This may be old news to you but it’s new to me. You can use AOL Instant Messenger to send a text message to your friend’s mobile phone. If your friend’s mobile number is 408-555-1212, just send to AIM buddy +14085551212. Your friend can even reply to the message and you’ll get it back as an instant message. Found this over at lifehacker from this post back in 2005!
Use AIM to send text messages Read More »
More about this later but Callwave and YouMail offer free alternative voicemail services for mobile phone users. Both include a we-based interface to retrieve your voicemail as well as text and email notification of new messages. Callwave can also provide a text-based summary of your voicemail with their Vtxt service. It’s supposed to be different than just speech-to-text in that it squeezes out unnecessary and redundant information. How well does it work? I dunno yet.
Alternative mobile voicemail services: Callwave and YouMail Read More »
Vista Home lacks the GUI to manage local groups which means the group membership of any user you create will be fixed at creation time. Not such a bad deal for most home environments but if you’re running Samurize, like me, it’s a problem if you want to gather and display performance statistics. It’s a problem that’s been discussed over in their forums for a while. While the GUI is absent, you can do it from the command-line.
NET LOCALGROUP "Performance Monitor Users" username /ADD
will do it. You need to run the command in administrative mode and the easiest way I’ve found to do that is to type “cmd” in the search box but, intead of hitting ENTER, hit SHIFT-ENTER. Respond Continue to the UAC prompt and the Dos-like box is running as a full Administrative user. And while you’re at it, check out all of the NET commands — NET /?.
(I’m going to post this over in the Samurize forums but I want to give you all a first-shot at it.)
See this article in Information Week about the author’s attempt to install one of the most popular distributions, and a Linux distro that Dell’s shipping.
Novell’s SUSE anyone?
It’s never easy: Ubuntu install not as simple as you’d hope Read More »
An update to an earlier post, this article in the July 5th Windows Secrets, goes into more detail as to what’s involved in Vista activation.
Vista activation update Read More »
Things have changed in the 6 months since I’ve posted about GPS receivers — prices have come WAY down and location information is being reported more frequently. Semson’s has lots of Bluetooth receivers available including the i-Blue 737 Bluetooth GPS (5 Hz – Updated Version) (32 channel, Auto On/Off, WAAS) for about $100. What’s a 5Hz version? It reads and transmits location information 5 times per second instead of the usual once per second. Lots of software doesn’t read it that fast and if you’ve set the unit to send at 5Hz, it’ll drain the battery faster but if you want/need greater accuracy, there ya go.
Since Microsoft Windows Live Search for Mobile and Google Mobile Maps have come out and can talk with GPS units, GPS receivers make more and more sense as a cheap add-on for a Smartphone. So, which one to get? Well, like I said above, you can get a 5Hz version for about $100. You can also get the Qstarz BT-Q818, a 32-hour, 32 channel MTK chipset model with auto-on/off, for about $70 (check this GpsPasSion forum posting for a review and recommendation). And then there’s the i-Blue 737 with the MTK chipset for $70, too (see this GpsPasSion forum posting for a review and discussion).
More/New GPS receivers Read More »
Information Week does some pretty good articles and this week they came out with Vista Recovery Strategies. It discusses the included backup tool but the thing that I found interesting is the Vista Relibility Monitor (on page 7). It also makes reference to something that I’ve used over and over when I ran into the SVCHOST.EXE problem (see this Windows Secrets story): the system recovery options presented when you boot from the Vista CD/DVD (starts on page 5).
Vista Recovery Strategies Read More »
Saw a reference to PassPack today in today’s (June 14, 2007) Chris Pirillo’s Picks. Would I use that free service? Think about it … you’re giving the passwords to a free service … does that make sense to you? Having run an Internet operation and seeing what can happen at various operations centers, I think I’ll pass. I know, I’m probably in the minority here. I mean, it’s soooo convenient, and they publish their privacy rules and practices and they swear that your data will always remain encrypted and and and. And that’s all well and good until it’s not. And then where are you?
I’m sure the service will flourish and go on to make its founders hundreds of millions of dollars and all of the passwords will remain safe and encrypted. Like the debit and credit card data at T J Maxx?
Online password storage? Read More »
You can always go to Wikipedia — their UMTS article describes it pretty well and there’s even a set of links on the right side of the page that will take you to other standards. Aside from that, here’s an article from a completely different site that, while it talks about Cingular in particular, is still a fairly good intro to UMTS and HSDPA along with their speeds.
3G, EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA: what’s it all mean? Read More »