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Free Phone Service to/from Your Laptop (…and with free cell minutes)
A Sales Engineer is always on the road, and always has her/his laptop. We often need to make calls that aren’t company calls that we don;t want showing up on the company’s bill. We also find ourselves needing to call work discretely in areas where there is Internet (client site) but no cell phone coverage.
And what about those of us that receive calls from all kinds of people throughout the peak hours of our cell carrier, yet don’t want those minutes taken off our allowance?
What is an enterprising Sales Engineer to do?
I was always frustrated at how Skype was too bulky (kills your battery), and was open to government inspection of content. I don’t use it. Like Gizmo, they get paid for “Skype Out” at a hefty fee. There had to be a better way. Other services I have, like GTalk, don’t even allow for calling land lines. Well, there is a way. Continue reading “Free Phone Service to/from Your Laptop (…and with free cell minutes)”
SlingMedia Apparently Doesn’t Suck!
I bought a Slingbox Pro on August 24th, 2007, at Best Buy. I have used it with my PDA (long since gone), which amazed everyone I showed it to, as well as on the road in hotel rooms and even from different parts of the house. Neat idea, and way ahead of Hava at the time. Still no support for my Dish Network VIP 612 DVR (HD) yet, but good enough.
I did a firmware update the other day, long after the 1 year warranty was up. It bricked my box, along with hundreds or even thousands of others.
My initial email:
Gmail’s “Labels” can act like “Folders”! (but don’t tell anybody)
If you wanted folder functionality in your web based client, you were usually out of luck with Gmail. In fact, here they say so:
Folders
Actually, Gmail doesn’t use folders. To help you organize your mail more effectively, Gmail uses labels instead.
Here’s why we think labels are better than folders:
Labels
Folders
A conversation can have more than one label You can only put a message in one folder A conversation can be in several locations (Inbox, All Mail, Sent Mail, etc.) at once, making it easier to find later You have to remember where you filed a message to retrieve it You can search conversations by label You can’t always do folder-specific searches
But this isn’t actually true-on either account.
You can actually have both folders and labels in Gmail-effectively having cake and eating it, too. All you need to do is install GTDInbox for Gmail so that your browser version of Gmail will act more like the IMAP service it actually is-showing you folders and such like it does in Thunderbird. This does not change anything about Gmail-instead it makes the Gmail interface look the way the actual Gmail servers see the email you have there. This step is also reversible, so any time you want to go back, just uninstall/disable the add-on. Simple.
So lets make a folder in Gmail called TEST:
Continue reading “Gmail’s “Labels” can act like “Folders”! (but don’t tell anybody)”
WTF Fidelity? An open letter…
I just fired off a little stress relief to my primary 401k company, Fidelity:
“[At Fidelity] I currently own/invest in:
Fidelity Dividend Growth FDGFX
Fidelity Magellan FMAGX
Fidelity Select Software & Comp FSCSX
I owned 10 funds at one time, but when I saw them all falling through the roof I converted most to cash, so I could ride this out.
The problem is, YOU DIDN’T!
Continue reading “WTF Fidelity? An open letter…”