Slate has a decent review of various VOIP services. They like AT&T CallVantage, but it sounds like you may want to wait a bit yet based on this opinion of VOIP as a whole: Reliability also is not always up to land-line snuff. Sometimes there’s no dial tone, your outgoing calls don’t go through, or [...]
How many times have you been at a movie, in a lecture, or on the train and heard someone’s watch beeping? And have them not even notice? Grrrrr. This Casio GW-400J vibrating watch (covered at Watch Report) makes too much sense – you feel it vibrate, and nobody else knows. My wife’s analog/digital combo watch [...]
A Million Monkeys Typing has The Beginner’s Mind, a Zen riff on too much organization getting in the way of living an actual life: Why did I need to have several versions of a contact list, in three different forms? One is enough. Did I really need two ways of tracking projects, and did I [...]
I like the idea, but haven’t done it yet – I get free long distance on my cellphone, and since I’m a social recluse, I just don’t talk that much anyway. Our landline has the ringer shut off since we only use it for DSL. But I know that eventually we’ll go with VOIP, if [...]
Brighthand recently ran an editorial titled Handhelds vs. Laptops — How to Lighten Your Load in One Easy Lesson. Well, that’s an appealing premise – I’d love to lighten my load, but I still take my Thinkpad with me when I need something more than my cellphone. It isn’t because handhelds and PDAs aren’t amazingly [...]
IMAP lets you have the best parts of a corporate email server for your personal life. Jennifer Berger at MacWorld recently saw the light – you should take a look. As she says: IMAP lets me keep all my e-mail on my company’s e-mail server, along with any custom folders, and my Sent items. I [...]
This is a great way to save on clutter and expense. We live in an apartment, so the computer is right where an entertainment center would be anyway. Rather than buying a big, heavy, expensive TV plus a big, heavy, expensive monitor, put all the cash into a nice LCD monitor. You’ll need a TV [...]
Loyd’s basement office sounds like my worst nightmare: At times, it can be difficult to navigate through piles of hardware. With various PC cases littering the floor and every tabletop surface holding heat sinks, CDs, manuals, game boxes, and other assorted small hardware, the basement lab will often look like the Tasmanian Devil just whirled [...]
As mentioned in an earlier post, if you store data, it is vulnerable. In the case of CardSystems Solutions and the recent massive data theft, they were particularly vulnerable since they failed to secure their network, even though they had been certified to a security standard set by MasterCard and Visa. Of course, that certification [...]
I hate cables and adapters both at home and while traveling. Problem number one is the huge number of incompatible chargers. This WaPo article says it best: “If you switch [cell phone] brands, it won’t work,” Kammerer said of his many chargers. “I wish they were standardized. My briefcase gets heavy.” Manufacturers argue that providing [...]