#“Quick Call Cost Comparison of Eircom, Skype, Blueface, Google Voice and Rebtel”
We run all of our business phone comms on Blueface (Irish number), Skype (UK number) and Google Voice (US Number). I was doing some checking on dial-out pricing on those services and others over the weekend and collected this initial pricing comparison. Thought it might be useful. Note that these are all Pay As You Go prices, except Eircom which is the home Talktime Chatter package. »
#“Rolling Up My Sleeves to Build a Cross-Platform Mobile App with FeedHenry”
I've been playing around with the FeedHenry platform for the past few months and it really has me excited with the possibilities. If you are not familiar with it, it's a platform for building iPhone/Android/Blackberry/WP7/Nokia-WRT mobile applications from one code-base using just HTML, CSS and JavaScript. These are not just web-apps, they can be uploaded to the various App Stores too. »
#“Courts Service saves \u008030m in costs - Seriously Impressed”
The report said the electronic transfer of information between the courts and the garda has reduced the administration associated with old manual methods by 75 per cent and free up hours equal to approximately 105 full time equivalent staff. via irishtimes.com Give the person responsible for this a big promotion. Well bloody done. Anyone have budget numbers for Courts and HSE to multiply up and see what savings would be possible in HSE? »
#“So I got a new laptop. That’s probably the last time I’ll ever mention it”
Laptops for me are like desktops, phones and screwdrivers. They are tools, not an expression of who I am as a person or what lifestyle I aspire to. I got my last proper one four years ago. It's still going strong and still as dog slow as the day I bought it, second-hand, on eBay. It was a Dell D420 which I have been juggling with a 120 quid Acer Netbook for the past few years. »
#“How to Get Rid of Those Damned Giant Skype Pop-Up Ads”
Pretty much every time I bring up Skype, I get one of these massive overlay ads. This is despite me saying I don't want to see ads and, more importantly, the fact that I'm a paying customer. This is customer abuse, plain and simple.
Luckily I found a solution on one of the Skype forums.In Skype, go to Tools > Change Language > Edit Skype Language File. »
#“That means 7,000 out of 26m people on Skype are using Video Chat right now”
My Skype says 26m people connected right now.Skype says that 300m video chat minutes are used every month.So 10m minutes a day.So 7,000 people every minute out of the 26m connected. i.e. a maximum of 3,500 chats.Sounds about right. i.e. bugger all. What is this bubble obsession with video chat apart from small kids and their parents/grand-parents when they are away? »
#“Hurrah - D-Link brings the Boxee Box remote to PC”
via engadget.com Love that remote. Hate the generic Chinese eBay MCE one that we use at the moment. I assume it'll also work with XBMC? $50 is a bit steep tho. Now we just have to wait for Boxee to be stable on Ubuntu again. Roll on Autumn.
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#“Just discovered VMware Unity - Standalone Ubuntu Windows in Windows 7!”
Last night I did a clean install of Ubuntu 11.04 in VMware Player on my Windows 7 machine. I love the Easy-Install feature which makes this an unattended piece of cake. But I was perplexed to find that the new Ubuntu Unity Desktop was missing. Eventually I sussed that it doesn't work (yet) in Player. But in my search I kept finding references to another "Unity" in VMware so I had to see what it was. »
#“The 627,000th Post on Google+ This Week”
You are all probably as sick as I am of all the stuff written about Google+. But I've found very few posts digging into the functionality beyond the usual top-level feature list. I'm really pleased that Google is actively soliciting feedback after their ostrich-like behaviour with Buzz. But there is too much here for me to enter as individual tickets.
Overall
Overall I like Google+ and think I'll be using it quite a bit. »