Posts filed under 'The Geek Factor'
Gorilla Mobile
seems to have come up with an interesting way to deal with making international calls from your mobile phone. Personally, I don’t — I have a home phone (VoIP), and a work cell phone that I never see the bill for — but someone like Amy who has a sister in Europe… If you pay for Sprint’s $4/mo International Dialing Plan, the calls to a UK cell phone are 31 cents per minute. With Gorilla, you dial an access number in the US and since the access number sees that you’re calling from the cell phone you registered with, there isn’t a PIN to deal with… and then your calls are 25 cents a minute…
Percentage-wise, it’s an even bigger benefit for people who call the Dominican Republic, which I’m sure is pretty common here in New York. Sprint’s $4/mo plan allows you to pay 18c/25c per minute to a Dominican land-line/mobile phone. Gorilla’s rates are 9c/15c…
Seems like the way to drop your phone bill dramatically without dealing with switching carriers for your regular service.
I’d bet that you could even put pauses in the speed-dial for the numbers on your cell phone to have the whole thing completely transparent to you to use.
March 28th, 2007
Well, Yahoo! Mail has gone and removed users’ e-mail quotas.
As the Yodel Anecdotal post mentions, when Yahoo! Mail was launched, they had a total of 200GB of space for all users of Y!Mail.
One might say that Google really changed the game with their launch of GMail with a 1GB quota (which is ever-expanding over time — kind of like the transfer and disk quotas on Dreamhost web hosting accounts).
I haven’t come close to quota on any of my free webmail accounts in years… I came close with Yahoo! Mail back when it was 4 MB, but I never used it as my daily account. Ever since I started having e-mail go to a personal domain, I couldn’t really imagine switching back… in some ways it requires more maintenance, so it’s somewhat harder, but I have the ultimate in control — I’m not hostage to the whims of a company that may discontinue the product or start charging me all of a sudden.
Plenty of free e-mail services have shut down or imposed a fee, some of them with what seemed at the time to be large companies that would never be forced to charge or shut down. AltaVista Mail went the way of the dodo in 2002. USA.net in 2001. This Email RIP site also mentions some real dick moves like December 2001’s AT&T “kills” 1 million+ addresses by switching users from @home.com to @attbi.com domains - without forwarding mails addressed to @home.com!
Of course, it would be negligent of me to miss mentioning Rediff’s unlimited quota mail, though I can’t imagine forcing myself through a pop-up hell of Bollywood crap to check to see if I got a password reminder e-mail for something.
March 28th, 2007
ArsTechnica has an article on upgrading your AppleTV’s hard drive. While the self-upgrade steps are only linked to (Engadget has a howto), I found it funny that there’s already a 3rd party service center who’ll do the upgrade for you… and they claim that it doesn’t void the warranty from Apple, that only the replacement HD isn’t covered.
I’ve been considering getting an AppleTV, a Mac Mini, and a high-def flat panel TV. One of the AppleTV’s main uses, as far as I consider it, would be if I could rip DVDs to a hard drive, and keep my collection tucked away. That, plus playing with MacOS X, would be the reason for the Mini…
Of course, the question then becomes: augment the Mini’s storage with an external drive, augment the AppleTV with a larger HD, or both?
I’m quite looking forward to the time when I have my movie collection all ripped and on magnetic media for an on-demand experience. Maybe soon…
March 27th, 2007
Looks like there might be an elevated alert level in New York City, as there were multiple police officers in subway stations on my way home today.
Like 5-6 on the southbound 1-train platform at 34th… which is unusually high.
I rarely see more than one or two cops on a platform, and I don’t think I’ve seen one actually on a train since I’ve lived here. Which, of course, makes me wonder who the hell I’m supposed to tell if I see something suspicious on the train with me.
March 7th, 2007
So I got a G4 tower given to my by Amy last year when she moved — the HD got toasted, and it was no use to her. I figured that I’d try to recover things off the HD for her at some point. It’s my first Mac, and it’s been sitting here since June.
Fast-forward to today. Searched Craigslist for a firewire HD, e-mailed the dude with my number, and got a call an hour later. Taking taxis to go pick up used stuff probably isn’t the most cost-effective, but it was quick and painless that way, and I got a 120GB Firewire LaCie drive for $60 plus cab fare.
I didn’t get to playing with the Mac right away. My apartment is such that the computers have their own bedroom, and I didn’t summon the will to start moving things around to hook it up until just a little bit ago. Plugged in the HD, a monitor that I had laying around, and… hmm… well, it turns out that I don’t have a single USB keyboard. I guess seeing them everywhere while at work somehow got things confused in my head. So I suppose I’ll have to wait until tomorrow, at least.
Since I also got install media, the plan, I suppose, is to install the OS onto the LaCie and then see if I can access anything on the internal HD to get it back for her… then learn just how all these damned OS X features work. I haven’t regularly used a Mac since System 7, and it’ll probably be quite strange. I don’t expect it to be anything more than a plaything, though perhaps it’ll get me to pay the Jobs tax at some point.
Beyond, that is, the $30 for an Apple keyboard that I’ll probably spend tomorrow.
February 19th, 2007
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