Maxson Central

I’ve blogged before about Truphone, what I did before coming overseas, what I wish I had known before coming overseas, and then some issues I had had.

Inspite of that, I’ve really grown to like Truphone.  Just having it while we were in Rome to use to call was AWESOME.  It is a great service.  I’m actually thinking about getting Cyndi a phone that it will work on….perhaps then we can dump vonage.  But…who knows.

Anyway, when I read about things like this, this, this, and this on the Truphone Blog, I get agrivated.  I’m sure they have a real good reason for what they are doing (probabaly a bajillion people have it installed on their iPhones)…I just wish they could get skype functionality on the nokia.  I don’t think it has anything to do with the client…probabaly a more back-end change (especially since Gizmo is offering a SIP to Skype bridge now).

Regardless, I’ll keep using Truphone…I think it is the best VoIP Service out there.  I just wish they could keep the client functionality in sync a bit more.

Image from VoIPMan via Flickr

I haven’t written too much about life here in Serbia recently…so, since I ended up with some extra time on May Day, I decided I’d write about our Internet.

When we first moved in, we had cable internet.  We were paying about $25/month for 512 kb/s (yep…kilobits per second).  Much much slower than what we were getting in the US before we left.  A few months ago, I went to pay our bill (we have to go to the office every month and remember to pay our bill…we don’t get a bill in the mail), the lady asked me a question. 

After going back and forth, I figured out that their rates and speeds had changed.  I could now purchase 1024 kb/s (kilobits per second) service for 1,700 dinars per month.  With the change in the exchange rate, this works out to about the same we were paying before.  Not too bad.

Traditionally, I have used DSLReports’ speed tester; however, today, I came across a new one.  I thought I’d give them a try and see what happened.  The results are below:

 

Don’t know the difference between a byte and a bit?  Don’t know the difference between kb/s and kB/sec?  Here’s a good resource for you (here’s another too).  But, remember that a byte is 8 bits….so a byte is 8 times larger than a bit.

This article poses an interesting question: what exactly are those people who manage that mailing list you are on doing with your password?

Given that I’m all for encryption, this article makes this look like interesting technology.  By the way (and so I can search for it later) the company is called cellcrypt.

One of the things that drives me batty about Vista is trying to figure out where things went.  For example, your user settings and documents used to be under c:\Documents and Settings\<username>\ (in xp).  In Vista, it is under c:\users\<username>\.

Ok..that’s not too bad…but what about my documents?  Used to be c:\DocsAndSett\<user>\My Documents.  In Vista, it is c:\users\<username>\Documents.

So why are there all these shaddow folders(c:\users\<username>\My Documents\ that look legit but give you an error if you follow them?  I’m sure it is for legacy support…but how do you know that when you first look at them.

Found this article on the web tonight.  I wanted to blog about it just in case anyone else is wondering where the shared desktop on Vista went.