List of free phone call services compared
Free PC-to-Phone services with free PC-to-PC feature:
Skype - Now you can make free unlimited phone calls from skype to regular phone within U.S. and Canada with no minute limits until the end of this year. This only apply within U.S. and Canada, if you’re using Skype from other countries the calls won’t be free.
Gizmo - I heard about Gizmo for the first time in an email that says “Skype bad, Gizmo good”. Now Gizmo can make calls from PC to mobile and landline phones FREE in 60 countries (click for more information), but it requires both participants, the one making phone call and the one receiving, to use Gizmo to make PC-to-PC calls actively in order to qualify for this.
Free Phone-to-Phone services:
Jajah - Like Gizmo, active users can use it to make long distance phone call with other active users. Unlike Gizmo, it’s phone-to-phone, to use it you have to go to its website to type your phone number and the number you wish to call, after a while your phone will ring - your friend’s phone will ring, and you can start talking. Unregistered users can only try it for 5 minutes, registered users can call 1000 minutes a month, five hours a week, 1 hour a day. (for more information click here)
Phonehog.com - Like Skype, this service is only available in U.S. and canada unless you have a way to call its toll-free numbers for free in other countries. Unlike other services, it’s intended to be used in regular phones, to use it you have to dial the toll-free number and enter the pin number they gave you, just like using phone cards. When you registered you have no free minutes yet, to add free minutes you have to go to its website and sign up offers from other companies, many offers are free, some are paid, most paid offers gives you more free minutes. If you want phone card or you want to make phone call from public phones (20 units per connection) it should be your choice.
The best free web hosting sites
You can find a list of free web hosting sites at http://www.free-webhosts.com you won’t need to register domain for almost all of them, I listed some that I think the best below.
If you don’t want ads in your website http://www.phpnet.us/ and http://www.freewebtown.com are the best for you. http://www.phpnet.us/ gives you 300MB web space and 80GB bandwidth a month, no file size limit at all; while http://www.freewebtown.com is the only one that offers 2GB for free with no file size limit either, but the drawback is it only has 2GB bandwidth per month, the same as its space. if you want to get additional bandwidth you have to pay for it.
If you don’t care about the ads and you want a website with unlimited bandwidth and lots of space http://www.prophp.org is best for you, it gives you about 250MB space, no bandwidth limit and no file size limit either. The ad they put on your pages is only a banner on top.
Two cool ads about switching to firefox found at www.firefoxflicks.com
For high quality version please see http://www.firefoxflicks.com.
Did you see the annoying “Click to activate and use this control” message sometimes when loading a page? Firefox will never have this problem. You can effortlessly do things in Firefox that IE users only dream about, Switch to firefox now for a better browsing experience and browse the web more securely.
Google’s server really sucks, downs too often.
Google’s server is down quite too often since I use blogger, on Friday Blogspot.com is down all the morning, yesterday adsense maintenance, today still down for a while, maybe other services are often down, as I know that picasa disconnects once in a while since I installed it last week and when I use Performancing to edit blogs I often get connection error.
Some very cool free stuff and tools online
Did you Know that:
- Now in aim you can make a free phone number in AIM phone line.
- In Windows Live Local you can see the front of your house.
- You can download free LEGAL music in mpfree.com, they’re in WMA format 128kbps or 256kbps, which is very cool.
- You can also download copyright free classical music online in the ClassicCat website.
- You can make free INTERNATIONAL phone call (including U.S. of course) in phonehog.com or make free phone call inside U.S. with Skype.
- In firefox you can play very cool game without any plugin, you can try it here.
- You can play video with java online.
- You can make a very cool mp3 player with flash (Very cool, works in myspace.com)
Blogger’s bug of switching back to publishing on blogspot.com after publishing on ftp
Today in the morning Blogger was down, but I thought blogspot.com was also down(in reality it didn’t). Because of this an idea of publishing on ftp came up to my mind. So I changed the setting to publish over ftp and published the blog to my own computer. Surprisingly when I switch I didn’t get any warning about I might lose my hosting in the current Blog*Spot Address when I changed the setting.
After a while I realized that blogspot.com is not down and doing OK I regretted that decision and tried to switch back to Blog*Spot Address. Here comes the problem, now I can’t get my angelchen1111.blogspot.com back when I switch back, it said it’s already in use although it isn’t. I checked it and still see my blog there, nobody took it over. After that I tried to make a new blog with angelchen1111 and even tried a new account with angelchen111.blogspot.com, all those doesn’t take it back. I read the help file and now understood that my host is supposed to be released after switching to ftp and I can take it back if nobody took it over. But the host didn’t seem to be released and nobody could take it. I got tired of this and slept thinking about I might need to get a new name.blogspot.com and update all links :(.
After I wake up the solution comes, I tried to publish on Blog*Spot Address with name other than angelchen1111 and hit publish, after publishing I changed the Blog*Spot Address back to angelchen1111 and published again, Bingo! Now it worked and I finally took angelchen1111.blogspot.com back. Warning, this might not work for everybody, please don’t try it with your Blog*Spot Address that you really want to keep or you might lose it, I made a new account to do the same thing again and it FAILED, it couldn’t take back the Blog*Spot Address. Try this only if you want your Blog*Spot Address back after switching to ftp or sftp.
Here I warn you people again not to switching back and forth the method of publishing, because sometimes some strange bugs might come out and screw up your post. Think over before you switch to ftp or sftp, you might not be able to get your Blog*Spot Address back after you switch.
Make Ubuntu Dapper to display Chinese well in two minutes
With Ubuntu Dapper you can make Linux to display Chinese fonts (or maybe for other languages as well) much much easier than before. After you read this you’ll find out to make Linux to display Chinese well can be as simple as this.
- Get the font Simsun.ttc from Windows or some other high quality Chinese fonts and put them in the folder /usr/share/fonts/truetype.
- Update the font cache by runing “sudo fc-cache -fv”.
- Last and not least run the command “sudo fontconfig-voodoo -f -s zh_CN” and you are done! restart X and check it out.
Here are some screenshots for the effects:
You can even see bold, italic, bold+italic fonts:
Firefox browsing Yahoo China:
Tips to test potentially unsafe software without hurting computer.
If you really want to test out or use a program that might be potentially unsafe, contain virus, or do something you didn’t expect, but you don’t want your computer to be hurt, what should you do? Here’s some tips to do it safely.
- for both Windows and Linux you can make a Windows virtual machine with VMware and make a snapshot before testing those programs, if something is wrong with the program you can go back to the snapshot.
- For linux users there’s even more options, we could test the program with a non-root user account, but still you might want to create a new user account to test it if your own user account has many datas because some programs might destroy datas that they can access.
- For advanced users they can use other options like make virtual machine with user-mode kernel or mount with unionfs to test the program with a virtual root account.
- For Windows users running programs with limited users might help, but most Windows programs won’t run properly under those accounts, for now the only solution that I can think of for this is VMware. You can also track what the program does by using Filemon to monitor file changes, Regmon to monitor registry changes, and Urlsnooper to monitor the url the program accessed, or any other utilities in addition of those mentioned above.
Something about Blogger’s template format and tips to show html code in posts
Did you know that Blogger.com’s template is just a special HTML file with some special template tags in between? That means you can customize your blog just like editing a web page.
That gives you the maximum flexibility to customize the blog’s design. You can add and change anything you want from top to bottom. To learn more about the template tags and what they do please visit http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42095.
I found it useful to put <meta name=”description” content=”<$BlogDescription$>”> into your template’s <head> section, so that search engines will show your website’s description in their result instead of some stupid message like “Notify Blogger about objectionable content. What does this mean? Blogger · Send As SMS · Get your own blog · Flag Blog · Next blog” if you have NavBar on.
If you want to put HTML codes in your blog to let others copy you can’t paste them directly in the Edit Posts window, it will give you some error message, here’s a way to get around it:
- Copy the codes you want to paste into the post and paste it into a HTML editor (like FrontPage)’s design section.
- Check the source code of the contents you just pasted, you will notice that the symbols “<”, “>”, or others became &??; now you can copy those codes with &??; and paste them in the posts, although you still see &??; now, when you published your post the &??; will become the appropriate symbol again when it show in the blog.
Note: You can’t get away with it by putting the unmodified codes inside the text box, Blogger’s editor still won’t let you save it even if you do that.
Laptop Theft in broad daylight
From youtube: |
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| “Security camera footage of a laptop being stolen, in broad daylight. To read the story - see http://www.stubbedtoe.co.nz/blog/blog.php?blog=10 The guy hasn’t yet been caught. ” That video made me remember that once my sister’s laptop was also stolen in broad daylight when left unattended in the library, the thief wasn’t cought either, sad  ……………………… Fortunately the laptop was the oldest generation that can only run Windows 98, it’s almost worthless now anyways. |
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