Status-Q

I've been playing with Gizmo. For those who haven't come across it, the Gizmo Project is like Skype, but uses open, standard VoIP protocols. Why would you want to do this, when the software's still in beta and there are millions of people using Skype? Well, because Skype users can only connect to other Skype users (unless they pay money to be routed over the standard phone system). Gizmo can connect to things which are not Gizmo, like standard VoIP phones and IP-capable exchanges.

I have both of these. I've been experimenting with Asterisk, the open source PBX, and I'll write more about that soon. But for now, suffice it to say that my office phone line is now connected to a computer, instead of to a phone. I have a motley collection of phones around the house which are also connected to it, either via conventional phone wiring or via the network. And I have complete control over this... but more about that in a later post.

When you get a Gizmo ID, which is just like registering for AIM or Skype, you get something which works just like those systems, but can also be dialled by a standard VoIP system (using a SIP call to <gizmoname>@proxy01.sipphone.com, for those interested). So I now have phones around the house on which I can dial a four-digit extension number and it will call my friend Robert on his Gizmo session, wherever he is in the world. And he can choose which phones in my house to ring, because I've assigned them different names, or whether to ring all of them at once, and he can do it when he doesn't have a phone handy! And get this: it's all free!.

Now, there are quite a few rough edges here still, and configuring some of this is not for the faint-hearted, but trust me, this is the way of the future. You can now either call my phone here using either using a phone number (and pay for the privilege) or call, say, my study using study@home.quentin.org. (Actually, I've changed the address here, but it's very similar to that; let me know if you'd like to try it). The second one is more flexible, easier to remember, and it won't cost you a penny.

Here's a quick idea: When you're next getting your business cards printed, upload your vCard (the standard electronic equivalent) to a web server somewhere, and print the URL of the vCard on your business card. Most people end up copying business cards into an electronic address book - those that are important to them, anyway - and if you do this then they'll only have to type in one thing.

You don't have to publish your details for all and sundry to see; you don't need to link to it from elsewhere on your web site, and you can pick a fun URL that people won't guess, like www.mycompany.com/007.vcf . But if you're giving somebody the details in paper form anyway, it's probably because you want to make it easy for them to contact you, so why not make it even easier?

Creating a vCard file is easy. On a Mac, you can just drag your address from the Address Book to your desktop or some other folder. On Windows, I think you can select a contact in Outlook or Outlook Express and do a Save As... Thunderbird, sadly, doesn't seem to export vCards yet, though it will import them.

There was a time when almost everyone had a PalmPilot, and you could just beam your details to them. Sometimes technology takes a step backwards...

Want to find books at the cheapest prices? ISBN.nu is an interesting way to do comparisons.

Rose has been avidly listening to the cricket. Well, à chacun son gout, that's what I say. However, during much of the day, it's only broadcast on BBC Radio 4 LW (Long Wave), not on FM.

Now, the last time I used Long Wave, we specified things by wavelength and hence everything was in metres, whereas now everything is in kHz, so it took me a while to realise that we no longer have a radio in the house, at least not a portable one, capable of receiving LW.

Ironically, the only way we could allow Rose to listen to the cricket while working in the garden was to put a laptop out there and connect to the BBC web site using our own wireless network. (Which can be found on your dial at about the 12cm mark, by the way.)

iTunes 4.9 is out and splashed across the front of Apple's site with the tagline 'Radio Reborn'. Why? Because it has built-in support for subscribing to podcasts. This is quite big news. More info.

I've been surprised how much I've used the RSS facilities in the Tiger version of Safari. I had assumed beforehand that the facilities in a general-purpose browser would not match up to those in NetNewsWire Lite, the RSS reader I had previously used. They don't, but in fact Safari provides all I need - an indication on my bookmarks bar of which pages have new material.

So I expect that iTunes will now replace my copy of iPodderX Lite, though I'd still recommend the full iPodderX for anyone needing more substantial facilities.

I came across this a while ago and forgot it. TinyURL.com is a free redirection service which takes your big URLs, like this one:

and turns them into small ones which do the same thing:

Much less messy in your email messages. Much easier to dictate over the phone.

If, like me, you normally only hear Steve Jobs talking about the latest Apple product launches, you might like the Commencement Address he gave at Stanford recently.

The buzzphrase of the moment is AJAX. If you're a programmer, and you don't know about this, you will soon. It stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML, which is an increasingly common technique for updating parts of a web page from a server without having to update the whole thing.

It's being heavily used by Google in Gmail and Google Maps, for example. And I think it my duty to keep Status-Q readers up to date with such terms so that you can casually drop them into conversations around the water cooler. "Oh no, it isn't using Flash. It's based on AJAX..."

Podcasts are becoming more and more important to me. Every day, while shaving or dressing, I get to listen to about 20 mins of interesting, educational stuff, usually talks from conferences that I didn't get to attend. Now I can 'attend' them without any cost in money or time! If I had a daily commute to work, it would be even more valuable.

I've always been a big fan of radio. The quality of radio & TV broadcasting here is one of the few things about Britain that still makes me proud of my country. The more I travel, the more I realise that our publicly-funded BBC really is the best in the world. And I'm ever more aware that, despite this, its days in its current form are numbered.

But if I, as an enthusiastic supporter of radio in Britain, find myself spending more time listening to podcasts than the radio, no wonder it's taking off at such a rate in the rest of the world! I don't expect, for example, when I turn on the radio, to hear any commercials, but for most of the world the simple matter of podcasts being largely advertisement-free is probably enough of an incentive in itself.