I didn’t know there was a whole initiative pushing both projects and hosts to upgrade. But with the end of support for PHP4 upcoming at the end of this year, I guess it is good there is one. I also would say that if you are still with a host who will not provide you PHP5 support, I would recommend switching immediately.
This a website that I came across today that is a museum of old computer hardware. It is pretty cool and has a lot of information, however the museum is a little hard to browse. I especially like looking at the technical specifications and the original cost of the hardware.
I found a great website that will let you lookup a phone number and find out what other area codes and prefixes that number can connect to as a local call. It has really good searching and sorting; you can find a number by city and state or area code and prefix. And once you find an area code and prefix you can see what other prefixes it is able to dial in its local calling area.
The reason I was searching for a prefix is because I recently signed up for another service called Grand Central. Grand Central is an amazing free service by Google that will give you a phone number of your choosing and then allow to route calls for that number to any amount of other phones. It also can screen calls, take messages and even pretend to be a disconnected line to salesmen. Right now Grand Central is invitation only and it looks like they are building in ways to charge for parts of the service, so it remains to be seen if it will be free forever. But it is a great service for me because now I can provide my family a local phone number to reach me at (hence the reason I was looking to see which prefixes were local to each other).
The local calling website.
http://www.localcallingguide.com
Grand Central’s website.
http://www.grandcentral.com
One of the greatest Linux applications I have ever used is Tomboy. It is a simple note taking application that sits in your toolbar and provides quick note creation, searching, basic formatting and linking between notes. It is perfect for the kind of note taking I do on the fly while sitting at my computer.
Long have I searched for a worthy equivalent for Mac OSX without much luck. For a time I used WikityWidget on the Dashboard. The only thing I didn’t like about WikityWidget was that you couldn’t resize the window to allow for more note room.
However on random forum the other day a saw a reference to a OSX application called Sidenote. It hangs out on the side of you desktop and allows you to mouseover and quickly create and jot down notes. It does support some formatting and you can save them externally. It also allows you to drag images and files into the note (I have tried images and pdfs). However it trails Tomboy in that there is no searching or linking between notes.
Overall I really like Sidenote and have been using it like crazy over the past few days. It will definitely be added to my Mac application toolbox. I want to thank Pierre Chantel for taking the time write and then give away such an excellent application.
Switching my MacBook from OSX to Ubuntu on the whole has been a good experience. Regrettably I will have to put OSX back onto my laptop. This is mainly because I need to be able to use Skype with video in my work. I do plan to setup a dual boot on my machine as soon as I get time.
I am going to use Boot Camp to get the drive partitioned and then put rEFIt on to manage startup.
I am most likely going to go with Kubuntu over Ubuntu. I have always primarily been a KDE fan when it comes to a graphical environment in Linux (plus I am looking forward to trying KDE 4). However over the last few years it seems like Gnome has been getting a larger emphasis from the community. So I have been trying to make myself use it more often, but there are just little things that will annoy me on Gnome or I will run into something that I like better on KDE.
The applications packages built for KDE have a lot of nice stuff in them that I like better than the GTK equivalents. Like Amarok over Banshee; or Kate over Gedit. I also really like Kmail and the related Koffice applications over Evolution. And all of those applications just run a lot smoother in a KDE environment.
Another one of the things that gets to me is that it seems the KIO interface works a lot soother than the IO interface for Gnome. I was always fighting with loss of connectivity when it came to dealing with Samba shares or SSH mounts.
Gnome is very much a capable and user friendly windowed environment, but I just prefer KDE overall a little more.
Anyway, if I don’t end up using a form of Ubuntu, I will probably go back to Fedora (my old favorite), because I have been hearing good things about the new version.
The link for this week is a governmental website that allows you to register your phone number with to prevent telemarketers from being able to call you. The national ‘Do Not Call’ list is run by the Federal Trade Commission and they provide this nice website to register numbers, check a registration and file a complaint on someone who is violating the regulation.
This is one of the only governmental websites I have ever used that was well put together. It is easy to navigate and find information. It is a simple process to register a number. And it offers valuable service.