Today after reading news after news about Google buying Gizmo I decided to try out Google Voice. I had request and gotten an invitation a while ago, but never found the time for it.

The start was not easy, I had to make 9 attempts before passing the google telephone number validation procedure, but in the end, after turning off the tv and using a flash web-based DTMF generation I succeeded.

I will not get into what Google Voice is right now, if you are interested check this out.

So, it seems Google have decided to take over yet another business and show everyone else how it's done. Combine it with a Gizmo account and you are covered in every situation. And let me tell you, this is big - after all Gizmo is the default VOIP provider when setting up any SIP capable Nokia phone.

What do you get:

• A USA phone number with an area code of your choosing. An incomming call to this phone number can get forwarded to any or all of the phones you have registered.
• Voice mail that you can: listen to online, have transcribed as text, get forwarded to e-mail, just name it... it's got it.
• SMS all over the world - for free
• call any phone in the US - for free
• receive and make calls thrugh WiFi anywhere in the world - no roaming charges
• ... and many more

I'm very happy Google did that... it frees me from Truphone!

About my decision

This phone was a natural upgrade path for me, having owned Nokia E60 and E51 before it.

For a very long time I was contemplating weather I need to upgrade from my E51 and if so, which one to choose the E71 or the E66. On one side I had the E71, with it's QWERTY keyboard, thinner body and huge battery. On the other I had the E66 with it's smaller size and accelerometer.

And since the most anoying feature in the E51 was the extreamly poor battery life (the E51 would some times not last throught a day of my typical use), I went for the E71 - even though I did not thing the QWERTY keyboard as an important feature.

To be honest I still contemplate getting the E66 also. Read below my thoughts on the phone: how does it compare, what software I find useful, etc.

Putting aside the great looks and being a truly remarkable machieve one fact that made me buy a PS3 was the fact that I could install Linux on it. As soon as I found the Terra Soft website I started the YDL 5.0 download and ran to the shop to get my PS3.
Abount an hour later my linux booted, and I realized there are few things I had not considered. These are as I see them the main disadvantages of the PS3, when it comes to Linux:

• It runs linux in a hipervisor - this means disk access is very slow, video is confined to framebuffer only and is very slow as well
• The system memory is extreamly limited.

In this article I want to share a cool solution I've found the latter problem

I remember the day I got my first walkman as it was yesterday. You can't imagine the goy I boy living in a small comunist country in Eastern Europe can feal, to be one of a blessed few who own a device most have not even seen yet. It was a far cry from todays models. It could only turn one way, so there was no rewind button, the speed controll was far from being precise, I could hear quite clearly the interference from the brushes of the DC motor inside and more often then not it would wrinkle my tapes. The worst probably was that it ran just 30 or so minutes on two quite expensite bulgarian made carbon AA bateries.
Sony has gone a long way since then. Now I own a Sony Hi-MD walkman that runs so loing on it's internal battery that I never manage to keep track of how long it was since I charged it.