So far I'm really pleased with Posterous -- it's extremely easy to post (I do it via email almost exclusively), it supports tagging, embedded pictures and other media and it can reflect your post to other sites. I'm even considering redirecting www.tonys-links.com to my Posterous blog. I've posted a similar item over there so head on over and let me know what you think.

I ran Internet Operations for a few years back during the boom and this type of action requires some really specialized knowledge. And the surgical precision is downright amazing. I mean, it's easy to knock down a pole or even go underground and wreak havoc but that's not the impression I got from the news reports -- the implication is they didn't just go down and do tons of damage but they selected the locations, the cables and coordinated their activities to occur pretty much at the same time. To me this says it's not just a prank. Maybe it was done to send a message?

Update, April 10: Some good links with more information on this:

PCWorld
eWeek
SFGate

There were 4 locations, 2 in San Carlos and 2 in San Jose. The two in San Jose (one at Monterey Highway between Blossom Hill and Chynoweth and the other near the old IBM (now Hitachi) plant on Cottle Road and Hayes) amounted to 4 cuts, 1 cable held 360 fibers and at each of the other 3 the cable held 48 fibers. In one report it said there were 14 cuts in one location but the SFGate piece says there were 4 cuts in each location.

Also, the two areas were hit about 2 hours apart, South San Jose first and San Carlos later.

The stock T-Mobile builds don't allow root access to the phone but the gang over at the XDA Dream Android Development forum wasted no time repackaging the build to allow root access (the Dream [aka G1] is an HTC phone and uses pretty much the same mechanisms to boot as previous HTC phones so they've got a LOT of practice hacking them). It wasn't too long before a "rooted" RC33 was available ... and I installed it Friday. The rooted build also includes browser multi-touch support which is nice but takes a little getting used to, an updated Busybox, a terminal emulator (which you use for access to the G1's Linux command line on the phone), relatively complete versions of less and even an implementation of vi. From the command line there's a lot you can do -- there's an SSH server and an SSh client so I can SSH from my phone to my Linux desktop, there's a VNC client for Android so I can use VNC to login to my Windows/Linux desktop and add in root and you've got pretty much endless possibilities open to you -- cron, modifications to the stock mount tables and so on.

Wow, what a phone!

Pros:
1) Price.
2) Support forums.
3) Web access from outside your firewall.
4) The UI is the usual Buffalo NAS UI, enhanced for the additional RAID levels and the additional web access capabilities.
5) SSH server is still there and can be started if you pay attention to the howtos over at the Buffalo forums at NAS Central.
6) With a little sleuthing you can figure out how to submit cron jobs to do you backups to another Linkstation as opposed to using the web UI.

Cons:
1) Slower CPU (but still very capable in my opinion).
2) Media player isn't that cool.
3) No access via iPhone/G1!
4) Not as great a selection of pre-loaded apps available as on the QNAP.
5) Disks aren't hot-plug (but does anyone really need this?
6) Can't upgrade RAID levels nondestructively like the QNAP.

So, on the whole, I'm pleased I bought it.

So, I've been considering purchasing or building a RAID NAS. QNAP has some really nice arrays that come equipped with MySQL, phpMyAdmin, NFS, DLNA and a number of other nice facilities but are pretty pricey ($300 for a 2-disk TS-209 II, $400 for a 4-disk TS-409 Pro Turbo and nearly $600 for a 5-disk TS-509 Pro, all without disks). They're professional quality RAID devices, though, and come with excellent support ... and SqueezeCenter should drop right onto them without a hitch.

But, I'm considering going a completely different route. The fit-PC Slim takes a different approach. It's a small, low-power PC with wireless and USB on which you can run Linux or XP. So, I'm thinking I could buy one of those (for around $250, diskless), install my own 2.5" ATA disk ($100, if I don't like any of the ones I have laying around), install Linux, plug in a USB drive (another $100 if I don't like what I already have) and, instead of RAID, run a cron job to rsync my precious filesystems.

Whatcha think?

(Yeah, Chad, I know, I really need to get comments fixed, don't I? :)

$55 from ShopAddonics.com, presumably cheaper elsewhere. I may have to pick one up just to play with it.

HyperSpace is a mini-OS that supposedly boots almost instantly and lets you surf the web and connect to WiFi hotspots (for use by HyperSpace). So, it's a mini-OS that essentially give you only the web. Since the web is one of the main things I use my computer for it should be a slam-dunk but an awful lot depends on the browser and how flexible it is -- what engine it's based on, what plug-ins it has and so on. Plus, it could provide a nice layer of insulation between my "real" computer (files, apps, etc) andthe web-at-large. The expensive version lets you toggle between HyperSpace and your base operating system (XP, Vista, Linux, I suppose), and that may be the best way to run it, although I can't see myself always using HyperSpace to surf.

So, again, I dunno. Is Woody a visionary?

On the technology front, I've all but abandoned Windows Mobile. Yeah, just when it's starting to stabilize and get some really good apps, this early adopter is jumping ship. I bought a Nokia N95 and T-Mobile's G1 (aka HTC Dream). The Nokia is an absolutely amazing convergence device, containing 2 cameras, a back 5 megapixel camera with excellent optics and a front 640x480 camera capable of video conferencing and live video streaming. Python is available for it and can run its own web server, serving content over the web-at-large. It's a mature platform, running the Symbian operating system (which is in the process of being Open Sourced).

The G1 runs Android, a Linux-based operating system and is an amazing feat. The camera is nothing special but the rest of the features and capabilities are very good, if you're an early adopter and a Linux fan. There are quite a few apps available for it, from a simple bubble level to a web server to barcode/price comparison apps, to Shazam (hold the microphone up to a playing song and it tries to identify it). There are RSS readers, social networking clients, GPS apps, weather apps, stock tickers, pretty much the expected complement of apps. And there are even a few Exchange clients available for it, too -- while GMail is nice, I miss the rest of the features of an Exchange server. Maybe I just need to get used to Google's features but, I have to say, I use a LOT of the features of my Outlook Calendar, Contacts and Tasks and I haven't been able to adjust my usage to accomodate Google's shortfalls/differences. Some of this may be due to the lack of a full-features import client -- I use categories extensively which are brought over as notes, not labels andmany of my contacts' details include birthday, anniversary and assistant information which I've come to rely on (reminders for these popping up on my phone and my Exchange client). While I've looked for other import clients, I haven't yet mounted an exhaustive search but that's on my to-do list -- something that Google doesn't yet support, either :)

I'm also all but abandoning Microsoft products on anything but my personal laptop. I've searched around and all of the services I provide on my home computers/servers can be done with Linux servers. I also intend to migrate from Microsoft Office to either Open Office -- I don't generally demand a lot of my word processor, spreadsheet nor presentation program and have found that Open Office handles my modest needs quite well. I have only just started my migration and it may take the better part of a year to get completely converted but it's underway.

That's a brief rundown on what I've been up to. Now that things have settled down in my "real life", I hope to be able to post more frequently -- I've got LOTS of new toys and experiences to share!

• I purchased a Panasonic KX-TG9343T cordless phone. It's a DECT 6.0 phone and supports the Open GAP standard (see the DECT Wikipedia reference) which should mean that it can operate as a handset in ANY DECT phone system.
• I'm looking into the snom m3 wireless VoIP phone. I'm staying away from 802.11 phonesets for the time being as I've heard they can be quite flakey and quirky. But it should be possible for my Panasonic handset to be an extension on the snom. We'll see when I get around to purchasing the snom.
• I'm looking into new mobile phones, the Nokia N96 being my current favorite non-Windows Mobile phone. For Windows Mobile, the new HTC Touch Diamond is looking really sweet and fast but the MWg Atom Life Windows Mobile 6 Edition is also looking really nice and quite a bit cheaper. No GPS on the MWg Atom Life, whereas both the N96 and the Touch Diamond have one.
• My old border router died. Fortunately, I bought an Airlink101 AR680W 300N Wireless Router a while back so I had new hardware on-hand. It took a few hours to configure it but it's working like a charm.
• I've tried about a dozen new betas and invitation-only sites to the point that I'm pretty much social-networked out. My favorite remains Twitter with FriendFeed running a close second.
• Twitterfeed is a good supporting site for Twitter in that it gets an abbreviated form of new blog entries that I create into Twitter.
• I've pretty much switched over to Digsby as my universal IM client. It allows me to login to the same service with multiple usernames and also allows me to login to my Twitter account and post new tweets.
• I'm running the Firefox 3 Portable App beta and am REALLY happy with it!
• And, to close before I completely bore you to death, I picked up Airlink101's newest Wireless Night Vision Network Camera and installed it. Sweet! Support full-motion video and "snapshots" by going to http://your-ip/cgi/jpg/image.cgi.

So, what do I cut out? Well, that's another problem. I'm reading product reviews written by people who don't really USE the product they're reviewing. They give it a quick once-over and call it a review and seem to be in such a big hurry to get the review out that they don't do anything useful with it nor give give me any real useful information about it (you know who you are). And I'm reading more from people who produce the technological equivalent of celebrity gossip. You know what I mean -- they go to lunch with the technological glitterati and get email from insiders about upcoming "big things" and then dribble it out over the course of a day (and you know who you are). Does that help me in any way? No, not really, it just serves to distract me from the technological heart of things.

What did I conclude from this? It comes in two parts. I wish they were profound but they're not. They're not even new ... far from it! Ready? Here they are:

1) I need to be take more responsibility for what I read. I must weed out the useful from the not-useful. Lots of things catch my interest but will it help me?

2) The industry is generally directed by the loudest mouths, not necessarily the most knowledgeable.

That's all. Rant over.

Skype's pay-as-you-go rate for calls to US numbers is $0.021/minute and $30/year for a dial-in number on an annual subscription.

Yahoo's USA per-minute rate is less than HALF what Skype charges on a per-minute basis. No-brainer, right? Wrong! Skype offers a monthly rate for unlimited calls to US numbers: $2.95. Yahoo doesn't offer an unlimited plan ... at least not that I could find.

I'm still paying less than that for my VoicePulse Connect service. If Skype opened their service to SIP without the need for translators and bridges like HipSip and Voxeo (see an explanation of how to make this work here), I'd jump.

Currently I've got a run-of-the-mill POTS phone plugged in to my Linksys SPA3102. That particular device can accept a PSTN line so I've got my landline plugged into it, too, allowing me to take and make VoIP calls and PSTN calls over my analog handset. This setup, while cheap, loses a lot of the advanced functionality afforded by VoIP.

Enter wireless VoIP handsets. Thanks to a few friends over at Twitter (@GarrettSmith and @VoIPSupply), I've found a couple that look promising. The snom m3 is my favorite but I'm hoping that Siemens will bring their C470 IP over to the United States soon. I'm looking for more information about the Polycom IP200W but, so far, nothing concrete has materialized.