Posted on Leave a comment

Howto Fix text messages when switching from an iPhone to an Android phone

If you are not getting any text messages from your contacts after switching to Android, you have to remove your number from Apple’s servers.

First, put the old sim in your iPhone and disable iMessage.
Next, go to this webpage.https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/
Follow the instructions and you should be good to go.
HTH. 🙂

Posted on Leave a comment

Getting things done and life in general

Do you get that feeling that our lives are getting complicated as we get older? Well I read this marvelous book called Getting things done The art of stress free productivity. I highly recommend it. I am trying to apply all the things from this wonderful book. Let me see, Dev and I bought a big filing cabinet to organize all of our documents, we bought a lot of folders, we bought a labeler, notebooks (Moleskine) and we have an inbox, sort of. And for the techie in me, I found orgmode. orgmodeOrgmode is the best thing invented since sliced bread!
Getting things done (GTD) has this mantra that everything needs to be captured. By that we mean, any input such as telephone calls, emails, snail mail, and even random ideas that props up in our brain, needs to be captured. They call this capturing. So when we capture, we put all this stuff in a “to-be sorted” inbox. The idea is to get the “captured thing” and move on and continue whatever one is doing. One part that I haven’t gotten an optimum solution yet is the capturing while I am driving. I have driven long hours ever since I moved and Dev still lives two hours away. I was thinking that I could use my cellphone’s voice recorder function but I found out that this is not easy with an Iphone or an Android phone. I miss my Blackberry’s one button voice recording. I really miss that functionality. I wanted to go back to Blackberry. I read rumors that Blackberry might be switching to Android. I hope they do it. I also hope that my carrier supports it. textnowI recently switched to Textnow, which is a Sprint MVNO. So right now, I am missing a lot of this cool ideas, what I usually do is have Dev write the idea on my Moleskine if she is there beside me.

Posted on Leave a comment

Getting “push email” without an Exchange server

For some people, getting their email pushed to their mobile is important. Although the emails from my home email server is not really as important as my work emails, it still is a good learning experience and its fun. 😀

First, one must already have a working email server. I  am not going to discuss that here. My personal setup is a Debian unstable box with Postfix and Dovecot. I set up my imap server with Maildir and virtual users.

Next, if you use a Debian based distro, do not use “d-push” ,the Debian packaged version of Z-Push, because it is old and I ran into a lot of problems getting it to work. Just download the upstream version and you should be fine.

Unpack the downloaded file and follow the “INSTALL” file instructions.

There are 2 config.php file that we have to edit. The main one on the root of the install, we need to add the “BACKEND_PROVIDER”. Since I am using imap, I added “BackendIMAP”.

Screen Shot 2015-03-07 at 11.32.10 AM

 

 

 

The second config.php file is under the backend/imap folder.  I change the port because I am using SSL. The options part I had to do a lot of trial and error, and some research.(5)

Screen Shot 2015-03-07 at 11.30.00 AM

 

 

 

Save both of this files and reload your Apache.  Before setting up your device try to login through the browser. One should get something similar to this screenshot. If not, you need to do more troubleshooting.

Screen Shot 2015-03-07 at 11.59.07 AM

 

 

 

 

References

  1. http://php.net/manual/en/function.imap-open.php
  2. http://z-push.org/
  3. http://z-push.sourceforge.net/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2408&p=8788&hilit=dovecot#p8788
  4. http://doc.zarafa.com/7.0/Administrator_Manual/en-US/html/_zpush.html
  5. https://nickebo.net/setting-up-push-mail-with-dovecot/