I'm looking for recommendations on getting a US phone number on my Japanese cell phone, via VOIP. I currently have such a thing with Skype, but their app and feature design are gratuitously stupid... just amazingly dumb.

My needs are simple... I pay a fee to get a US-based phone number, and when someone dials that number, it rings on an app on my iPhone. And using that same app, I can dial out. Voice messages a bonus.

I'd like to use Vonage's app (I've been a normal Vonage customer for a decade), but it doesn't work with Japanese phones.

Going through some closets in our childhood home, my sister came across some software she bought fresh out of college. It's a blast from the 22-years-ago past, when software came with massive manuals.

In this case, the box weighs 30 pounds (14kg), and the manuals are 9" (23cm) wide.

This was back when "Windows™" was just "Windows™" (it was a year or two before "Windows 95™"). She paid about $500 for it, in 1994 dollars no less.

Another issue I discovered with my iPhone today, besides the problem of it not alerting to a new watchOS version, is that restoring an iPhone from a backup with iTunes requires a lot of temporary disk space, and if you don't have enough, the restore operation will partially fail, silently leaving the phone with some apps (and their data) missing.

If you notice, as I did today because most of my apps were missing, you can clear out disk space and re-run the restore.

The first time I encountered this kind of problem was a few months ago when restoring [...]
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This post is for the search engines, about how I remedied an issue with my Apple Watch, for folks who might have the same issues.

TL;DR version: if watch-enhanced apps are not even showing up in the iPhone "Apple Watch" app, check in that app to make sure that you have the latest watchOS version.

I stopped by the Apple Store in Akron Ohio the other day to have my iPhone's camera replaced because its stabilization had started to go crazy. As they fixed it for free under warranty, I lazily watched [...]
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This post is a short followup to last month's "The Scourge (or Beauty) of “Snap To Road” with iPhone Location-Tracking Apps", in which I explained how an attempt by Apple to make the iPhone location services more relevant for car navigation can end up destroying the accuracy for other uses such as geoencoding or fitness tracking. When enabled, the user's location is "snapped" to the center of the nearest road; internally Apple calls it "Map Matching"; I call it "Snap to Road".

In the screenshot of Google Earth seen above, the red line, recorded with the "Snap to Road" feature [...]