back to work

Back in Berlin after one week of vacation. The city is noticeably quieter as many people left for vacation. Summer is seems indeed the most relaxed time in Berlin. The ratio of tourist to inhabitants shifts again towards the tourists.

SIM card issues

Had weird SIM card issues since last week. My iPhone was displaying a message whether I’d want to add this number to my iMessage list of numbers. I didn’t pay attention at first and declined as I was on vacation. But this week had a look and eventually noticed that a different mobile phone number suddenly shows up in my Apple ID settings.

That of course immediately made my alarm bells ring. Had I been hacked?

Upon investigation I noticed that my own phone suddenly shows a different phone number for main SIM card. WTF!?

I did some tests with a friends phone: Calls to this new number immediately get cancelled. Calls to my original number still arrive on my phone. As do messages. Very weird.

Since this is a corporate contract, it wasn’t easy to get support from T-Mobile as I lack the relevant access codes. A bit back and forth via our corporate support eventually solved this mystery …

I have a rather old contract that had two SIM cards for the same mobile number. The second SIM cards sits in a mobile hotspot that I used during my on-call days. Hadn’t used this mobile hotspot in ages. But turned it on last week during vacation. Everything worked. But soon after that weird iOS message about to add the new number showed up. Which I kept declining.

T-Mobile stopped supporting multiple SIM cards for the same number on their side. When my mobile hotspot booked into the mobile network, they assigned a new number from their pool to my main SIM to keep their systems consistent. Two active SIM cards for the same mobile number are no longer supported. They solved this by assigning a new number. Why they assigned it to my main and already active SIM … I don’t know.

That was a relief – I wasn’t hacked but just ran into a technical edge case I guess. Issue is solved meanwhile.

medication foo

Kid is going on a vacation trip to Norway in two weeks. Since he’s got some prescriptive medics we needed to tell the trip organizer which ones he needs. My wife fortunately found out, that we also would need some official papers to accompany the drugs when traveling to Norway. A certified statement from the prescribing doctor in addition to an officially signed and stamped paper from the city of Berlin.

And of course there were only two days left to organize this as we were about to leave for our next week of vacation….

Fortunately everything fell into place and just took a whole lot of traveling the city to collect all the paperwork.

CamSnap camera

a few friends recently got a small digital camera that got some popularity lately. Not for its features, but rather for the lack thereof.

It’s super simple, no screen, no settings, no different lenses. Just turn on and shoot. Download later.

CamSnap is promoted as a summer camp camera which if super affordable and lets you focus on capture the moment instead of over engineering the images and immediately share them to the world.

I like the idea in principle. But decided for the time being against jumping that bandwagon. I miss some key features in the camera which I would meanwhile consider essential:

• accurate meta data in the images: time, orientation

This would allow the images to just be stored without much manual sorting etc. The current model doesn’t keep time. The camera just doesn’t have a clock. There are some workaround, but this would require post processing the images …

Orientation is also quite essential for me now. I don’t want to rotate pictures later …