Tag: tricks

Call Forwarding to Google Voice Mail

After having a Grand Central account for a long time that I never really used, which has now become Google Voice, I’ve finally found it to be some what useful.

Thanks to my brother tipping me off to this trick, I’ve got a faster voice mail service that can email the messages to me, transcribe them to text, text message them to me, etc.

You can also create groups and setup each group of contacts to reach a different voice mail greeting.

To do this yourself, all you have to do is:

  1. Create a Google Voice account for yourself and select a phone number.
  2. Go to your Google Voice account and open Settings -> Phones and uncheck any phones listed.
  3. Go to Settings -> General and under Notifications you can set it to email you or text the message to yourself.
  4. Dial *71 + 10 digit Google Voice number

Basically, what this does is forward the caller to your Google Voice number if you fail to answer the call. From that point Google Voice just intercepts the call with the Voice Mail greeting message.

If you ever want to undo this little trick, all you have to do is dial *710 on your mobile device and your original voice mail service will be restored (since the phone no longer forwards to the Google Voice number).

These numbers (*71 and *710) are as far as I know generic, however, if they don’t seem to work for your phone service, just do a quick google search for “busy number call forwarding” + your service provider.

Good luck and enjoy! 😉

Wired: Win at Rock Paper Scissors

So after reading my feeds from Google Reader (which is just an awesome feed reader from any way you look at it) I came across on that was interesting and just plain humorous at the same time. I haven’t really played “Rock Paper Scissors” in years…at least not seriously.

This quick article gives you some good tips on what to look for to make your next move and how to lead the game. Not that I expect any of us to really be making use of these tips, but it’s funny so I thought I would share the info.

1. Play paper first. Rookies tend to lead with rock, so paper is the safest opener. (A savvy opponent will try the same, causing a tie.) If you win, claim victory; if not, start the next throw right away, because of course it’s two out of three.

2. Exploit copycats. Casual players often switch to the object that just beat them. You can encourage them to do this by shouting, “Paper wins!” when you defeat their rock. Then throw scissors on the next round.

3. Watch for doubles. People rarely throw the same hand three times in a row; if they play scissors twice, your next move is paper. Also, keep up the pace so they have less time to think and instead fall into patterns.

Hopefully you enjoyed learning these tips as much as I did, haha. 😀

How To: Multiple Homepages in Opera..

Ok, so we all know that you can have a ‘Saved Session’ in Opera and have it open first. This enables you to have what they call “Multiple Homepages”, but I recently had an idea for true ‘Multiple Homepages’. Here it is..

The idea is simple really. You start out by going to the ‘Bookmarks -> Manage bookmarks…’

opera

Now you want to create a folder to store all of the ‘Multiple Homepages’ in. This way you can add as many as you wish and edit the list anytime. Click the arrow beside the ‘Add’ button and select ‘Add New Folder’…

opera

Now that you have a folder made, you can name it anything. Right click on the new folder and in the menu select ‘Properties’. In the properties menu you can edit the name of the folder at anytime. For this example I have called the folder ‘homepages’. The most important part of this step is that you give the folder the nickname ‘homepages’ as seen in the image below. You may add a description if you wish, then click ‘OK’ to save settings.

opera

Now that you’ve added the folder and named it what you wanted, you just need to add a button somewhere so you can open all of your ‘Multiple Homepages’ whenever you wish. To do this simply drag the button you see below to any place in your toolbar as seen in the image below.

Drag me to your toolbar–> [BUTTON]

opera

Now that you’ve finished adding the button where ever you wish, you are finished! That being said, I’d like to say that this task would be accomplished much more easily if Opera would allow us to use nicknames as homepages in the ‘Preferences’ window..

opera

But since they don’t..we are forced to find ‘remedies’ for our problems. I am planning to suggest this to the Opera Developing team so they can possibly add this in the future. It should be as simple as removing the code that inserts the extra ‘http://’ in front of any string that you insert into the homepage text box. (you can see this for your self if you set your homepage in Preferences to ‘homepages’ or something like that then reopen Preferences to see what it saved it as.