Simon’s Blog

I’m in the car driving to family for Christmas eve.  Unfortunately we had to leave our puppy at home tonight.  But that won’t stop me from video chatting with my puppy and then blogging about it all from I-95!

Instructions

• place a laptop near your pet, set the preferences so your laptop never goes to sleep
• have two Skype accounts who are buddies
• turn on Skype, login and set the preferences to automatically answer calls and start video for people on your buddy list
• download fring (free) to your iPhone from the app store
• open fring and sign into your other Skype account
• call the laptop you left next to your pet

Now you can call home from your iPhone or computer whenever you want to see what your pet is doing!  Since the iPhone does not have a forward facing camera your pet will not be able to see you, just hear you.  Fring will only let you perform video calls over wifi, so I am using a jailbreak app which fools the iPhone into thinking it is actually on wifi when using AT&T.  3G Unrestrictor will let you make VoIP calls, watch high-quality YouTube, use the Slingplayer, download large apps and podcasts on AT&T’s 3G network. 3G Unrestrictor is $3 on the Cydia store.

The first time you call your pet it’s really funny how confused they are.  I did this last Christmas with my two cats.  I VPN’d to my iMac and made the video of my face very large for my cats but they didn’t seem to recognize that I was on the screen talking to them, but they did look around the room when they heard me talking to them.  The first time I video chat with Mitsy she was so cute with her eyes wide open staring at the computer then looking around then back to the computer, man I wish I had recorded that, it was classic.

I just saw this dude on the highway. That guy must be so cool.