Back in the day I had got a Frontier Labs Audio player… it was the Nexia predecessor to the nexblack. It really was a pretty good music player. It supported compactflash for storage (no interntal storage.) It used double A batteries and had real buttons. MP3 was the primary audio format – they had promised ogg via a firmware update, but the hardware really just wasn’t up to the task. I used it for several years which is not bad for a $40 or so audio player. Unfortunately it has become flakey in it’s performance sometimes failing to boot up when I switched it on and so when I was given $40 for my birthday I thought it might be time to shop for a replacement.
Category: General Web/Tech
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Frustrations with Verizon Landline
As you may know we had a good size snow storm here in the mountains of western North Carolina. It’s not unusual, but we will many times go a few years between these big storms. This one brought a tree down on the phone line just before it branches to our house and one other. I called Verizon the first night (Saturday) and got a (!$!$!$!) robot attendant that told me many outages were reported in our area and it should be fixed by Monday at 9 something AM. Not wanting to waste the time then with holding for a person I resolved to call a second line. At this point I could see the line hanging to the ground from the pole and knew they were not aware of it though. I called from a cell phone (of course…)
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Facebook Chat Not Working | Voice Chat Coming to Facebook
It looks as though this evening facebook chat isn’t working. In fact FaceBook has confirmed all sorts of problems with it’s site and various applications. Chat apparently has been affected. Status updates for some people are disappearing and just general instability. (This may include not being able to log in to your account or errors accessing and viewing AND posting content.) In other words don’t expect things to “just work”. In other news…
It looks like facebook is getting ready to add voice chat.
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Blackberry Outage – Blackberry Internet Service spotty today
A lot of blackberry users are talking about a blackberry outage this afternoon and evening. It seems that the Blackberry internet service is unreliable at the moment with some users reporting a flat out outage and others say they’re getting bursts of email.
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Google Voice Review | I got the golden ticket….
Last Thursday I opened up my GMail and found to my surprise that I had an invite to Google Voice. I didn’t have time to deal with it at that time, so I saved it as new until Thursday evening and spent some time then playing with it. I had put my address in the waiting list some time back because the premise behind Google Voice (former GrandCentral) is potentially very useful for me. I’m self employed, I work from home, from the car, I’m onsite, I’m at clients locations and I also have some bits of time at a location that has wireless access. For many years I’ve had several phones to check messages on, and if I forget, then…. find a message when I get in at 8 or 9 in the evening on the house phone. It’s difficult to manage and I want to change it, Google Voice may be the way to make that change….. right now I’m just testing the waters though. It did feel kind of like a Willy Wonka moment of sorts though seeing that invite in the inbox! Read on for more….
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Morse Mp3 Ringtones
I’ve spent a bit of time over the last week putting some scripting together to build a new website. The site is morseringtones.com and as you might imagine there are morse code mp3 ringtones available there for download. I’ve put together a list of over 9100 names and there are 4 ringtones available for each name. These are played at 4 different speeds in morse code. For the quicker speeds the names are repeated multiple times to make sure you have a better chance to hear them if you’re using them on a cell phone. I’ve put things up to where you can submit ideas for further names if you like. I may be adding prosigns at some point in the near future and at some point may make it possible for people to go ahead and generate custom morse ringtones from a web interface. So if you want a morse code ringtone for your phone step over and take a look.
I’ve also bundled up the whole collection of them for download via lulu.com, more details can be found on the Purchase morse mp3 ringtones colleciton page.
In the future here I may detail some of the scripts that I’ve used to build this site. It’s all built on a linux server ( the generation of 9100 ringtones at 4 different speeds took about 6 hours.) I’m sure the scripts could have been designed differently but was quite proud of putting together the process for making the whole site so that future maintenance is minimal.
Anyway …-.-
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The REAL Physics of Possibly REAL Time Travel
Time Travel has been one of those science fiction themes that has been the MOST captivating. Not just for me, but for millions of people. I think the “what if”s are probably the most intriguing. What if I could get a message to someone… what if I could find out what happened …. Would those things even be possible, ethical? Up until now, it’s been more of an intellectual exercise, but I’ve been doing some reading on the subject and there is a very real possibility that time travel would be physically possible. Of course, physics classes for years have talked about how travel into the future should be possible. Simply travel away from the earth at near light speed and then back at near light speed. You will have only aged slightly while much time will have passed on earth. But, realistically traveling into the future isn’t as enticing as traveling into the past. We’re ALL traveling into the future one day at a time on the slow path. Here’s how one could travel into the past….
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Digital TV Coming Soon – Will It Affect You?
I’ve devoted quite a few pixels to this topic over on the Online Radio and TV site, but… in the United States broadcast TV will make the move to ALL digital in February. We have cable and the only way it’s affecting me is in my planning for the inevitable winter storms that will knock out the cable from time to time. Times like that we need over the air access to our local news and I’ve got the converter box for that. But, with so many people on cable or satellite – will the digital transition affect you?
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Tracking Santa Claus Online
This is the time of year that we start thinking about that monumental trip Santa Claus makes around the globe on Christmas Eve. There are lot’s of neat ways to track his progress online. One of my favorites in recent years has been the Norad Santa tracking site. Last year they were using Google Earth for the tracking. Have you ever wondered how or why NORAD started this whole Santa Claus tracking mission?
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Ultra Capacitor Flashlight | 90 second charge | Light for Life Flashlight
This looks NICE… The new Light for Life flashlight which uses an ultracapacitor instead of batteries. Because of the ultracapacitor it takes 90 seconds to charge up. It uses LED lights and can run for 90 minutes on that 90 second charge. I see some uses that this wouldn’t be appropriate for, but many that it would be great for…. (If they could sell a handcrank adapter or some portable charge method that could be excellent.) It comes with a mounting bracket, belt ring and DC charger. (The number of charge/recharge cycles of a lithium ion or himh battery would pale in comparison to the ultracapacitor.)