A Whole Lotta Nothing

How to port your AT&T iPhone number to a new Verizon iPhone quickly

I'm going to write up all the steps to move off a AT&T phone onto a new Verizon phone because I had to assemble all this info from disparate sources and figure others might save time if they knew about all the steps to do it yourself.

Before you call you will need a lot of info that might take some digging. It requires:

1. Your AT&T account number (mine was 12 digits, all numbers)
2. Your AT&T account secret PIN (mine was all numbers, 6 digits)
3. The last 4 digits of either your Social Security number for a personal account or the business EIN for a business account
4. Your new (temporary) Verizon phone number
5. Your old AT&T number you'd like to port over.

Once you have all that written down, follow these steps. 

• Take out your new iPhone, sync it to your iTunes, probably restore from your other phone's backup
• call Verizon's number porting system at 866-465-5415 (probably on a home phone, with speaker phone so you can enter lots of digits)
• Enter the old AT&T phone number, get an error, press 2 to proceed, then press 3 to replace a number with an old one, enter current temp Verizon number, then they will ask for your last four digits of your Social Security Number or EIN business number.
• Go through the menus, eventually you will need to give the old AT&T phone number again and then your AT&T account number and your PIN on your account.
• You will get a "port request began" success message at the end.
• Hang up and go to verizonwireless.com/port to check the status. It should say that porting is in progress. They say this will take 3-24hrs, but I would suggest waiting about 10-15 minutes before going to the next step.
• Start your new iPhone, dial *228 and follow the prompts to activate your new phone and it should say your new phone is activated.
• Let your phone sit after hanging up. You will be kicked off the Verizon network and then join back on about a minute later, with your AT&T number.
• If your phone still has the temp Verizon number, wait another 5-10min and then call *228 and activate your phone again, when it comes back onto the Verizon network, chances are your old number will be attached to it.
• Wipe/restore your old AT&T phone and sell it to someone else

The number porting process says you will get a text message at some point when it is all complete, but that never happened for me, and if you have all this information handy and you follow these steps, you can get your number ported in about ten minutes without any need for human intervention. Good Luck!

Reddit vs. Metafilter, London pub quiz

It transpired that there was enough of us (about 22?) to make up 3 Metafilter teams and that being a spectator wasn't going to be an option. As I struggled to come to terms with this responsibility, a large group of Redditors arrived.

As I watched them file in, my heart sank. They had the confident air of people who were very good at Pub Quizzes. These were clearly people who knew a lot of trivia.

Their leader, Lowercase_Drawer, came over and introduced himself, and spoke to adrianhon. I didn't really catch what he was saying, but from his poise and deliberateness, it seemed like he was saying the kind of stuff a Bond villain says when they have the upper hand.

via metatalk.metafilter.com

I won't spoil the ending, but after the build up on reddit, I was pleased with the results.

SendTab: a great simple app for managing screens

For the last year I've been using my friend Ben's app Sendtab to manage all the different places I find interesting content. He originally built it as a way to send anything from his laptop to a mac mini attached to his home TV (he cut cable and was constantly watching online video). I started using it soon after it was built and it's become a killer app, as I use it every day on at least three devices.

I mostly blame Twitter for this very First World Problem, but I read Twitter each morning on my iPhone when I'm slowly getting out of bed. As Twitter has replaced tools like Delicious for link sharing, I've found friends sharing interesting links, articles, products, etc almost every morning. Whenever I think "wow, I need to check that out later on my Mac after I get up" I use Sendtab. Same goes for viewing Twitter on an iPad (especially if the link leads to some flash content I can't view right then and there).

Sendtab is a pretty simple thing, you just click a bookmarklet or copy a URL to an iOS app and you can save a URL to your pile to view later on other devices (and you can optionally direct it at a specific device). Why is this useful? For me, I can move anything interesting from my iPhone to my desktop computer and view it hours later. I've also got a GoogleTV attached to my living room TV so when someone points out an hour long lecture worth watching or a hilarious YouTube video I want to show my family, I save those to SendTab as well, pulling them up on my TV via GoogleTV's home screen bookmarks.

I know Instapaper is a good app for tracking articles among many devices, and Boxee enables you to "watch later" any video you find online, but I find SendTab is a nice simple silo for tossing everything interesting I want to check out on some other device. It's also handy for "I'm going out the door to the airport and want to keep reading that NYT article I'm halfway through" by letting you send links to specific named devices (the iOS app can fetch these and bounce directly to the URL). 

To date it's been a simple web app. Ben recently put out a real iOS version of it as well for 99 cents. I also use the Sendtab extension for Chrome that adds a nice big Sendtab button to my browser. If you read/watch the internet on a variety of devices throughout your day, check out Sendtab, it's good simple software that does exactly what it was designed for.