The Finland Backlog Post
I didn’t comment on too many things when I was in Finland last week. I’m still playing catch up in Google Reader. Here are a few posts I flagged last week. I didn’t get to all the posts I flagged, so expect more in the coming days.
Sync Google Calendar With Your Phone: My GigaOm himself pointed to a J2ME application that will sync Google Calendar with your phone. I briefly tried this and while it appeared to download everything from Google Calendar into my phone, it didn’t go the other way. Maybe there is some settings here I need to mess with. Clearly, this has a bit more development work before this becomes usable for the masses.
More Ways To Call Free: I feel like I need another way to make phone calls free like I need a hole in the head, but now there’s FuturePhone which gives you the ability to call some number in Iowa and then call a number of other places for free. This apparently is possible because rural phone companies can and do charge a lot of money to terminate calls in their exchanges, and sure enough, Iowa has a ton of them. Nothing but a minute stealer here, time to move along.
Make Your MacBook Run Cooler: Slashdot mentioned this cool little application that allows you to change the speed the processor fans run at so that your laptop isn’t quite so hot when sitting on your lap. I’ll have to try this for an extended period of time and see how well it works.
RSS + BitTorrent = Lawsuit Waiting To Happen: I’ve seen a few articles on this topic, but this is one of the more recent. Other articles are referred to in the comments that may be better or worse for you.
PhoneBoy Gets A Mention: It’s not often I see Russel Shaw come across my Technorati feed as having linked to me, but he did when discussing Symmetric NAT and SightSpeed.
2 Million Users? Who Cares!: VoIPGirl gives TelTel a try and finds out that 2 million customers could very well be wrong. Or they could be using a completely different soft client to access the service. Either way, soft clients are a dime a dozen. Where’s the value?
Real People Try Linux: Someone I know with a bit less geek creed than myself gave Linux a try. Amazingly, she’s still using it, albeit as a bootable CD only. Not sure exactly what distribution she is using, but she recently tried Ubuntu and found she really needs to install it to get Java and Flash working. I pointed her at something I managed to Google about how to make room for Linux on your Windows PC. We’ll see how this all goes.
The PSTN Is Tied To Voice: I want to address a comment made to a post of mine by Aswath Rao, someone far smarter than I am. While you can certainly run more than just “voice” over the PSTN, the fact is the PSTN, as a transport mechanism, is optimized for voice traffic. Certainly you can transmit data over it, however current modem technology maxes out that audio channel at 56kb/s in the downstream direction, 33kb/s in the upstream. IP networks are not optimized for voice, but can handle a wide range of traffic, including voice. The real kernel of my post is that act of switching a call between two networks of the same type (e.g. both running IP) is a lot simpler than switching a call between two different network types (e.g. one running IP, the other GSM).
The Hyper-Informed Haze: This posting by Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger kind of sums up what I ended up doing while I was in Helsinki, which was blog less. I also listened to less podcasts as well. I realized that because I did less in these areas, the world did not end. I experienced the world around me and stepped out of the hyper-informed haze that it’s so easy to get into. I did make a (hopefully) permanent reduction in the number of podcasts I am trying to keep up with on a regular basis. I probably need to do the same thing with my Google Reader as the number of feeds I follow is starting to grow too much.
