How to tell what carrier your cell phone is on:

Dial 611 to find out what carrier a cell phone is on.

Or, you can sometimes tell by the home screen, as seen here on this StraighTalk iPhone5:

(TFW = TrackFone Wireless, a.k.a. StraightTalk)

How to Tell if You are Connected to a Verizon Femtocell (Network Extender)

You probably have seen stories like this:

Hack Turns Verizon Femtocell Into Spy Tool

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2421782,00.asp

But there is a simple way to know if you are connected to a real Verizon cell tower, or someone's Verizon femtocell (what Verizon calls a "Verizon Wireless Network Extender", link).

Simply dial #48.

From Verizon's own documentation:
"How do I know my phone is connecting through the Network Extender? When dialing #48 on your wireless phone, an an­nouncement will tell you if you are within range of the Network Extender. In addition, you will hear a short double tone on your wireless phone whenever making or receiving a call. The tone is played at the beginning of the call."

So also watch-out for (well, "listen"-out for) those short double tones too. That's a dead giveaway that you're on a femtocell. If you were not expecting to be on one, and don't trust the new unknown one; then it's time to "go sheilds up!" - set your phone to airplane mode, until you're clear of the area.

Be careful who you connect with!

Happy Tech'n,
-J

How to default HTML render of a Google Calendar on a web page to Week view:

I personally find that the Week view of Google Calendar is more helpful. This is also the case because I have so many calendars and events shared with my account that it just runs out of space trying to fit events into the small squares of a monthly calendar. Furthermore, you don't get the time-block perspective in Month-view that you do in Week-view, where you can easily see where events are double-book or overlapping.

Recently I wanted render a Google Calendar on a web page, and it (of course) defaults to Month-view:

...with options to change it to Week-view, or Agenda-view. I wanted it to default Week-view:

...and optionally display Month-view or Agenda-view.

To do this, you need to add a tiny snip of code to the iframe embed code URL.


For example, your URL probably looks something like this:

src="http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=[your_domain].com_[GoogleAuthKey]%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/New_York&amp"


You just need to add to it:

src="http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=[your_domain].com_[GoogleAuthKey]%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/New_York&mode=week"

That's it! Now the default view mode = week.


Happy Tech'n,
-J