This is a little late in writing but if you have an iPhone and you make lots of international calls, Skype for iPhone is a great fit. The application is free from the Appstore. It only requires your iPhone to be connected to a wifi to make voice calls. When calling from Skype to Skype, the call was clear and in some instances better than the average cell phone call. Calling to a landline was not so great but functional. When I first used this app, I thought it was broken because I did not put a ‘+’ in front of each number. The test call would work great but anytime I called anyone, it kept saying the party was not reachable. I could not find that issue anywhere on the net. It finally hit me that I needed to add that prefix. After that everything was great. If you purchase Skype’s monthly rate for unlimited calls then theoretically you can use your iPhone to make calls without a contract!
Do you remember the early days of computers when after you’ve purchased your boxy beige unit and brought it home to find a few free programs falling out of the box? Hopefully you didn’t just flip the shipping box over to get to the contents. One of those items was the ‘Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing’. I think I’ve found those disks rummaging through old computer documentation boxes as much as old AOL disks. Now there is a way to get that kind of typing program for FREE and without running Windows 95. The site is http://www.typingweb.com/.
I’ve tried it and it works pretty well for an online FLASH /AJAX / JAVASCRIPT site. In fact I would say it works better than the old Mavis Beacon Typing program. When you register, it lets you save your progress and see how much you improve over time. On my first try I got an average of 51 WPM with a Gross speed of 67 WPM and an 99% accuracy. My problem keys were ETUC. Of course if you don’t want to divulge your information you can just start typing right away without ever registering.
Google released an API for ‘Google Talk’ that will allow developers to write applications that piggyback off the Instant Messaging platform.
It is currently only available in the developer sandbox.
Here’s how to do it.
http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/sandbox
2. When the other person gets on, go to ‘Options’ and click on ‘Start applications’
3. In the address box, put in:
http://code.google.com/apis/talk/examples/chess.xml
Good Luck and have fun!
I was away from home most of the weekend and needed updates on the games. One of the things I’m quickly learning about twitter is how valuable the live search term updates can be. Google is the king of search but twitter is the king of real-time search. Imagine making stock decisions on data that is 15 minutes delay vs real-time. Now imagine if you have the ability to know what the world is talking about right at this moment. Or even better yet, what everyone within a 100 mile radius is chatting about. How much would this information be worth to advertisers or information collectors? This is the power of twitter. Back to the reason of this post, I found http://www.sportsblogtweets.com/. I think this site will get tons of traffic as twitter gets more popular. Go Denver! (I always root for the underdogs)
AVSIM.COM was launched in 1996. In one hack, they have lost everything from then to now. Why did this happen? The owner said they did backups but in the form of mirroring two servers. When the hackers took over both servers, it destroyed this system of backup. In this case an offsite or even OFFLINE backup would have sufficed.
Removable hard drives, DVDs, even old tape backup can’t be compromised over the internet.
I’m sure they’ll have full community support to get those lost 13 years back.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8049780.stm
