Sat 27 Dec 2003
No, these links are not holiday related; I have been too busy stuffing my face the past few days to write anything. Here are a few links that I would have written about if I had more time between holiday meals…
Fri 19 Dec 2003
Earlier this week, I was thinking about how cool it would be if Vonage offered softphones. Well, as Gizmodo points out, current Vonage customers can add a softphone line to their account for $9.99 a month. However, it is somewhat unfortunate that one must add a line to take advantage of this service. First of all, who wants yet another phone number to deal with? The other reason is of course the additional $9.99 per month. This might be a reasonable deal for some, if they travel a lot, but for the occasional softphone user, $9.99 seems a bit steep compared to their other prices.
This new feature would be more attractive if it could simply be added to an existing Vonage line. It should also be configurable so the soft phone, when available, overrides the Cisco ATA router without user intervention. This would allow someone on the road to turn on their smartphone and receive incoming calls on their laptop immediately without reconfiguring call forwarding thorough Vonage’s web interface. A seamless service offering like this would be worth an additional few dollars a month and would not add require any additional management by the customer.
Sat 13 Dec 2003
All of the blog archive files on this site have been renamed from *.html to *.php. If you encounter any problems with missing files, please let me know. If you are interested in how the redirects were done so that all the existing links and bookmarks to this site were not broken, keep reading.
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Mon 8 Dec 2003
WorldChanging points to a site called Scorecard that allows you to see how your community ranks environmentally. So New York, you want the good news or that bad news first? Well, the good news is, according to the site, New York county doesn’t have any EPA superfund sites and is ranked among the cleaner 20% of all counties in the U.S. in terms of air releases of recognized developmental toxicants. The bad news: this county ranked among the dirtiest/worst 10% of all counties in the US in terms of the number of people living in areas where noncancer risk from hazardous air pollutants exceeds 1. You can read the rest of the details on Scorecard’s site.
Note that 96% of the air cancer risk in New York county is from mobile sources, also notice that cigarettes are not listed as a mobile source. Are we banning the wrong thing?
Sat 6 Dec 2003
Jonas and I hatched the idea of Mr. Martini several years ago at the Red Room. It was to be an automated bartender, the details were kind of sketchy, but it would be able to make an excellent martini, wear a bow tie and crack corny jokes. Mr. Martini, like so many other bar room ideas, quietly faded away over time.
A recent post on slashdot makes me belive that Mr. Martini could one day be a reality. Five German guys have built Punica, the Portable UNIversal Cocktail Assembler. The Linux powered bartender runs the open source Mixit software package. Their web site does not mention wether or not it can mix a killer martini, if not, I’m sure an enterprising developer can write a stir/shake module. Punica was inspired by Bar Monkey, another Linux powered cocktail dispenser. Bar Monkey is not all that portable, but version 2 is quite impressive.
These projects prove that when technology and liquor meet, great things happen.
Sat 6 Dec 2003
As snow falls for a second day here in New York, it is feeling more like January or February than the first week of December. The snow in the city is beautiful when it first falls, it gives everything a nice sugarlike coating. The picture at right is the view from my garden looking up at the frosty fire escapes.