Nate's blog

As part of my summer internship I was given a G1 phone for the summer. Also, I recently was invited to the google voice beta. Naturally I wanted to use google voice on my G1 and thankfully google recently released a G1 app for voice. This guide will walk you through the setup process for a normal google voice user and will also walk you through setting up your phone to use google voice for voicemail only.

1) Go to the android marketplace and search for “google voice”

2) After the app installs follow the on screen instructions until you reach this screen:

At this screen, pick the 1st option if you want to use your google voice number as your main number, and pick the other options if you want to keep your current number as your phone number.

3) If you picked the first option in the last step then congratulations, your google voice account is now setup and will act as your voicemail box (go to step 8). If you want to keep your current number as your main number read below.

4) Go to the home screen on your android phone.

5) Hit menu the settings, then go to call settings, the go to call forwarding.

Image from engadget.com

6) In call forwarding you are going to need to change the bottom 3 settings, when you click them you will see something like VM: +1##########, you want to change all of the #’s to your google voice number.

7) Go to the google voice website and then go to settings, then enable the “do not disturb” setting. 

8) Enjoy google voice.

PS: If you do not yet have google voice go to http://www.google.com/voice to request and invite.

I really hate it when developers change something when the old system worked just as well if not better than the new one. Mozilla did it when they got rid of the lock icon if FireFox and it looks like google just did when they moved the tabs in iGoogle.

The old iGoogle had tabs at the top of the page, like almost every other website.

Old iGoogle tabs

 However the new iGoogle has moved the tabs to the side.

New iGoogle tabs

If you are like me and want the old tabs back then follow these 3 easy steps…

1) Go to http://www.google.co.uk/ig?hl=en

2) Click the sign in button in the top right corner and if prompted sign in

3) Enjoy the old iGoogle tabs and update any bookmarks or homepage settings

I just finished installing google chrome. It is very good looking and seems to render pages correctly. However there are a few minor annoyances that I have encountered so far. The first is that google was not kidding when it said that this is a minimalist browser, there are not many menus and there is no search bar. Rather most navigating is done from the address bar (which will take some getting used to). Also one thing that really annoys me is that when i click my middle mouse button nothing happens, in IE and FF when i click the middle button i get a nice scroll circle, I do not get this in GC. Additionally I can’t seem to get spell check to work.

I have only using the browser for 1hr so far, which is not enough time to fully evaluate it. Expect a full review in a week.

A few days ago I had a problem with gmail SMTP. Well as visitor Thad points out, it may have not been a problem with my computer after all, it seems like google forgot to renew their SSL certificate, which caused problems for people who were trying to send emails via google’s secure SMTP port.

The time is 12:10 on July 31st, 2008 (7/31/08) and it looks like gmail’s SMTP server may be having some problems, when I try to send a mail in thunderbird using gmail’s SMTP server it goes to 33% hangs for a bit and then gives me an error message that says the email can’t be sent. I’ve looked, but can’t find much info about this problem, so I would like to pose a question to my readers…

Is there anyone else out there experiencing these problems too??? (please comment if you are)

UPDATE: It was an encoding problem on my side, all seems to be find with gmail.