Hacker's ramblings

Lately, I've been playing Mudrunner: Spintires a lot. That's a really weird game about logging machinery and mud. For some strange reason I find hauling logs from a lake through mud really entertaining. Why logs are located a "lake" is beyond me.

During the gameplay, player needs to operate number of different heavy machinery. This involves driving a skidder, a heavy truck or operating a crane to get the logs loaded. I tried doing that with a traditional mouse and keyboard config. I kinda managed to do it, but anybody who has driven a real car or truck or flown an airplane using only a keyboard knows, it's very tricky. Then I got a hint, that a Playstation 4 controller is really good with that game.

A-haa! All I need to do is hook up my PS4-controller into my PC using ... well... dunno. As Google search engine is a good friend, I found a project DS4Windows from Github https://github.com/Ryochan7/DS4Windows. It will convert a PS4-controller into an Xbox controller, which will work perfectly with most games.

Just hokk up an USB-cable to the controller, run the software, and:

You're done! It really is that simple. Now spinning tires in mud is much much more enjoyable!

The other day I realized, that my mobile subscription has a voicemail. Since its a corporate one, I really cannot control it much, it just ... well ... is.

This existence of voicemail became evident for a simple reason. Somebody left me a message there. Ufff! Why! Personally I hate those 70s relics. If you cannot get a hold of me, just send a SMS or an email! ... People... They just don't get it.

So. I had an easy task, go listen the message. In an iPhone, there is a Voicemail menu:

Tapping the "Call Voicemail" does absolutely nothing. Eventually I did find the voicemail number from my subscription paperworks. That is, if I really was interested in the message, but I wasn't. Being a geek, I wanted to get my iPhone to do what the button caption says. To Call Voicemail.

Apparently that is something my Telco should fix. Or, that's how its done in the Big World. No such joy for me. After a good while of googling around, I found bunch of codes, which actually didn't either work, or do anything useful on an iPhone. Finally, I bumped into an ancient Apple community discussion with topic Q: iphone 5 change/add voicemail number? This user had been instructed the following:

I have just been in contact with Orange regarding this they advised to dial:
*5005*86*123#

This will set the voicemail number to 123 (orange) so hopefully (i've not tested) you can just put your voicemail number inplace of 123!

Yes! Doing a *5005*86*<my voicemail number here># does the trick for my iPhone 8 running iOS 12.1.

While at it, I googled more and found article iPhone codes from the same era.

For a complete list of generic mobile phone Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), or "Quick Codes" or "Feature codes" see Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstructured_Supplementary_Service_Data#Code_table.