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.

The concept of microblogging has been around for a while and is championed (based on userbase?) by Twitter. I for one don’t seem to get why and at the risk of making an ignorant statement like these,  I find micro-blogging in its current form (with exception of a handful scenarios) frivolous and useless. The main argument I hear about it is that twitter (or similar services) are the real-time web and unless Google or others move towards that, you will be losing the game by serving the users content that is not super fresh and real time. I can see that being the case eventually and maybe the current form is just a stop-gap to figure out how to get us there and just maybe that is why Facebook is so obsessed with turning into twitter to the degree that it changes the site to even look like twitter. And then you have Google to some degree drooling over Facebook and certain aspects of its model and Microsoft trying to catch up with Google. We have a full ecosystem right there with these four guys.
Here is a good video summarizing my sentiments on tweeting (thanks to Karina):

PS. I do have a twitter account (curiosity) but I think I have logged into it maybe twice in the last 6 months.

A long time ago I switched to Firefox mostly because of its extremly useful plug-in model (which also includes add-ons such as ieTab). I do use Internet Explorer (IE) from time to time since certain sites still are optimized (or only work) for/on IE.

Then came Google Chrome along and at a first brief encounter (installed on my Windows Server 2008 machine), I wasn’t impressed with the promised speed along with the fact that there were virtually no plugins out there to use.

A couple of months passed and I kept reading in blogs and other places about the amazing performance of this browser (e.g. test done by ExtremeTech), so I decided to give it a week on my Vista machine just in case in case…and surely I started seeing results. Web pages do load faster and I really find the omnibar very useful saving me both time and click as it tends to find what I am looking for 85% of time as the first result.

So even though I have to give up a few of my plugins (and thereby features) due to chrome being so new on the market and lacking proper plugins, I still find it worth it even if the speed gain is 2.3% (according to the tests). You may think above certain limit small gain in speed does not matter and it’s more of a marketing ploy. I disagree because performance hit even in small dosage is very noticeable and frustrating, so I take performance over feature richness if I have to.

I don’t have an iPhone but rather a Nokia E71 which for my needs is better than the iPhone (maybe I will write a comparison later).

Nevertheless, what I really dislike is that many carriers (e.g. AT&T) lock the phones they sell to their own network. I am paying for the phone and you are already making me commit for 2 years to use your services, so the only way I interpret your move to lock the phone beyond our agreement is that you are insecure of the quality of your services, hence you use this method to shackle me down to continue using your network. Of course there is more to this as carriers usually pay through the nose to get exclusive deals with (hot) phone manufacturers and this is one way for them to try and get back that money. Bottom line though, it is not very customer oriented.

Anyways, for all you iPhone fans who are not on AT&T but still want want to be able to use an iPhone, here is a method to ‘unlock’ your iPhone and still keep your warranty (which other methods such as jailbreaking can’t do)

Moogle.com offers an unlock adapter to achieve this for $29.99. I am sure there are other sites that offer this service and the way these work is that they don’t modify any part of the phone itself, neither by hardware nor by software. The only thing they do is they intercept the data traffic between the SIM card and the phone, and when the phone asks for sim card’s operator code it gets a “fake” code back (basically, the phone thinks it’s using ATT sim card although it is not). That check is done once upon phone boot, sim insertion and/or signal re-acquisition. The other parts of the phone do not care (so they display proper operator logo, connect to the right network etc.) and do not ask for the code again.
Then again, I am sure it is a matter of time before Apple & the carriers who have exclusive deals with Apple tighten up the model further through the software updates so this stops working.

I heard of qik.com a while back and been wanting to try it out but unfortunately it was not available for Windows Mobile phones. To summarize it in one line: the site allows you to stream live video from your phone on the net.

Why is this so cool? If you think about it, a major part of having family/friends close to you geographically means that you get to know about the small details of their lives as you have frequent interactions which provides this wonderful aspect. You know, small seemingly unimportant details that we feel there is no time to share or are simply not important enough when we are thousands of miles away from each other and chat over the phone/skype/chat etc.

With my (3G) Nokia and Qik installed on it, all I need to do is send a text msg to whoever I want to share a visual moment with, be it when I am at a concert, our baby doing something cute or some other share-worthy event happens, and they can get on qik site and watch it live (with ~10 seconds lag). It also gets recorded in case you want to see it later. No more a need for a web cam connected to computer with internet connection.

And here is an actual example of a situation when it was very useful : When being at a pool with our daughter Carmel, I sent a text message to my parents telling them they can get on qik.com which they did back in Finland, and they were able to enjoy Carmel, seeing her splash and laugh in the pool, *live*. Alternative to this would have been to record it on the phone or other camera, download it to a computer, upload it to youtube.com, send an email to them to watch it which at best would have been a few hours after the event; not anywhere as good as watching something live and feeling you are part of it.

WinDirStat (via daily Grind) saved me a few gigs on my HD and there is something to be said about data that is presented visually in a nice and useful way and this one does it for sure.