Despite all the coverage that Apple’s new iPhone is getting, there is still innovation going on at other cellular providers. Last week, T-Mobile announced their new “HotSpot @Home” service. For an additional $10 a month, you can use your WiFi-equipped cellphone as a VoIP device. When you’re in range of a WiFi access point, the cellphone will use the Internet to make VoIP calls (instead of the cellular system) – and the minutes used here won’t count towards your monthly plan, giving you essentially unlimited usage time when you make calls this way. Your phone still retains all its original functionality, such as call hold and caller ID, so your phone isn’t crippled.

The best part, however, is the seamless integration. As you move out of range of a hotspot, the phone will automatically hand off to T-Mobile’s cellular network, in much the same way as hand off occurs between adjacent cellphone towers when you’re moving. This is not only beneficial, but a prime example of the convergence of wireless networks that many people believe is going to play a bigger and bigger role in the future. Kudos to T-Mobile for offering innovation in this area, instead of just a new phone with a lot of fancy features.
Continued

There’s nothing quite like jumping into an ice cold shower after a long run in the heat.

And then not moving for the rest of the day.

Back in in June, the USPTO started a pilot project called “Peer-to-Patent” with the aims of opening up the patent review process to the public. By doing this, it hopes to leverage the help of the community in speeding up the patent process by having teams of volunteers looking for prior art that can determine the relevancy of the patent application. The IEEE Spectrum had a good article/interview with the founder of Peer-to-Patent; it’s a short read (2 pages), and I suggest you read it since it does a good job at explaining the goals and the means with which the project aims to accomplish them.

There is apparently a huge backlog in patent applications, so the needs for a project like this are obvious. However, will the “wisdom of the masses” prevail in helping to resolve the numerous problems in the patent system, evidenced by the seemingly endless litigation related to it?
Continued

Just over a month ago, the CBC launched their Great Canadian Wish List project on Facebook. Reaching out to the young people of Canada (who use Facebook), the project aims to gauge “grassroots” support among them by allowing users to create a “wish” or cause that others can then support. The most popular “wishes” will then be made part of the CBC’s Canada Day coverage special. With so many issues facing our modern Western society, the project had lofty goals in attempting to stoke the interests of youth. However, as expected, the “wish list” has mostly descended into another yet another debate on abortion, and gay marriage.
Continued

I’ve recently had a few experiences with some companies and thought I’d share my thoughts. It’s really quite interesting to see the level service offered by big companies, and how they can differ so widely – they’re not all bad.

Some are bad, of course, and don’t seem to put any effort towards customer satisfaction, and continue only to operate because there is no viable competition. This is unfortunate, as this puts the customer in between a rock and a hard place – with the result being a feeling of losing one’s hard-earned cash.
Continued

Google has updated its interface for their Docs & Spreadsheets application. Besides the visual improvements, they’ve also “replaced” tags with folders, and added a “Google Suggest” function to the search box, that finds matches as you type. (Neat!)

While some may consider the move from tags back to folders a step backwards, the change is really superficial – under the hood, it’s still the same old tagging system. The only difference is how most users will interpret it.
Continued

If you are using a web-based e-mail provider, chances are you’re using either Google’s Gmail, Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail or Yahoo!’s Mail, or a combination of the three. These are the “big three” when it comes to web-based e-mail services. Microsoft and Yahoo’s offerings have been around for about 10 years or so, with Gmail, the upstart, only being about three years old. Together, these services boast millions of users and bring in huge advertising revenue for their respective companies. But which one is the best for you?

Before Gmail, web-based e-mail was anemic: storage was limited to only a few MBs, and functionality was limited. Indeed, you probably couldn’t get by just using a web-based service, and probably just used it for temporary stuff, relying on your trusty desktop e-mail client and POP3 service for most stuff. Gmail spurned innovation with its announcement of 1 GB of storage, later upgraded to 2 GB and beyond, and made web-based e-mail a viable alternative to desktop clients. There was no question at the time that Gmail was far superior to both Microsoft and Yahoo!’s offerings. However, things have changed in the three years since then, and Microsoft and Yahoo! have both fired back with new and feature-filled web-based e-mail services that offer serious competition to Gmail. How do they stack up against the young champ?
Continued

It’s been a while since I wrote about uberOptions, the excellent utility that allows you to configure the extra mouse buttons on your Logitech mouse in just about any way you could want. Basically, uberOptions can unleash the potential of Logitech’s mice, expecially their higher-end models like the MX610, MX1000, G5/G7 and VX and MX Revolution that have many extra buttons.

While SetPoint itself has a lot of functionality, supporting multiple mice, uberOptions manages to up the ante by allowing any button to be assigned to any function or keystroke. Furthermore, you can assign these settings on a per-application basis (application specific settings), so that buttons can perform different functions depending on which window currently focused. This is especially useful in games, where sometimes, the extra mouse buttons aren’t detected by the game itself. This can be fixed by using uberOptions to assign/bind keystrokes to the mouse buttons just for that game – that way your mouse will still work normally outside of the game. This can make the extra buttons on your Logitech mouse very useful in games that have lots of different actions, normally assigned to keyboard commands only.
Continued

The weather sure does change fast out here – I guess it’s because the land’s fairly flat, and there’s no big lake nearby. We got a thunderstorm ‘watch’ for this region a few hours ago, when it was still bright and sunny out. Sure enough though, storm clouds rolled in, and about 10 minutes after it got dark, the hail started. It only lasted for about 5 minutes or so, but during that time it sounded like we were under attack! Continued

I finally decided to move to Feedburner for managing the RSS feed for this site. I had known about Feedburner for a while but didn’t really look into them a lot, until their acquisition by Google piqued my interest. After using their service for a while, I can see why Google would want to buy this company – their service, even the free version, simply rocks.

Feedburner, at its most fundamental level, allows a publisher to keep track of the readership statistics regarding their feed. This makes it easy to manage your feeds, and see how many people are reading them, and look at the overall trends in readership level over a time period. Seeing as how Google Analytics offers this sort of service, but instead for your website, it’s easy to see why Google would want to make Feedburner part of their list of services.
Continued