Going Like Sixty

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Here’s what I think…

I got the Magic Jack phone doo-dad today, and it works like a charm!

It’s about the size of a Tic-Tac box with a cable attached. One end of the cable has a phone jack connection, the other end has a USB connection. Plug in the phone, plug into the Magic Jack and wait for the software to install.

I had a glitch on that last part. The software wouldn’t auto-install because I had that feature turned off as a security measure.

They had a link on their website for Magic Fix which I ran a couple times before the installer finally launched.

The only drawback is the limited number of area codes to choose from as your “home” number. I picked Boca Raton, Florida because I’d like to live there.

Since we intend to us it only for outgoing long distance calls, it’s a non-issue.

I attached a cheapo phone and the quality of the call was excellent. No echo, no delay, no static. It was a better quality call than using our cordless landline. Far better than any Skype call.

Don’t call me, I’ll call you - free.

Leave your phone number in my comments, an area that is kind of like a toilet stall.

UPDATE: During the install, the set up for Magic Jack changes your default external sound. If you want your speakers to work, go into the control panel change the default for sound to your speakers.

My friend got his and ran into the same installation difficulties as I did. This is not plug and play - or even plug, run install, and play. It requires running upgrades and their “fixer” program and trial and error.

UPDATE 2: I went to their website and looked at the reviews and I don’t think these folks are scammers because of the glowing review from (among others) PC Mag.

UPDATE 3: Scariest story yet:

In short, it not only has one agree to ads with its paid-for system, but claims that the ads are necessary for it to work. It will also snoop on your calls to target ads more accurately, and has you sign away your legal right to take it to court if it defrauds or otherwise harms you. Delightful.

It gets sexier. When you access MajicJack’s instant web help page, a bizarre series of “compatibility tests” take place first, reporting lies like “Your MagicJack is functioning properly” even if you don’t have one installed.

UPDATE 4: Nice write up in Twice.com, the official newsletter of the Consumer Electronics Show. They might have spent more time on the customer service angle, however. Thanks Bob.

Firefox has been outperforming IE in every department for years, and version 3 is speedier than ever.

But tweak the right settings and you could make it faster still, more than doubling your speed in some situations, all for about five minutes work and for the cost of precisely nothing at all. Here’s what you need to do.

1. Enable pipelining

Browsers are normally very polite, sending a request to a server then waiting for a response before continuing. Pipelining is a more aggressive technique that lets them send multiple requests before any responses are received, often reducing page download times. To enable it, type about:config in the address bar, double-click network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining so their values are set to true, then double-click network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and set this to 8.

Keep in mind that some servers don’t support pipelining, though, and if you regularly visit a lot of these then the tweak can actually reduce performance. Set network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining to false again if you have any problems.

2. Render quickly

Large, complex web pages can take a while to download. Firefox doesn’t want to keep you waiting, so by default will display what it’s received so far every 0.12 seconds (the “content notify interval”). While this helps the browser feel snappy, frequent redraws increase the total page load time, so a longer content notify interval will improve performance.

Type about:config and press [Enter], then right-click (Apple users ctrl-click) somewhere in the window and select New > Integer. Type content.notify.interval as your preference name, click OK, enter 500000 (that’s five hundred thousand, not fifty thousand) and click OK again.

Right-click again in the window and select New > Boolean. This time create a value called content.notify.ontimer and set it to True to finish the job.

3. Faster loading

If you haven’t moved your mouse or touched the keyboard for 0.75 seconds (the content switch threshold) then Firefox enters a low frequency interrupt mode, which means its interface becomes less responsive but your page loads more quickly. Reducing the content switch threshold can improve performance, then, and it only takes a moment.

Type about:config and press [Enter], right-click in the window and select New > Integer. Type content.switch.threshold, click OK, enter 250000 (a quarter of a second) and click OK to finish.

4. No interruptions

You can take the last step even further by telling Firefox to ignore user interface events altogether until the current page has been downloaded. This is a little drastic as Firefox could remain unresponsive for quite some time, but try this and see how it works for you.

Type about:config, press [Enter], right-click in the window and select New > Boolean. Type content.interrupt.parsing, click OK, set the value to False and click OK.

5. Block Flash

Intrusive Flash animations are everywhere, popping up over the content you actually want to read and slowing down your browsing. Fortunately there’s a very easy solution. Install the Flashblock extension (flashblock.mozdev.org) and it’ll block all Flash applets from loading, so web pages will display much more quickly. And if you discover some Flash content that isn’t entirely useless, just click its placeholder to download and view the applet as normal.

6. Increase the cache size

As you browse the web so Firefox stores site images and scripts in a local memory cache, where they can be speedily retrieved if you revisit the same page. If you have plenty of RAM (2 GB of more), leave Firefox running all the time and regularly return to pages then you can improve performance by increasing this cache size. Type about:config and press [Enter], then right-click anywhere in the window and select New > Integer. Type browser.cache.memory.capacity, click OK, enter 65536 and click OK, then restart your browser to get the new, larger cache.

7. Enable TraceMonkey

TraceMonkey is a new Firefox feature that converts slow Javascript into super-speedy x86 code, and so lets it run some functions anything up to 20 times faster than the current version. It’s still buggy so isn’t available in the regular Firefox download yet, but if you’re willing to risk the odd crash or two then there’s an easy way to try it out.

Install the latest nightly build (ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/), launch it, type about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Type JIT in the filter box, then double-click javascript.options.jit.chrome and javascript.options.jit.content to change their values to true, and that’s it - you’re running the fastest Firefox Javascript engine ever.

8. Compress data

If you’ve a slow internet connection then it may feel like you’ll never get Firefox to perform properly, but that’s not necessarily true. Install toonel.net (toonel.net) and this clever Java applet will re-route your web traffic through its own server, compressing it at the same time, so there’s much less to download. And it can even compress JPEGs by allowing you to reduce their quality. This all helps to cut your data transfer, useful if you’re on a limited 1 GB-per-month account, and can at best double your browsing performance.

Tinnitus (ringing in my head) makes it not fun for me to be in a very quiet room. I’m lucky that Nancy likes to fall asleep with the TV on. Otherwise there is usually plenty of background noise to make the tinnitus bearable. Except where our desktop computer is located.

Therefore, when it’s not “fan weather” I depend on Pandora.com - a marvelous internet radio station - to play in background when I’m surfing or blogging. It’s free. But Congress and the Recording Industry Association of America are putting them out of business.

Pandora.com is not peer-to-peer. I’m not pirating music. Pandora pays artists everytime I listen. It’s The Music Genome Project, formed by musicians.

However, an obscure federal panel decided last year that Internet radio providers had to use a different pay scale. An exorbitant pay scale. It’s high now, but by 2010, sites like Pandora will have to pay 2.91 cents per listener per hour. Right now, Pandora will have to pay the RIAA 70% of its projected revenue for 2008, and that bill is going to shut down the site, Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora, said…

I love Pandora.com because it has exposed me to music I NEVER would have listened to in the past. Therefore, I’ve listened to artists that NEVER would have made my playlist because I didn’t know they existed.

Yet RIAA, who you would think would want me to listen to new artists, is killing the Goose that has a big golden egg.

The music industry has been suffering massively reduced revenues lately as music downloads have caused CD sales to plummet. Internet radio was a shining new business model. Not only does it give you a way to listen to your favorites, it gives emerging artists a chance to be heard. Pandora and Slacker make it easy to buy new music too. — music that you might never have heard any other way. The music business must be crazy to limit this pipeline.

Regular radio is exempt from these outrageous feeds. Because they carry those damn irritating commercials to pay the way. Get this: they don’t pay if they broadcast music, but do pay if they stream it on their website!

There is hope - I hope it doesn’t come too late.

Internet Radio Equality Act (HR 2060), which Manzullo and Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) introduced last year. The bill, which maintains the strong bipartisan support of 149 cosponsors, would vacate a Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) decision last year to triple royalty rates Internet radio stations must pay and instead put the rates at parity with satellite and cable radio.

I don’t have a iPod. I find the earpieces annoying. I don’t like CD’s because I don’t want to listen to the same artist for an hour. Terresterial radio is a non-starter because in our little burg it’s Public Radio longhair, Classic Rock, or Country Western. And all those irritating local commercials!

I sure hope Pandora’s box doesn’t get slammed shut by the Recording Industry Association of America. The irony would just be too, well, ironic.

Mexico introduced the Mastretta MXT, the first car to be designed and built in Mexico, at the British Motor Show to rave reviews. the two seater coupe used aircraft construction techniques to create a very light and therefore very fast car. The power is from a Cosworth engine which is turbocharged to create 240 BHP. It should top out at about 150 mph, with a price of about $64,000.  The first model will run on gas, with a compressed natural gas engine promised for the future. The designer Daniel Mastretta went for a retro Can-Am racing car with wide body and muscular stance. He promises that the car will be easy entry and easy exit. 

“Initial drawings of the car were like slashes on the page and these lines are integrated into the design of the car you see here today,” Mastretta says. “I was trying to evoke emotion with the MXT. It has a dynamic tension that I believe drivers will love. “We have a passion for design in transportation which goes back for 20 years and that is fundamental to this car. It looks fantastic, but there is function there too. Great aerodynamics and low weight combine to maximise performance and handling and the low nose and high wings which enclose the wheels allow the driver to place the car very precisely on the road or track.” (gizmag) 

Xer’s seemed to be just totally overwhelmed that Randy Pausch actually died. He actually did. He said he would, he had a deadly form of cancer, he told his family he would die sooner, rather than later.”But, but,” Xer’s seem to be saying… “we never thought he would actually do it!”

Heavy man.

Randy Pausch was a teacher who died of pancreatic cancer.

Lots of people die of pancreatic cancer, so what made him such a star?

Randy Pausch knew nothing more than anybody else about dying from cancer. He just knew how to present.

He was a great presenter.

• white
• male
• handsome
• well-educated
• witty

Pausch benefited from the Tim Russert Effect. If you are a great presenter and can muster an audience, you will become a star. It’s not what you know, it’s how you present it.

At the end, as Dr. Pausch’s body was clearly failing, Mr. Seabolt said he told his friend that it was okay if he felt like he needed to “let go.”

Dr. Pausch’s reply: “I’ll get back to you on that.’’

And those, according to Mr. Seabolt, were the final words of Randy Pausch.

Always leave them wanting more... read the rest of the post.

Things never get lost around our house, they just disappear for a short while and the pop back into view. Is it the same at your house or are you just so organized that if it’s gone, you know it will never return?

Thus is the case with our video camera. It decided to reveal it’s hiding place whilst I was rummaging around for some other treasure. It was in a closet not six feet from where I sit. Inside one of those storage boxes, but nonetheless it was right on top.

Now I can’t wait for the battery to charge to see what’s on that tape!

Also in the box were other electronic gadgets that I just couldn’t throw away.

We all have a dozen unused remotes, right? Or is that just me? So what will we accumulate in the next couple of years?

• mouses
• film cameras
• digital cameras
• headsets
• miles and miles of cables
• power supplies