Recent Posts

151

Non-Windows Software / Re: Wanted - Free (or cheap) wifi calling app for Android

« Last post by app103 on May 20, 2018, 07:38 PM »

This article on How-to-geek, might prove to be useful as well.

-Shades (May 20, 2018, 06:16 PM)

From the first line of the article:

If you’re on a carrier that supports it,

Which means your phone has to have existing service, and a number, which this phone doesn't have.

Basically, any of those apps will let you make calls over Wi-Fi, but they won’t use your actual phone number, nor will they call out to a traditional phone in most cases. Instead, you’ll actually place calls from account to account; for example, if you use Facebook Messenger, you actually just “call” the person on their Facebook account instead of putting in a phone number. The same goes for free Skype accounts, though you can pay money to call normal phone numbers.

That's not what I need. I want to make & receive real phone calls, with a real phone number. I don't want instant messaging. And Skype makes you prepay for minute credits, which is required for making/receiving normal calls. If you run out in the middle of a call, you get cut off.

Google Hangouts and Voice are other exceptions—they essentially work together to make calls. You’ll need a Google Voice number, as well as the Hangouts Dialer to make calls, in which case you should be able to call out to any traditional phone number. The problem will come when you want to receive calls using these tools—you’ll have to do quite a bit of extra setup for that.

But they don't explain the setup process or link to any instructions.

@Deozaan, how do you receive normal phone calls without a number for Google Voice to forward your calls to? And how do you make normal phone calls without cell service that it can use its minutes for? How do you call a business? Or how do you receive calls from your doctor?

From the Google Voice app page:

Keep in mind:
• Google Voice is currently only available in the US
• All calls made using Google Voice for Android use the standard minutes from your cell phone plan
• Calls are placed through a US-based Google Voice access number, which may incur costs (e.g. when traveling internationally)

152

Non-Windows Software / Wanted - Free (or cheap) wifi calling app for Android

« Last post by app103 on May 20, 2018, 02:28 AM »

I purchased a new mobile phone and moved my sim card to it, so that I can use the T-Mobile service I am paying for, with the new phone.

But I still have my old mobile phone (Moto G3), now without any sort of carrier, service, or phone number that would allow me to make or receive calls on it.

What I am looking for is an Android app/service that would give that phone a new life, with a new number and allow making/receiving real phone calls over wifi only, without the need for the phone to be attached to a traditional non-wifi carrier. It would be used for US calls, only, no international usage.

What I don't want is a service that will require me to pay per minute or buy an allotment of minutes in advance, or require me to view ads or complete offers to earn credits that can be spent to make/receive calls. (I don't have time for that nonsense). I also am not looking for texting, video calls, text chatting, or any other frills (if the service comes with it, fine, but I don't need it and won't use it). I just need voice calling. I also don't want something that would require others to have and use the same app, in order to "call" me. (there's no shortage of apps that can do that, including Facebook, Skype, and a bunch of others) I also do not want ads on my lock screen or unexpected ad popups.

I don't mind paying a cheap fee, around $20 to $30 per year, but am against paying anything much more than that, as I don't expect to use it very much.

Basically, I am looking to turn the old phone into something that has a phone number that only works at home or if I am somewhere where I can connect to some sort of wifi, including free wifi.

Google Voice is out, since your phone has to have an existing phone number to set it up on your phone, and all incoming calls would get forwarded to that number, rather than to my currently numberless phone, and all outgoing calls would require an existing carrier to provide the voice minutes that would be used. Since this phone is no longer connected to a traditional carrier, I can't do that.

153

Developer's Corner / Re: Quickly developed web application or slowly developed actual application?

« Last post by app103 on April 24, 2018, 10:57 PM »

It may depend heavily on how committed you are to supporting your app.

Do you plan on maintaining the hosting and availability of your web app for 10+ years? If not, perhaps a desktop app would be better in terms of availability, since it wouldn't depend on you to continue to host it. Once in the hands of the end user, they could keep and use it indefinitely, long after you have lost interest in the project.

I suppose the best of both would be to distribute the JS, so that it could be run locally, bearing in mind that the end user may not wish to use the browser of your choice, which could present its own problems, in terms of support. But that could be solved by embedding it into the browser of your choice, forcing the user to comply, and thereby eliminating most support complaints.

Example: The reason why Fried Babelfish was released as a desktop app was to force the end user to use Krishean's script from round 2 of our little game, locally, in Internet Explorer, otherwise the script wouldn't work. And no matter how you tell the user to only use it in IE, there would always be those that would try in another browser and complain that it didn't work or would just contact you with an IE bashing rant. This solved the first 2 problems and cut down on the amount of IE bashing we had to put up with. (the version released for NANY 2009 was a much later round of the game, using Google's translation API, rather than the original Babelfish scraper script that Krishean initially wrote)

154

Developer's Corner / Re: Guide To GIT (Git Magic)

« Last post by app103 on April 24, 2018, 09:57 PM »

Amazon says it has a publication date of April 5, 2010.

https://www.amazon.c...-Lynn/dp/1451523343/

155

Official Announcements / Re: DonationCoder 2018 Fundraiser

« Last post by app103 on April 24, 2018, 06:25 PM »

156

General Software Discussion / Re: Does anyone here actually use the Microsoft Store?

« Last post by app103 on April 16, 2018, 10:55 PM »

I think I only have 2 apps from there, one of which is a freeware video downloader for Netflix, the other is the Fitbit app for Windows.

157

General Software Discussion / Re: Search program clock on your desktop. With the weather. As in Android

« Last post by app103 on March 13, 2018, 07:20 AM »

There is a desktop bar that contains all the widgets in your collection, which is what is showing in your screenshot. You need to open the widgets from there, to display it on the desktop like I have them. Then you can close that toolbar so that it stays in the tray as just an icon. The open widgets will remain on the desktop, unless you close the whole widgets application or the individual widgets.

Attached to this post you will find my fixed weather widget. Keep a backup of the zip file, after extracting it, in case you should need it in the future. Then just click the extracted widget to open it.

Unless you have changed the widget engine's default settings, it will ask if you want to move it to your collection. The answer is yes, move it, overwrite the original existing widget, whatever it wants. Once the non-working widget has been replaced with this one, you should be good to go.

One note about this. I only replaced an old dead yahoo.com URL in the original widget code with one from weather.com that works. The weather widget will occasionally crash if/when it receives bad feed data from weather.com, which is something I have not fixed (and do not plan to).

I am not sure which clock you are referring to, since there are 2 on my screen.

The analog clock is the Carmino Vector clock, a stand alone application (not a Yahoo widget) from here: http://www.crossgl.com/vcl_clocks.htm

The digital clock is my own DClock project (also not a Yahoo Widget), which you can find here: http://appsapps.info/dclock2.php

As far as RAM is concerned, I can't really say. It couldn't be all that much for just the weather widget, though, since I have used the whole collection you see in my screenshot, plus a ton more stuff, on an older Pentium 4 PC with 1GB of RAM. (the Yahoo Widgets engine and all widgets were written for XP era computers, which were typically single core and usually 2GB of RAM, or less)

158

Living Room / Re: How to check xlsx files for malicious macros or virus

« Last post by app103 on March 03, 2018, 09:33 AM »

Use a disposable Google account and upload it there, to open in Google Sheets. You can view it there, without any sort of Excel specific macros causing potential problems to your system.  And even if it does cause a problem, it would likely be limited to that specific Google account (not your machine), which would be a throw away account, just for that very reason.

159

General Software Discussion / Re: Search program clock on your desktop. With the weather. As in Android

« Last post by app103 on March 03, 2018, 09:11 AM »

For CPU temperature, I don't have a good desktop widget for that. I am using Speedfan, which does have a tray icon.

For weather, CPU load, memory, wifi, battery, calendar, and trash bin, I am using the old Yahoo Widgets. Whereas you may be able to find an installer for the base engine application, the actual widgets to use with it may be difficult to find, and some, like the weather widget, near impossible to find one that actually still works.

If you like anything you see in this screenshot, let me know and I'll see what I can do to give you more info, or a source to acquire them, if necessary.

For the weather widget, I may be the only source for the one shown on my desktop, that actually works, since I had to decompile it and fix it myself.



Weather widget in compact view:

160

Living Room / Re: Peculiar windows problem

« Last post by app103 on February 21, 2018, 12:14 AM »

Tip of the Day: Never use Facebook as an indicator of the health of your PC or browser.

Facebook has been known to experiment with stuff, and for it to go horribly wrong, disabling functionality of various parts of their site.

They roll out changes, both good and bad, to a limited audience, so the changes may affect some accounts and not others, or some accounts under certain conditions, browsers, OS's, or combinations of things.

If you want to know if something is wrong with your PC or your browser, use other sites (more than one, in more than one browser) that actually care enough about user experience to not test crap on their live production servers, because if you let yourself become a victim of Facebook's code experiments, you will be driven completely mad, for no good reason.

161

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows Explorer crashing

« Last post by app103 on December 12, 2017, 07:13 PM »

You wouldn't happen to be using Classic Shell under Windows 10, by any chance?

If so, try disabling it and rebooting, to see if that solves your problem.

After a recent Windows update (which may have also occurred to your system automatically, without you noticing), I started experiencing the same sort of Explorer problems.

The culprit turned out to be Classic Shell. Once I disabled it and rebooted, problem was solved.

162

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Black Friday / Cyber Monday 2017

« Last post by app103 on December 04, 2017, 07:30 AM »

SitePoint has 50% off for the next ~4 hours (link)

-Jibz (November 25, 2017, 02:16 AM)

Well, it's for more than 4 hours. Most likely till Christmas, at least (perhaps till the end of the month, but I am not completely sure on that).

And 50% off means 2 years of membership for $99 USD.

The exact offer page is here: https://www.sitepoin...mium/l/black-friday/

There are also some bundle offers going out to our mailing lists, that don't include a membership (because not everyone likes memberships):

- Ultimate Full Stack JavaScript Bundle for $39 USD (updated with new content): https://www.sitepoin...k-javascript-updated

(I'll update this list as I see more mailings going out with other bundles)


Disclosure: I work for SitePoint but they have not compensated me in any way for making this post nor encouraged me to do so.

163

Living Room / Re: GoDaddy Blocking Access to Website

« Last post by app103 on September 22, 2017, 11:31 PM »

So... Let's just say you fixed it and move on..

-Stoic Joker (September 22, 2017, 03:41 PM)

164

Living Room / Re: GoDaddy Blocking Access to Website

« Last post by app103 on September 20, 2017, 06:47 PM »

I once had a site hosted by some cheap-ass company that had an automatic temporary block that would be activated by any IP address that made "too many" requests to their server within too short of a period of time. And it didn't discriminate between viewing pages in a browser and downloading a copy of the site via FTP. So, making a backup of the site would result in my not being able to access it again till the following day. And even worse, I also ended up temporarily blocked from even accessing the web host's support forum, so it was awhile before I could figure out what the problem was. I was eventually told that uploading the site wouldn't trip the block, but downloading the whole thing again could, if it were more than 20 files.

But if something stupid like that were in place at Go Daddy, wouldn't their support people know about it?

165

General Software Discussion / Re: Modern forum software: Discourse

« Last post by app103 on September 20, 2017, 06:24 PM »

I thought there was not a single human in the universe that thought that the 'old guard forums' were better than Discourse. But @tuxman proved me wrong.

-urlwolf (June 28, 2017, 05:48 AM)

We use self-hosted Discourse where I work (SitePoint), and I can't stand it, on the whole, but there are maybe a few features I do like, such as @mentions. So, I am another one that likes SMF better....but not just any SMF, Dc's SMF. (I do miss the old Zillarank search mod, though)

166

Living Room / Re: Tomaso Albinoni Concerts

« Last post by app103 on September 20, 2017, 12:05 PM »

And if you are also a fan of The Doors...

167

Living Room / Re: Badly explain your occupation

« Last post by app103 on September 20, 2017, 04:29 AM »

I used to be an unpaid freelance content generation consultant, and I also used to get paid to give away other people's free stuff, which I still do both (part time), but most of my time is now spent sitting on my butt at home, making angry, confused, and/or frustrated people happy, sometimes with gifts containing collections of letters, numbers, and noisy moving pictures, that by looking at them (in the correct order) could potentially make them smarter, and fill their pockets with pictures of dead people.

168

Living Room / Re: Waterfox to support for XUL-Based Firefox Add-Ons - a petition

« Last post by app103 on September 20, 2017, 03:50 AM »

Another alternative would be Pale Moon, which will also continue to support XUL extensions. Here is their roadmap for the future: https://www.palemoon.org/roadmap.shtml

169

Non-Windows Software / Re: Android: (Wired) File Transfers from PC

« Last post by app103 on July 24, 2017, 10:39 PM »

I recently had to figure out how to get about 4G of pdf files off my phone and onto my PC. Tried connecting the phone to the PC via USB, but discovered that unless the storage card is formatted as external storage, not all files will be accessible via USB. Some, most notably the ones I wanted to transfer, are not available to access if you have formatted the card as internal storage for your phone.

I ended up finding them on the phone with ES File Explorer (they were hidden in the application folder of the app where they were acquired from and not in my Downloads folder), then uploading them to Google Drive, which then automatically copied them to my PC, so that I could then delete them from my phone with ES File Explorer, move them to a different folder on the PC, and then delete them off my Google Drive.

And I really do have to thank Inspira Technologies, makers of my inexpensive Astrotab A10 tablet, for introducing me to ES File Explorer. It came preinstalled on the tablet and I liked it so much that I installed it on my phone. 

170

Non-Windows Software / Re: Android: (Wired) File Transfers from PC

« Last post by app103 on July 21, 2017, 02:18 AM »

Anyone know how enable MTP mode on Galaxy S6? Can't get the phone being recognized by Samsung Kies even with USB debugging on

-fsmanchies (February 27, 2017, 03:35 AM)

Normally, (in almost all Android devices), you pull down the Notification Panel then tap on the one that says Connected as ... when you have the USB cable plugged in.  That should take you to the option to set it for MTP, PTP, Mass Storage, or Charging.

When I have to type in a lot of stuff on my phone and get fed up with fat finger frustration I plug in my USB mouse using the adapter and click on the onscreen keys.  It is way faster since it is pretty much impossible to miss a key with the mouse pointer. 

-MilesAhead (February 28, 2017, 10:13 AM)

Get a cheap roll up USB silicon keyboard.

-4wd (February 28, 2017, 06:03 PM)

I just got an iClever keyboard on prime day.  I had an iGo stowaway before that, but I think because it's getting old in the tooth, even though it would connect, there were some idiosyncrasies.

-wraith808 (July 19, 2017, 04:55 PM)

I bought a Periboard about a year ago, that I could use with either my phone or my tablet, so I could actually get work done away from home, when I don't feel like lugging my laptop. Combine it with a text expander app, I'm all set.

Hello from McDonald's!

171

Developer's Corner / Re: Your First Programming Language vs Now

« Last post by app103 on July 20, 2017, 02:06 PM »

1. Multi-user BASIC
2. I try very hard not to. It really gets in the way of learning and using other languages when your brain defaults to thinking in MuBASIC. I think the whole experience gave me a sort of brain damage that I am still trying to get over.
3. Object Pascal for desktop apps, a combo of things for web
4. I wouldn't. Most of what I did in that language was writing stuff to solve my algebra homework (high school CS teacher was also my algebra teacher, and she accepted the programs as a homework solution, and as extra credit in CS class, because you have to know how to solve the problems yourself, to be able to write programs that solve them). The only really useful thing I ever wrote in MuBASIC was a user friendly program for inexperienced, computer phobic teachers to use, to average student grades. If I were to do something like that today, it would be entirely different, and a much bigger project than it was back then.

172

General Software Discussion / Re: need 'always on top' e-Post-It 4 WinXP.

« Last post by app103 on July 14, 2017, 09:10 AM »

I love Notezilla and personally, I wouldn't use anything else. It's well worth the price.

But if you'd like other options, there is a thread listing lots of other sticky note apps that are available, both freeware and commercial: https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=18605.0

173

Living Room / Re: DayAgainstDRM

« Last post by app103 on July 14, 2017, 09:03 AM »

On the plus side, while a subscription to a smaller service like SitePoint Premium won't get you access to as many ebooks, the ones you do download won't have any DRM and you are free to keep whatever you download for as long as you wish, well past the date of your subscription ending. 

(I only mention SitePoint and not any of the other smaller publishers, not because I am trying to promote SitePoint, but because working for them, I know them well enough to know there isn't any sort of DRM in any of their files, and you can feel free to keep whatever you download and/or convert them to any format you may need if they don't carry your preferred format for any particular ebook. Other smaller services may also work the same, but I can't say for sure if they do or don't.)

174

General Software Discussion / Re: Microsoft and Skype atrocity

« Last post by app103 on July 14, 2017, 08:07 AM »

I have found that Hangouts is good for international group video chat and we use it where I work, just for that purpose, so that we can all attend company meetings, remotely, regardless of where in the world we happen to live. (company located in AU, with remote workers located throughout the world)

It's not a good international alternative for just calling someone and connecting with their phone number, but for things you can schedule, it's great.

175

Living Room / Re: DayAgainstDRM

« Last post by app103 on July 14, 2017, 06:41 AM »

O'Reilly didn't just carry their own books in their shop. They have print on demand contracts with smaller publishers that can't afford to hire printers to publish large batches of their books. O'Reilly allows them to upload a copy of their books, and then they print the books for them, as they are sold. As well as those books also being offered through O'Reilly's shop, these smaller publishers could then sell print editions on their own site, too, only ordering from O'Reilly what they actually have already sold, with O'Reilly shipping them direct to the customers, as well as O'Reilly taking it upon themselves printing up additional copies for titles that seem to sell well, which O'Reilly offers on Amazon and elsewhere.

I have been told that there will be some changes on the current O'Reilly shop pages, to include Amazon buttons for the affected print on demand books, located below the button for reading it on Safari. But to me, this does create a bit of a sticky situation, where many of these small publishers have their own subscription based service for their e-books (most of which are DRM-free), with O'Reilly now becoming a bigger form of competition to them, offering an inferior version of the digital versions (in my opinion any way), while still remaining the actual printer of their books. 

I am not sure I'd entirely define this kind of relationship as "friendly competition", or a "mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship", or even as a "benign parasite". (but that's just my personal opinion)