Cheap Long Distance Calls

My friend pointed me to Google map that has a cool feature: phone call forwarder. The way it work is that after you find a company or any contact/address information with phone number on the left side of the map, we click "call" link on the right of the phone number. A textbox will appear asking us to enter our phone number. Once we enter our own phone number and press "call", our phone will ring. Interestingly, when I tried it, I got call from the destination which I was calling to. When I picked up, I heard voice "connecting.." and then a dialing tone was heard. I guess, if there was somebody had picked up my call, I would made a call.

In this case, Google VOIP gateway intermediates connection from my phone to the destination. Google makes two connections, one is to my phone and second, to the destination (both originating from Google).

This way, we can make free long distance calls!

My Dream Energy Generator

I have been dreaming if there is a way to generate power from water. This dream power generator will just convert water to electrical power with Oxigen as its residue.

This technology shall be cheap to make and compact enough to fit into a car. I imagine till will reverse global warming effect. Why? because, first, it takes water from sea to generate energy. Secondly, it does not generate much pollutant to the ozone layer. Third, it generates oxigen essensial to human.

That's just (all will stay) as my imaginary dream, eventhough with fusion we could similarly do create energy from oxigen, but the technology is still far from practical use.

45 nm Chips

Last week Intel announced that they had overcome difficulties in making transistors smaller and smaller. A separate announcement was also made by IBM.

I don't know if both companies have the same solution for the nano technology. We'll see.

Sys-op for Packet-Radio Network

Just found this information:
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:_I-BvCh6yTMJ:onno.vlsm.org/v11/onno-eng-1/network/the-indonesia-computer-network-status-report-04-1995.rtf+lutfi+itb&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=28&client=firefox-a

I did not remember my number is in the list as the sys-op many years ago! :-)

Review on Sandisk's Sansa e280 MP3 Player

I got my player a few weeks ago after going through rigorous reviews posted by other users on the Internet. My decision to buy this one instead of iPod was mainly because Sansa is more open system than Apple's iPod. Also, I recalled that MaximumPC sometime ago had reviewed and made comparison between some audio formats and Real's Rhapsody audio format (*.rax) is superior than others, including Apple's AAC (*.m4p or *.m4a).

Another reason is that Rhapsody has monthly rental service plan, which allows you to listen to their files (yes, all of them which is millions of music files) on the go (on Sansa players) or through its Rhapsody software running on PC. They even allow us to indirectly transcode the files to non-DRM MP3 or WMA format. How, you may ask? It is by burning your purchased music files and then re-rip them to unprotected MP3 or WMA. The quality of this *.rax files are really good and the size is not bigger than average high quality MP3 encoded in VBR.

One thing I don't like from Sansa is the buttons on the front. The four buttons surrounding the rotating wheel are placed sunken (shallow) than the wheel hence make them harder to reach/to push.

Quality of the sound is average. Sometimes I hear some distortion, but not sure whether this is caused by the device itself or because the music was undersampled/bad encoder.

Will continue in more detail if time permits.

Comparing some Headsets

I was looking for a good and affordable headsets for to-be-mine Sandisk Sansa e280 (darn, 2 more days have to wait till it is delivered) MP3 player (will put a review on it later).

Upon searching on google, I landed on a site http://www.headphone.com that compares the 'really' technical comparisons (not just a sounds-like-a-geek-but-a-stupid reviews). The web gives a frequency response graphs, harmonic distortion graphs, isolation and impendances for the tested headsets (unfortunately, they did not test on Bose headsets).

Here I try to compare between Sennheiser's PX100, Sony CD3000, Apple's Ipod earbuds and KOSS KSC55:

Frequency Response


Harmonic Distortion Products



Isolation



Impedance



So How to pickup the best headset? The rules of thumb are:

1. Pick the headset with the flattest and widest frequency response
2. With the lowest and flatest spikes in harmonic distortions
3. Isolation; This is a measure of a headphone’s ability to isolate the listener from outside noise. The deepest notch for the noise frequency usually good ones.