Tag: SMS

Earthquake Notifications on Your Mobile Phone

Here’s a tip for Australians out there after the 5.3 magnitude earthquake the struck Victoria yesterday. I use a service called “If This Then That” or Ifttt for short which is a great way of getting the output of an online service and piping it into something else that may not be natively supported by …

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The Perils of SMS Boarding Passes

This had slipped my mind but remembered this after receiving an advisory notice to a change for a future flight. Jetstar offers the ability to receive your boarding pass on your phone which is then read by a scanner at the boarding gate. This is pretty handy as it reduces the amount of paper used …

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Signup for F3 Critical Alerts from the RTA

Here’s a quick tip for those of us in Sydney that live or work on the North Shore or in the surrounding areas. Back in November 2010, the RTA rolled out a service in pilot for a period of twelve months to notify people about incidents and traffic flow alterations on the F3 which is …

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Six Months and Counting: Critical SMS Bug in Android Goes Unpatched

*** Update *** It seems after an intense amount of feedback, Google has elevated the priority of this flaw to critical. Just a heads up for those of you with Android based smartphones. A bug has been lodged with Google back in June 2010 regarding a bug in the sending of SMS from an Android …

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Apple Peel – Turn Your iPod Touch into a Phone

On my travels across the interwebs, I came across something interesting called the Apple Peel. Basically, it gives the iPod Touch telephony and SMS capabilities but only once the device has undergone the jailbreak process and the appropriate applications have been installed. Bearing in mind that this is still a prototype there are still a …

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Converged vs Standalone Devices – Which is Best?

Particularly over the last decade, we have witnessed convergence of technology at any increasing rate. Ten years ago, mobile phones did little more than make and receive calls and SMS. MMS was later introduced while camera and video functionality started to appear as entry level features. Mobile phones have also turned into mobile broadband modems …

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No Inflight Calls For You!

Shortly after ACMA had given the green light for cellular communication technology to deployed in aircrafts, QANTAS and Jetstar have quickly put the brakes on any such deployment in their fleet. In a blog entry earlier this week I touched on how this technology could become a nuisance particular on longer international flights. At the …

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Australian Airlines to Offer Inflight Cellular Services

In a previous post I wrote about how about how our friends across the ditch were getting access to inflight SMS as well as data for smartphones. That was a couple of months ago and it seems like us Australians weren’t about to be outdone by the Kiwis according to this SMH article. As expected …

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Is Facebook Trying to Replace E-mail?

Whilst I was out and about today I got thinking about how deep Facebook has its hooks in the online social interactions between many people around the world. It didn’t seem too long ago that we were quite happy with online forums, e-mail and SMS before Facebook and Twitter showed up. Outside of work, I …

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In-Flight SMS and Data – Telecom NZ

Today, ZDNet reported that Telecom NZ is going to allow in-flight SMS by the end of this year in addition to data services for smart phones. Interestingly, they have stopped short of offering voice services (but for an introvert like me I am quietly happy with such a decision as I would go stir crazy …

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