A few video’s that once again reminds us about the amazing things we humans are capable of, and while some of these can’t be achieved through hard work, most become apparent only after hard work and perseverance.

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UTF Cast bulk converts files to UTF encoding.

PowerMenu gives useul features in windows eg keep always on top, transparency etc.

Our household is amongst the ~17.5% household in US that does not have a landline and while it has worked very well, there has been occasions where we have felt that having a stationary phone would have been nice.

Recently this got me thinking as I got a Google Voice account (by having one in GrandCentral which Google bought a while back). Here is how we do telephony in our household:

• Mobiles – both of us have one but it’s always on silent/vibrate not to risk waking up our baby, so we do miss calls. Also a lot of times we are not home and wish to make international calls to family, in which case having Google voice (see below) & a Rebtel account really helps.
• Landline – We have a skype-in number (with skype-out feature) that we use through a Voip phone (Netgear SPH200D) which hooks up directly to our internet router so we are not dependent on a computer (and skype software) being on. And it ends up being much cheaper than paying monthly fee for landline. Of course if your internet connection is down, so is your ‘landline’ with this solution.
• Google Voice (GV) – And finally the part that brings it all together: Having a GV nr allows people to call this nr, which in turn will ring all the other phones until someone picks up or it goes to voicemail. Voicemails gets transcribed to text and searchable from gmail. Further you can receive txt msgs on this nr.  There are tons of other features on GV beyond these though. Some of my favorite features:
  • Calling international numbers (call your GV nr and then dial an international nr, not free but very cheap)
  • Having your voicemails accessible from the web and any of your phones
  • Voicemail transcriptions
  • ListenIn
  • Call screening vs. Call presentation
  • Switching phones during an incoming call
  • Temporary call forwarding
  • Sending all calls to voicemail
  • Recording outbound calls
  • Conference calling on the fly
  • Call widgets
  • Goog411 integration

And I expect soon enough Googletalk will be part of this solution which then really makes the possibilities endless.

If you are not familiar with what Akamai is, in one line, they provide an express highway for internet traffic. Certainly worth a watch as to how one of the bigger problems of internet has been solved.

You mayhave seen the movie: The Truman show with Jim Carrey where his character Truman was the star of a TV show with everyone in this world but him knowing about it.

Hearing about it on the radio today, something similar is, in smaller scale, happening around us here in the US at least. It seems with the ongoing recession and home sales so low, real estate agents are taking to new tricks to sell houses: they hire actors to play the roles of good neighbors and plant them around in the emptynext door house or as dog walkers up and down the street or lawnmover neighbor 3 houses down, or a few kids playing on the street…you get the picture.

I personally found it quite disturbing, especially when the buyer in the story realized this after buying the house and moving in that his street pretty much has only empty foreclosed houses.

So, next time you are house hunting and meet a friendly future neighbor, make sure they actually live there.

PS. This is not a April’s fool joke.