couple open-source options, I stumbled across a page on malektips.com: Windows XP and DOS - Unix Style Tail Command

I learned from that page that you can download the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools package for free, and that it includes a tail utility (including -f functionality). After downloading and installing that on my laptop, I looked in the installation directory, and found tail.exe there. It’s only 7k!

Next, I FTP’d that to the server I needed to run it on, and gave it a try, hoping that it did not have dependencies that required installing the whole Resource Kit Tools package. As it turns out, it worked liked a charm! It’s nice and small, and arguably from a trustworthy source (Microsoft itself). Easier to justify than most of the other tools I was able to find, in case anyone ever questions my putting it on the server.

Baby monitors can be useful, but most have their issues. Of course, I’m saying this based on our experience with some monitors we tried about 7 years ago, so I suppose they may have improved in some ways. We tried a few, which had problems like excessive interference, lack of AC adapter or rechargeable batteries, reception range much less than advertised, etc.

We settled on one, which we’ve been reasonably happy with ever since (enough so that we used it for all 3 of our kids, and in 4 different houses [our old and new houses, and two friends’ houses]): Fisher Price Sounds ’n Lights (pictured at right).

However, the range was not always good enough. Sometimes we’d be a little bit too far from the transmitter, and we’d hear an awful lot of static. If we were just barely too far, then we could just turn down the volume to quiet the static, and still hear if/when the baby cried. But, for those times when the baby monitor was not adequate, I figured out a trick:

I could call my cell phone from the house phone, put the house phone outside the baby’s door, and carry my cell phone with me. Then, periodically, I’d pick up my cell phone and make sure the baby wasn’t crying. Since it was usually night time or weekends when I used this, I didn’t waste my cellular plan minutes.

Over the years, I made a few little tweaks to this procedure, and learned a few lessons. Here are a few tips, from my experience:

- Call mobile to mobile. If your cellular plan, and your spouse’s, both have unlimited mobile-to-mobile minutes, then leave one of your phones by the door, and carry the other one with you.

- Call FROM landline TO cell phone. If you’re doing landline to cell phone, always make the call from the landline, so if the call gets disconnected for any reason, the phone does not end up making that loud, evil, phone-off-the-hook sound.

- Make some noise. If you have some kind of noise in the house, like a TV/radio on somewhere, then it’s easier to verify that your connection is still valid. If the house is completely quiet, and you listen through your cell phone, you’ll just hear quiet, and may question whether you’d actually hear the baby crying.

- Use speakerphone. If possible, put your cell phone on speakerphone. If not, at least turn up the volume all the way, so you’re more likely to hear the baby crying/smoke detector/etc., without having to repeatedly hold the phone to your ear.

- Mute your cell phone. The point is to be able to listen for your baby, not communicate both ways.

- Lock the keypad. You don’t want to accidentally hang up the call or anything. If the connection does get dropped, you have to run back and call from phone to phone again.

MOST IMPORTANTLY:

- Don’t go too far away! This tip is to enable you to go beyond the reach of your baby monitor, but not to the grocery store!

Never leave your child(ren) alone in the house, without at least being nearby. The point is so you can go to the opposite corner of a big house, out in the back yard, or maybe to your closest neighbor’s house, for a limited time. In these situations, you can run to your baby’s aid if the need should arise, within seconds.

If you decide to make a late-night beer run… well, isn’t it a well-known fact that most accidents happen within a mile or two of your home? What if the one time you leave your baby alone in the house, some moron doesn’t stop at the stop sign a few blocks down? Or if, somehow, the house catches on fire? Or if someone gains unauthorized entry to the house (burglar, kidnapper, etc. likelihood may vary depending on your neighborhood, but the risk is there, particularly if you are not in the house). These are the scenarios that always went through my mind, and always kept me close to home.

I’m not sure what actually constitutes criminally neglecting your children, but I don’t believe what I’ve described here is it. I think driving away seems like a logical place to draw the line, if one needs to be drawn in this regard, and that is something I have not done.