Gadgets and VoIP

A Modest Proposal: A Cell Phone "Tower" on Every Telephone Pole

Here is a proposal that makes sense to me. In fact, it seems so obvious and so simple that I am sure the telephone company executives will never understand it: Install a mini cell phone base station on every telephone pole or perhaps on every third telephone pole up and down every street in the country. Then tear down those ugly towers that ruin the appearance of neighborhoods.

The result will be better coverage for all cell phone users, lower costs for the cell phone companies with the savings passed on to customers (that will never happen!), and fewer ugly towers in our neighborhoods. Better coverage? Lower costs? Improved appearances? No, the telephone companies will never do this!

Carry Emergency Information With You at All Times

There are at least a dozen methods of carrying emergency information with you. In these high tech times, I would recommend carrying that information with you electronically, as well as on a piece of paper or in a medical ID bracelet. The electronic method allows for storage of more information.

In this case, I am talking about medical information, next of kin, and other information that you might want emergency responders to find. While my mother convinced me to always have clean underwear, it's probably more important to make sure you have easily-findable information on your body as well.

For those with significant medical problems, such as diabetes or heart problems, a medical ID bracelet is a great idea. Medical personnel always look for those. However, the amount of information you can include in a normal medical bracelet is limited.

Why Do You Have a Landline Phone?

The American population increases every year, from 281 million in the year 2000 to 309 million today. Yet, according to a recent Federal Communications Commission report, the number of land line telephones in the United States has declined steadily each year during the same period: from about 192 million landline phones in 2000 to 163 million in 2007. That’s a 15 percent net loss. At the same time, the number of mobile wireless telephone subscribers in the United States has INCREASED from 114 million in 2001 to 238 million in 2007 — a 109 percent increase.

The reason is simple: we are seeing a big increase in the number of people getting rid of their land lines and just using cell phones. FCC statistics say almost one-fourth of American households have done that already, and the number appears to be growing.

Another handful of people are now using computer VoIP phones, something almost unheard of in 2000 but common today.

Sprint Offers Free Femtocells

Sprint has begun offering femtocells for its customers that have reception problems in their homes. They aren't the first to offer such a device, but appear to be the first to offer it for free to qualified users, which is how it should be.

Femtocells are like your very own cellular tower in your house. If you have reception problems in your house, your cell phones will connect to the femtocell rather than struggle to connect to towers. The femtocell is then connected to your home network and your voice and data signals are routed through your internet provider and ultimately to Sprint's network. Sprint had an earlier model released in 2008, but this one supports EV-DO.

To Catch a Cell Phone Thief - Quickly

You have to love technology! A man accused of swiping an Apple iPhone out of a woman's hand in San Francisco was arrested and charged with theft when police found him only nine minutes later. It turns out the phone had been tracking his every move.

The iPhone was being used to test a new, real-time GPS tracking application, and the woman holding it was an intern for the software's maker, Mountain View-based Covia Labs. Covia CEO David Kahn had sent the intern into the street to demonstrate the software. Police say Horatio Toure snatched it and sped away on a bicycle.

Find the Best Broadcast Channel for a Stronger Wi-Fi Connection

Your wireless router broadcasts your Wi-Fi signal on channels ranging from 1 to 11.* As more routers broadcast on the same channel as yours, your router's performance generally decreases. The solution: Scan for the least crowded channels and use one of those.

You can read more on Lifehacker at http://lifehacker.com/5580636/change-your-wi+fi-routers-broadcast-channel-for-a-stronger-connection?skyline=true&s=i

Google Voice is Now Open to All US Residents and Is Free

Google Voice is one of my favorite applications. I use this telephone service several times a day. It has transformed the method I use for phone calls. Google Voice has been in a restricted beta test, available only to those who earned invitations. I got my invitation a long time ago and Google Voice has become a part of my life.

With Google Voice, there is no hardware to purchase and no new telephone equipment required. You can use it with or without a computer. The voice calls are never sent to your computer so you don't have to wear headphones or anything like that. You simply use the normal telephone(s) you already have.

Google Voice is now out of the limited, invitation-only beta test and is open to anyone in the US.

Massachusetts Police Using iPhones to ID Perps

Could identifying criminals be as easy as holding up an iPhone, snapping a quick pic, and waiting for results? It sounds like a cross between a science-fiction fantasy and a silly joke, but the concept is no laughing matter for officers in the gang unit over in Brockton, Massachusetts.

The city's officers are currently testing a new biometric scanning program--really, an iPhone app--that allows them to use Apple's handheld devices to snap a quick picture of a person's face. The photo is then sent over to a secure network for processing and, if the facial characteristics of a subject give him or her away, the person's identity, photo, and background information are sent back to the officer's iPhone.

Apple Announces a Slim Unibody Mac Mini with HDMI

Apple has updated the little desktop Mac Mini and if you were thinking about buying a new MacBook or iMac, you might think a little about grabbing this instead.

The new Mini comes in a slim unibody case, 1.4-inches tall, shrinking from 2-inches, and gains an SD-card slot, an HDMI port for true media center integration, faster NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics hardware (up from the old 9400M graphics). It also keeps FireWire 800, Mini-DVI, four USB ports and Ethernet.

iResize for Macintosh

Modern digital cameras are technical marvels. They take very high resolution photographs. For instance, my shirt-pocket-sized Canon PowerShot SD780 IS Digital Elph camera takes 12 megapixel images. When saved on the computer's hard drive, these typically produce images of 4,000 by 2,248 pixels. Those are huge!

Luckily, storage space is really cheap these days. Even two terabyte hard drives are available for $100 or less. Storage space isn't much of an issue but other uses can be a problem. Did you ever try to post one of those huge images on a web page? How about sending a dozen or more photographs to a relative by using email? Huge images don't work so well in the online world.