IN-OZ.com

Sometime between the previous post and now, it seems Google quietly enabled incoming and outgoing calls directly in the Voice app for Google Voice numbers. So we no longer need either a separate VOIP service nor a SIP client app.

More details may be found here.

Recently I switched us to voip.ms for US phone service, and to Acrobits as the Android SIP client. Voip.ms because they have multiple servers around the world, including one in Sydney! Acrobits because it supports push notifications which helps preserve phone battery life, and was the best of the lo...

Now Google has announced termination of Hangouts support for Google Voice, effective early 2021. I think what that means is it will not support voice calls without being linked to a "real" US phone number. After much digging for information I set up an account with Callcentric, a "bri...

On the client side of my VPN I have a Roku which is quite literally a "black box" and cannot be configured to support a VPN. Many other devices will also present this problem. Once again a Raspberry Pi came to the rescue! I configured one as a "VPN gateway" which means adding the...

Just a quick follow-up regarding the US tax return. What I ended up doing for 2019 was to claim the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion instead of the Foreign Tax Credit. The savings (for me) was about the same but this way was a lot easier and avoids the complex dependency on the Australian returns.

And now the local club and many others are closed due to the pandemic. Online play remains for the die-hards, though probably not for me as I was playing to get away from the computer and have some social interactions!

Kind of ironic that I was an early developer of online bridge software.

Sigh.

Contract bridge is without question the greatest card game ever invented. I learned to play in college and immediately became a fan. From roughly 1972 through 1994 I played often in duplicate tournaments, and also being a software developer I developed online bridge software for OKbridge. Having bee...

In the US we used Google Fi which worked well. It includes international roaming at the same US data rates, and that worked well for the first year and a half of our time in Australia. But then there was email from Google saying they were going to cut off our data roaming due to the amount of time a...

I am in no way qualified to give tax advice! This posting is just to relate my experience, having just lodged my first Australian income tax return. This is a topic that I had fretted over quite a bit, as Australia has high income tax rates as well as a 10% value-added tax for most goods and service...

For what it's worth here is a nice article about things to do in Melbourne.