Spent some time on the phone with T-Mobile. The first representative disconnected me after a 10 minute conversation about what she might be able to do and how she'd have to put me on hold to be sure…
The second representative was surprisingly nice - he blacklisted Blinko from my account and talked to his supervisor in order to refund one of the charges.
Since I never subscribed to this service (or opted in to their SMS messages, for that matter), I went directly to the FTC to file a complaint.
Now for the waiting game. Yay!
So recently on my T-Mobile phone, I've been getting these text messages from a service called Blinko. Thinking they were spam, I simply deleted them.
Apparently they were more than just spam.
On my bill, I have two items under "other service provider charges" from Blinko. Each for $9.99. This, in addition to the $0.05 I pay for receiving a text message… WTF?!
After getting upset about the Gentoo Forums post, I moved on with my work … the whole reason I created the ebuilds in the first place.
But due to recent traffic on the Catalyst mailing list, I've revisited the "make Catalyst easy to install" issue. You can now find all of Task-Catalyst in my perl-catalyst overlay.
My overlay has at least one distinct advantage over the tarballs being passed around in the forums: it's in Subversion. Getting updates is much simpler than downloading a new tarball, unpacking it, etc.
First, checkout the overlay to your Portage overlays directory:
mkdir -p /usr/local/overlays
cd /usr/local/overlays
svn checkout http://svn.danieltwc.com/overlays/perl-catalyst/trunk perl-catalyst
Then add the overlay to PORTDIR_OVERLAY in your /etc/make.conf file.
PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/overlays/perl-catalyst [...]"
Some of the ebuilds in Portage are not stable yet, so add the following to /etc/portage/package.keywords:
dev-perl/MIME-Types ~x86
dev-perl/Tree-Simple ~x86
dev-perl/DBD-SQLite ~x86
dev-perl/PAR-Dist ~x86 # Only with USE="par"
Finally, install the package:
emerge -av Task-Catalyst
Periodically you'll want to fetch updated packages:
svn update /usr/local/overlays/perl-catalyst
Gentoo users may note that I've duplicated a couple of ebuilds that exist in the Gentoo tree. One is dev-perl/libwww-perl - the version bump is needed for changes to HTTP::Response that HTTP::Request::AsCGI depends on. The other is a version bump to dev-perl/yaml, which is needed for Catalyst 5.64.
The whole process may become easier in the future - Allen and I are tossing around the idea of a CPANPLUS::Dist::Ebuild. Ideally we'd be able to improve on g-cpan. Stay tuned.
After a bit of searching I found eFax. They took my email address and gave me a free fax number. I fully expect to receive spam from them, but that's what Yahoo! accounts are for…
It took about half an hour to actually receive the fax. Whether the delay was on T-Mobile's end or eFax's, I don't know. eFax sent the fax as an attachment to my Yahoo! account. The file was in some proprietary format. eFax provides a free viewer for these files, which can be used to print the fax or convert it to a PDF using OS X's native support.
The fax was not as exciting as I hoped. The cover page listed a number very similar to mine - only one digit different. The fax itself looked like an agreement to sell land somewhere near here, complete with Social Security numbers…
Now I wonder if T-Mobile is going to charge me for receiving or sending the fax… :-/