See Part 1 and Part 2. Last fall, I began a series of articles about my journey to “phone independence.” Basically, I found a way to make and receive free phone calls (yes, free) using an actual telephone and a free Google Voice account. This is possible through a gadget called the Obi 100 or Obi 110. This graphic pretty much says it all: If you are fuzzy on the details, please see Part 1 and Part 2 (listed above). I don’t plan to rehash everything here. Unfortunately, I’ve now hit a setback, and I wanted to be honest about it, since I agreed to document every step of my journey. This spring I was planning to port my landline phone number to Google Voice and take the next step. But then Obihai, the company that makes the whole phone-calls-through-Google-Voice thing possible, announced that Google plans as of May 15,…
I’m hitting the road early today, so today’s post has got to be short and sweet. But I wanted to tell my readers about something exciting I recently came across. If you know me, you know I like free. I constantly post about free Kindle books at my Facebook, so if the idea of free Kindle books appeals to you, please come and friend/follow me (https://www.facebook.com/adamblumer for free nonfiction and https://www.facebook.com/AdamBlumerNovelist for fiction). But free phone service, not free books, is why I’ve come calling today (pun intended). A few years ago, I came across Google Voice, and I can’t speak more highly of it. Google Voice gives you a free phone number, and you can send and receive free local and long-distance calls—even send text messages—within the US and Canada completely for free using your computer (via Internet access). Read more about it here: http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html. If you have Internet in your home (and most of…
