I loathe Vodafone's (Telecom/2degrees are just as bad) voicemail system.  I have no issues with paying $0.20 to access it, it's just navigating it using a phone's keypad seems so antiquated.  Smart phones are now more prevalent than ever so there should be an app/menu that allows you to easily navigate voicemails, save them, delete them etc.  Pressing 1,2,3 # to navigate messages, remembering which message you are on, and jumping between messages is as hard as getting sbiddle to shout you a beer.

The closest I could get to an improvement on the voicemail system was messagePage, where an operator answers your calls and sends the details in a SMS.  It worked well for some time, but the costs rack up quickly if your calling volume is high.

The best solution is voicemail-to-email.  You can store them, delete them, and forward to a colleague if required.  Until johnr and his boys enable this in the Vodafone core, I have a dirty hack to get this going.  You will need NZBestMate enabled on your mobile.

1. Sign up to 2talk's Go Free plan. 

It'll cost you nothing a month as we are using them purely for inbound calls, not outbound.  Keep track of the 028 number, we'll need this later. 

2. Enable Do Not Disturb

Login to the 2Talk portal, and under the column marked Inbound Calls click Do Not Disturb.

Under Do Not Disturb tick Enable Do not Disturb Service and click Save Options. This will force all calls to your new 028 number to go to voicemail.

3. Setup voicemail service

Now that 2Talk will be handling your voicemail, you need to setup your greetings.  You can either have 2Talk call you to record, or upload an MP3.

In the field Send a copy of my voicemail messages to the following email address: enter the email you want your voicemails to go to.

4. Call Vodafone to setup NZBestMate

Call 777 and give them your new 028 number.  This will zero rate any calls made from your mobile to your 2Talk number.

5. Setup voicemail redirection on your phone

This is tricky as it varies from phone to phone.  On my Galaxy SII, it's under Settings > Call > Call forwarding > Voice call.  Modify busy, unanswered and unreachable to be your 2Talk number.

That's it. 

Do a couple of test calls to make sure it all works.  I've had this setup for a few months now - mine is slightly different as my 028 number registers to work, and my voicemails go through our VoIP PBX, but exactly the same concept.

The best thing is: I never have to use Vodafone's voicemail system ever again.

The Vodafone Sure Signal is a femtocell, which is a small cellular base station that you run at home/work to improve your Vodafone coverage (you must have Vodafone ADSL).  I run one of these at home, as I have good coverage outside, but no coverage inside.  The Sure Signal means I don't have to run outside at all hours, to make and receive calls.

About two weeks ago I received this email (I've shortened it somewhat):

Great news! You will soon receive a Sure Signal upgrade. This free upgrade means you'll enjoy the great mobile reception you're used to with Sure Signal in a sleek new device, plus it'll prepare you for quicker data speeds on your mobile with our next network upgrade in the new year.

The new device will be couriered out to you in the next couple of weeks. So keep an eye out for the courier and you'll soon be enjoying all the benefits of our new and improved Sure Signal service.

The courier pack arrived at the glorious hour of 8am this morning.  The new Sure Signal is a much nicer looking, and a much smaller unit (new one on the left):

The new one is manufactured by Alcatel-Lucent (old one was Sagemcom), and has a Ethernet pass through port if you're not running a switch.  The new one also doesn't sit upright, with the stand making it lean back slightly:

The unit was dispatched from Brightpoint, with a return courier back to send the old unit back.

The best thing about upgrading to the new Sure Signal is how quick and painless it was - unplug the old unit, plug in the new one: done.  No port forwards on the router or any other configurations, the unit just works.  Surprisingly, it works with my Draytek modem, even though it's not the standard Vodafone ADSL modem that was provided.

If you have one of the old Sure Signals, and haven't received a new one in a few weeks, it might pay to contact Vodafone - the cover letter indicated the old Sure Signals won't be supported past April 2012.

I'm a big fan of the Sure Signal, and have recommended them to friends and family who have coverage issues.  The investment in one is not much, it uses very little power and the data it uses is zero rated.

Thanks Vodafone for the free upgrade!

Have a great break over Christmas/New Years everyone.

Here at 3Bit we use Google Hosted Apps for email and calendar.  For the past four years it has worked without any dramas.

We heavily use the Google Groups function.  This allows you to have an alias, such as sales, support, info etc to forward to a group of mailboxes.  Trying to send an email to sales (at) 3bit.com was giving us this strange bounce error:

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

sales (at) 3bit.com

Technical details of permanent failure:

Message rejected by Google Groups. Please visit http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188131 to review our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines.

A couple days back, when trying to login to the Google control panel, it asked for us to upgrade, which I agreed to. I thought the above error was a mis-configuration from the upgrade, so I deleted all our groups and re-added them - emails were still bouncing.

After spending most of today trying a multitude of different things, I stumbled across this answer:

I suggest you enable Google groups for business in your control panel dashboard. Click 'Add Services' when viewing your dashboard.
Once you have done this, disable Spam filtering in each of the affected groups. You can do this in the 'Spam Controls' tab in your group settings. Select the option 'post them to the group'.
This will fix the issue.

In the Google control panel, click Organisation & Users > (your domain) > Services.  Scroll down the list and find Google Groups and make sure it's set to On.

For some reason, during the upgrade, ours switched off, and was causing the bounce messages above.  Hopefully this post saves someone from hours of cursing and shaking their fist at Google.

(for non-programmer folks, != means does not equal)

I've had a little time up my sleeves lately, so I decided to get my hands dirty and code up an application that would send and receive SMS messages.  Based on the advice of Geekzone guru sbiddle, I bought a Wavecom GSM modem (USB model) and dropped in a 2degrees SIM.

Doing some research, I found a handful of existing programs that would do the send/receive I wanted, but they were all too expensive (for example, ActiveXperts SMS component, US$795).  Using a standard COM port, I control the modem using the standard AT+ commands, that most (if not all) GSM modems support.  My thinking was that if I made the program light-weight, send/receive of SMS would be lightning fast.

I wrote a pretty straight forward, basic program - when a message is received, it logs it to a SQL Server database, does some processing, and then fires back a reply - this is where I came unstuck.

I've had the luxury of using commercial SMS gateways before.  They are super fast, and very reliable however you pay for the convenience. Trying to replicate this cheaply using a GSM modem is just not possible.

The biggest issue I encountered is speed.  The modem can only work as fast as the connecting network will allow.  Trying to send a message while the modem is already sending one will cause it to jam; the same happens for receiving multiple messages concurrently.  If you have a time sensitive application, this method is just too slow.

I also discovered interesting delays between Vodafone and 2degrees.  Sending a SMS message from my mobile (Vodafone) to the GSM modem (2degrees) would take around 25-30 seconds to arrive, however the reverse worked much faster at an average of 4 seconds.

My recommendation: if you want speed and reliability, go with a commercial SMS gateway provider (and be prepared for an light/empty wallet). For less time sensitive applications, a GSM modem will do just fine.

Twitter is gain in popularity - their latest blog post outlines an impressive volume of 200 million tweets a day:

For perspective, every day, the world writes the equivalent of a 10 million-page book in Tweets or 8,163 copies of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. Reading this much text would take more than 31 years and stacking this many copies of War and Peace would reach the height of about 1,470 feet, nearly the ground-to-roof height of Taiwan's Taipei 101, the second tallest building in the world.

I have to admit, that when I first joined Twitter back in November 2008, I couldn't see the point.  I now use it daily to keep up with others in industry, chat with friends on Geekzone, and to ask questions from people who follow me.  It really is a useful tool, however, there is also a lot of crap that gets posted.

The benefit of having followers/following others is you can select who you want to receive updates from.  If someone is tweeting information that you don't find relevant, it's very easy to un follow them.  It also gives you unprecedented access to celebrities, without having to read filtered information from a PR company.

A quick email to Mauricio and a database query later shows around 120 Geekzoners have their twitter associated with their Geekzone login.

So how many of you are twats use Twitter?

Follow me by clicking the Follow button in the left hand side bar.

It's all over the news at the moment - political blogger Cameron Slater, aka Whaleoil, has got his hands on a whole raft of Labour files, as well as the personal details of their online donors.  In terms of a breach of data security, this is pretty much worse case scenario.

In Cameron's latest blog post, he outlines exactly how he got the data:

Quick summary of the video: using the online tool My-IP-Neighbors Cameron worked out the other sites running on the same IP address as Labour website lets-not.co.nz - one of those sites was healthyhomeshealthykiwis.org.nz, and with no index file and directory browsing switched on, it gives any visitor to it a complete file listing of every file and directory hosted on that site.  It also contained a surprising amount of files that really shouldn't be there - MySQL database dumps, personal and credit card details, plus other sensitive files.  To add insult to injury, the site has also been indexed by Google, meaning all the information on that site is now part of the Google cache.

Malicious hacking? Hardly.  Epic fail on the part of Labour's web team? You bet.

The "real life" analogy of this happening is not WhaleOil breaking into a Labour car and retrieving a briefcase of private documents and taking copies - it is more similar to Labour leaving the files spread out on the footpath, and them complaining when someone discovers and reads them.

I'm not condoning what WhaleOil does with the information; what I do want to point out is how he obtained the data is not hacking, not by any stretch of the imagination.  What has happened is the staff in charge of their websites have failed in the most basic steps to secure their websites, and it is not a design fault.  Hopefully this experience also teaches them not to store sensitive files online, especially not backups from their main website's MySQL database.  I also question why credit card details are being stored online - the industry standard is to use a third-party credit card processor who stores (if required) credit cards securely, removing this liability for your own website.

I would be asking some serious questions of the Labour staff, and how such a slipup could occur.

Hotlink, from Vodafone, is a mobile top up service for prepay customers.  It's not a brand new service; up until the weekend, I had no idea it existed, and was given a demonstration of how to set it up by Vodafone fanboy (and employee) johnr.  What impressed me was how straight forward setup was, and how quickly credit could not only be added to your mobile, but to any Vodafone mobile of your choosing.  If you have leeches teenagers who you regularly top up, Hotlink is the perfect product for you.

The first step involves picking Hotlink from the Vodafone SIM menu on your phone (unfortunately I can't screenshot this as I've already set it up).  It presents you with a list of supported banks.  Once this is done, you then need to login to your internet banking.

I bank with ASB, so under Mobile Banking I enter my mobile phone number under Mobile Top-up and then pick the bank account to debit:

The menu on my Nokia E71 changed about 30 seconds later - I now have the option to top up my mobile, and enter a specific amount, or top up someone else's.  The fact it is part of a menu, and I don't need to remember codes or a number to send a SMS to makes even more handy.

It's free to sign up - you can then become a walking, talking, Vodafone top up machine.

During my time in the States, the average shopper I encountered in Walmart was not your tech savvy geek.  For those who have never had the honour of stepping foot in a Walmart, it is like the love child of The Warehouse, Mitre 10, Countdown and The $2 shop.  Anything your heart desires is available in Walmart, for ridiculously low prices.

I'm a massive fan of the Amazon Kindle, having bought one for my partner at Christmas.  I see the success of this Walmart-Amazon deal being with how stupidly simple the Kindle is.

The Kindle is small, light and does one thing and does it very well - its e-paper allows you to read books.  No flashy graphics, no backlit screen, no having to charge it every night (supposedly the Kindle has a month's battery life) - it really is the perfect device for a book worm.

So Amazon has started with a great product the closely emulates a physical book (eg no eye strain), without having the bulkiness of a thick novel.  Good start.

Their next trick is delivery of books to the device.  I opted for the WiFi+3G model.  I login to Amazon, search for the book I want, purchase it (for far less than a physical book, plus no high postage to NZ) and within minutes it's on the Kindle.  Regardless of where you are in the world, Whispernet (Amazon's automagical delivery network, powered by AT&T) gets it from Amazon to the Kindle (or you can do it via WiFi just as easily).  Since this is all setup before you receive the Kindle, there's no having to find a NZ sim card, making sure it has credit etc.  Amazon do it all for you.  Not having to plug the Kindle into a computer to get books is also great.

Two nights ago I was reading a blog post about a book called The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick.  It's a complete history of Facebook and some of the financial, technical and social hurdless they have had to overcome.  From the time I read about the book, to actually reading the book on the Kindle was about 5 minutes.  I'm just about finished this book as I can't put it down (I read one book every two years, I'm not a big reader), and would probably not have bought it had I needed to drive to a physical book store, or waited two weeks for it to arrive by courier.

The Kindle really is an amazing device, I highly recommend it.  I should buy one for mum for Mother's Day, but I'm cheap, so she'll have to settle for some flowers instead.

You can support Geekzone by buying a Kindle through this link.

Hat tip to @paulhayton for the link to the article.

Last Tuesday I was invited to the Panasonic Roadshow at the Langham Hotel in Auckland.  I was part of a small group of seven people, from the main media outlets, able to preview all the new technology coming out from Panasonic.  That evening (they had already held one the previous evening), 400 retailers would be shown what we were seeing - the benefit for us is we could take our time looking at everything, while not being told how to sell it to our customers.

The tour lasted for about 45 minutes and a lot info was covered.  We got to see Panasonic's 3D offering (which I have already seen and raved about), their new plasma and LCD LED TVs, a LCD screen running 3D graphics natively from a Nvidia graphics card (must have for gamers, and I must convince my better half that I need one), cameras and camcorders, plus offerings in HiFi, DVD and Blu-ray players. 

There was so much covered, so there is only a brief summary below.  If you're keen to get more info, this post really doesn't do any of the Panasonic products any justice - drop into your local tech retailer and try them for yourselves.

• Plasmas/LCDs
• Improved the front glass panel to minimise light entering in - this means scenes of pitch black are much sharper
• Impressive 178 degree viewing angle (you reading this Samsung?!)
• Has the ability to convert 2D movies into 3D (we watched Sherlock Holmes, not as impressive as a "native" 3D movie, but very cool technology) - the Blu-ray player can also do this
• Better sound (personally I would stick to having a stereo system and not relying solely on the screen)
• DLNA / Wi-Fi enabled
• Ability to record TV to a SD memory card or a external USB hard-drive (plus pause live TV)
• Digital cameras
• Water proof up to 12m (with a dive case this can be extended up to 40m)
• Only compact camera with GPS, a compass, an altimeter and a barometer
• Has optical image stabiliser where other brand only have digital stabilisers.

Thanks Panasonic for the invite.

During a catch-up dinner some months back with Kelvin (chiefie), David (cisconz), John (johnk) and our better halves, John mentioned that the electrical company he worked for had just installed GPS tracking in all of their vans.  Our discussions ranged from how the units work, if it's possible to disable the units, to some of the more positive benefits of having GPS installed.   Some of the ideas we bounced back and forward I am going to detail here.

I'm well familiar with this topic as one of our clients specialises in GPS tracking.  In its most basic form, GPS tracking consists of two parts:

1. A tracking unit - a unit is installed in your vehicle and this calculates your current real-time position and relays it back to a server and
2. A server - this stores the GPS location with a date and time, and allows for this data to be plotted on a map, plus other useful reports, such as how far you've driven around today.

At face value, this all seems very big brother - a boss being able to see exactly where his workmen are at all times sounds like snooping, and to a degree, it is - this, however, is only a small part of the benefits of tracking your vehicles.  In a business, staff and vehicles tend to be big expenses, so it makes sense to report on both.

During development of Argus, I volunteered my car and had a GPS tracking unit installed.  It is a small box hidden in the car, and it reports back periodically to my client's servers.  Unless you were told, you would have no idea that it was there.  It is still in my car to this day for the following reasons:

• Security - my car alarm is hooked into my GPS, and should my alarm go off, my partner (she is included in-case my cell phone is flat) and I are sent a SMS message within 2 seconds with my car's location.  A couple years ago, before I had the alarm wired in, my car was stolen from the Botany Town Centre car park and dumped 200m away.  At that time, I was able to find my car within minutes (rather than waiting days for the Police to find it), and had the alarm been hooked in, I would've been alerted within seconds (a lesson learnt the hard way!).  This really is a must have if you have an expensive bike, custom car or boat.
• Accountability - during busy days of back-to-back meetings, sometimes I will not remember who I've met with.  By using some of the reports the next day, I'm able to backtrack where I've been, and this helps trigger my memory.  From an electrician's point of view, it can prove that you were at a remote location with the arrival and leaving times, should a dispute from a client arise.  I also use this feature often when possum shooting with mates - it allows us to see where we've been shooting, what time we arrived, and what time we left - unfortunately it doesn't help with our .22s' accuracy.
• Safety - the GPS unit has a variety of relays which can be plugged into your car, for example, a crash sensor could trigger a SMS message to a loved one with your current location, if you are unconscious and unable to respond.
• Peace of mind - having the facility to know where you car is at all times is very reassuring (good idea for parents with teenagers who take family car). 
• Productivity - there are gains to be made by analysing common routes, and combining them together to save on fuel and other vehicle costs.  I know of a customer who observed his workmen going back and forward multiple times a day between a supplier and a building site.  By better planning a job, they were able to make one trip to the supplier, get everything they need, and get the job done quicker.

(these are just a handful of the benefits)

For business owners thinking about getting GPS tracking, you need to get your staff onboard, and outline why it is a good idea.  I highly recommend against covertly installing tracking in your company vehicles - all it takes is one report left carelessly on a desk, or a tracking screen left up on a laptop and your staff will quickly figure out what's going on.  Nobody likes being followed without their knowing, and the best way to destroy any employer-employee trust is to track them behind their backs.

I'm glad I had GPS tracking installed and recommend it for both personal vehicles and business fleets.

Blatant plug: Contact the clever guys at Argus Tracking if you are keen to have a chat about GPS tracking or to have it installed.