For some reason my Treo 700p smartphone started to skip music playback. After I hard-reset it and just installed Pocket Tunes 4.01 it was back to normal. So there must have been some conflict with some software that I installed. So going forward I am going to keep a log of what I install on my treo and when, so that in case this happens again, I'll know what software is the culprit.

Recently Apple announced their latest product - iPhone. It will not be available until June, but this video gives us a sneak preview of it being used by a human being instead of an animation on their website.

I think this is definately a pretty cool device. I already use a smartphone Treo 700p that can do pretty much everything that iPhone can plus a lot more since I have a choice of 1000s of apps I can install on the phone.

The new multi-touch screen interface is interesting, but I am a bit skeptical about it for several reasons:

How easy is it to type on the touch screen vs. the hard buttons on my Treo? Notice that the this video did not dwell on that. Apparently the phone has an auto-correct feature which guesses the words you mean to type, but how about entering passwords or web URLs which may not have the words from the dictionary? The absense of dedicated buttons for common tasks sounds like a drawback to me. I love the ability to push a concrete button on my phone and go straight to the calendar, email, launch the music player or whatever I configure those buttons to do . On iPhone you have to do multiple taps on the touch screen to switch from one application to the other. I have hundreds of contacts in my address book. On my Treo I can just type the first couple of letters of the person's last name or first name and the contact list narrows down to just the people who's first or last name starts with those letters. Based on this video, on iPhone I have to flick my finger through the entire list until I get to the contact that I want. That sounds like a major pain.

Also there was a clear cut of the video when the presenter was talking about browsing the web. Looks like you can "zoom in on [the webpage] and read it", but that would mean that you constantly have to scroll to read the text using your finger which is placed right on top of the page you're viewing. This is very inconvenient because the finger will block your view. I like the way my Treo renders the pages in an optimized way so that you have to just scroll up and down with the dedicated buttons below the screen.

Another gripe is the absense of external memory card slot. You're limited to 4GB and 8GB of internal memory. Wouldn't it be nice to pop in an SD card with some full-length movies on it? Or take the card out of your digital camera and stick it in the phone to view the photos on the nice 3.5 inch screen of the phone? Apple was never into making things modular. According to the hype, this phone will remove the need to carry two devices - an ipod and a cell phone. Hmm well not for the people who are used to 60 or 80 GB ipods.

Anyway, these are just my thought from what I can see from this little video. I may change my mind once I have this puppy in my hands.

Great news from Skype:

I use Skype on daily basis at work to make PC to PC calls to my co-workers around the world. But whenever we have those long conference calls using regular phone, I have to just hold the receiver next to my ear for 30 minutes which is very uncomfortable. I always wished that we were on Skype instead. Now we can call in with Skype and have our hands free!

News Article

Who would ever know that it would be possible to run both Mac OS and Windows on the same computer natively! Well now that recent Mac computers use Intel processors, it is possible.

My co-worker bought an Intel based Mac laptop and we attempted to install Windows on it. Apple provides a boot option to install Windows XP, but you need to have Windows XP Service Pack 2, which we did not have. We tried to install SP1, but that did not work. Tomorrow we'll try again once we get the SP2 installation CD.

The latest developments in Macromedia Flash technology now allow streaming video be played by regular Flash plugin in a browser. The cool thing about that is that almost 100% of browsers are compatible with Flash plugin regardless of the platform (Mac,PC, Linux, etc). Using the Flash technology many websites now allow users to upload and share their videos. I've tried several of them would like to share with you with what I found. I've tried the following websites:

I uploaded the same video in Windows Media Video format 320X240 30 fps to all websites and below are the resulting videos:

Not only the video is blurry, but also the frame rate seems to be low. Definately the worst.

The video is very grainy! Also half of the time it does not even come up. You may need to refresh the page to see it. TagWorld is still in Beta so they are probably still ironing out the kinks.

youtube.com is the pioneer of the mass video publishing site. The quality is better than that of tagword.com. Still is not perfect, but I guess they are trying to save on bandwidth.

myspace.com is the best out of the three. The video is played at the resolution of the original file (320x240 in this example) and although it's smaller in size, it is sharper in quality. myspace video player offers you a choice to magnify it by clicking on the right-most button and you get pretty much the same quality as youtube.com.

Approval process takes several days!

Last year on the eve of Halloween I had a Pumpkin Carving Party in my apartment. This year I did not have it, but some other people did. They decided to create a Jack-O-Lantern computer. It actually glows in the dark just like a real Jack-O-Lantern. Step by step assembly process is here.

Can you imagine to zoom in from outer space: all the way to the street where I live: For a while I was impressed by Google Maps - the way you can just drag them with your mouse. But today I discovered a whole new dimension to viewing satellite images - Google Earth. You can literally fly from one place on Earth to another (you zoom out all the way out into outer space, see Earth rotate to the direction of your destination, and zoom in up to the street level where you can see cars and people! You can drag the image and it will pan over redrawing the new area on the fly! You can change the viewing angle and see elevation. You can also display local attractions, restaurnats and hotels right over the images of the streets. This is suuuper cool. Since it's a stand-alone desktop application, as opposed to something that runs in your browser, Google Earth can take full advantage of your computer's hardware. Speaking of which, you do need to have a supped up computer to be able to run it effectively. Try it now! (Currently works on Windows only).

But there are good news and bad news. The good news is that areas such as New York City are mapped out very well. The bad news is that my hometown St. Petersburg, Russia only has part of it mapped out to high resolution. Also to find it, I had to enter Moscow in the search box and than pan over to St. Petersburg which is spelled on the map as Sankt-Peterburg (to match Russian spelling).

Celebrating more than 1 million Treo smartphones sold worldwide, palmOne today is giving away a Treo 650 smartphone every 5 minutes for 12 hours, from 12 PM until midnight EST.

Anyone in the United States can register for a chance to win a Treo 650 smartphone (no purchase necessary) by visiting www.SeeTreo.com

I already own this phone and it is the greatest gadget I have ever had! I registered anyway to see if I can get lucky.

Ever wanted to call someone and conceal your real voice? You can type a short text message below and click on the SPEAK button to hear it spoken by the selected voice.

Text:


Voice: Crystal ... US English Mike ...... US English Rich ...... US English Lauren .... US English Claire .... US English Rosa ...... Latin Am. Spanish Alberto ... Latin Am. Spanish Klara ..... German Reiner .... German Alain ..... French Juliette .. French Charles ... UK English Audrey .... UK English      

Display the link for the audio file.

This is really cool stuff to play with. The speech is amazingly clear, yet still sounds quite funny. My favorite is Audrey - with her impeccable Queen's English pronunciation :)

To save the audio file on your computer, check "Display the link for the audio file" before clicking SPEAK, right-click on the link and select "Save Target As..."

Don't forget to turn on the volume on the computer and make sure you have the speakers or headphones plugged in.

Good news for music lovers using Microsoft Windows. I am one of them. At the end of July, NullSoft released a new version of WinAmp - 5.04. With this version they have included two additional choices in Streaming Media section of the Media Library. You now can stream a collection of songs and music video clips that are stored on the WinAmp servers. I think most artists in that collection are affiliated with Time Warner since NullSoft is owned by it. In any case, the collection is quite big. There are currently almost 1000 songs and more than 1700 videos. The cool thing is you can efficiently search for streaming songs and videos the same way as you can search for your local media stored on your hard disk. Meaning, you can filter by genre, an artist within that genre and by a keyword which is searched within the artist name and song name. Together with hundreds of streaming radio and TV stations which are also integrated into WinAmp, I hardly even need to listen to my own music collection.

Download the latest version of WinAmp here

Today I installed Skype on my computer. Skype is a new service that allows voice teleconferencing over the internet. This technology is nothing new. Many instant messaging service providers also have voice chatting capabilities. However, Skype claims that the sound quality is even better than that of regular phones and can conference up to 5 people. The service is totally free (at least for now) without any ads. The other advantage is that it has P2P (Peer to Peer) architecture and there is no central system to connect to. Skype was designed by the people who created Kazaa, a popular P2P file sharnig system. At my company we are actually starting to use this service to have conference calls between our London, Rio and New York offices. So far the results are great. Skype supports regular IM chat as well.

Try it out! Download it, install it and
To use the service efficiently you need a pair of headsets with a microphone attached. They look something like this:
You can pick them at your local electronics store or on line. But if you'd rather have a conventional looking phone, you can get a special USB phone that connects directly to your computer.

Although it will take some time to happen, you can be sure that, eventually, all of the circuit-switched networks will be replaced with packet-switching technology known as VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol). VoIP telephony just makes sense, in terms of both economics and infrastructure requirements. More and more businesses are installing VoIP systems, and the technology will continue to grow in popularity as it makes its way into our offices and our homes. Things are changing right now. According to a new study, published by Sage Research Inc., 86% of US organizations surveyed report they are in various stages of evaluating or deploying VoIP telephony. This is the technology of tomorrow but the cost savings and business economies mean it will very quickly be a standard part of every PC.

Here are some news articles:

• The Register (September 24, 2003)
• ZDNet (April 21, 2004)
• Skype review from PC Stats

I took my Sony Clie NX80V to a ski trip at Hunter Mountain to take some pictures. Since Clie can take videos, I thought it would be cool to shoot a video clip of skiing down the mountain. After taking a while trying to figure out how I could attach it to myself, I finally came up with the idea to attach it to the band of my ski goggles turned to the side as shown on the picture. This worked pretty well, except for the fact that my vision was partially blocked by the Clie hanging down in front of my nose and it was very difficult to see where I was going. This is why during one run I unexpectedly ended up on a steep mogul trail which I was trying to avoid during the whole day. This is when I had to put the Clie back in my pocket and finish that run without it. After a while, I got the hang of skiing while looking from one eye at a time and was able to finish the whole run while recording the video. Take a look:

Real Video format: Stream / Download (2.34 MB)
MPEG format: Download (4.25 MB)

OK, I finally switched to Mozilla as the default internet browser on my home computer. I was searchnig for MP3 encoder at download.com, so I typed "MP3 encoder" in the search box and this thing came up. At the time that I did this, they did not have the editor's note and I did not pay attention to the user comments. So I downloaded and installed that peice of sh*t. From that point on my computer was posessed with all kinds of adware and spyware. It kept freezing. I got all kinds of new tool bars in Internet Explorer and my desktop was filled with a dozen of new icnos pointing to all kinds of crap like casinos, money savings etc... After spending couple of days trying to delete the stuff by hand by exploring my windows registry and removing the applications via the control panel I still could not get rid of all of the spyware. So I downloaded SpyBot Search & Destroy and it removed some stuff, but I still have a problem where in Explorer I get certain words on the webpages underlined with links. So I decided to install Mozilla and none of the problems with explorer were present. So I decided to make Mozilla my default internet browser for now. I will miss Yahoo Companion toolbar which I used in IE. I used it for easy access to my Yahoo Bookmarks and a quick search field was handy. But now Mozilla allows you to use Google to search for anything typed on its address bar. I also was able to import my Yahoo Bookmarks into Mozilla. So we'll see how it goes... I do love Mozilla tabs a lot!

Not sure when exactly it has been released, so this may be old news, but I just found out about it today. WinAmp has been the media player of my choice for years. WinAmp 3.0 was buggy and had diffent plug-in API than the previous versions, so I switched back to WinAmp 2.91. And now WinAmp 5.01 is out. Why 5? Well it's the sum of 2+3. It combines the best of both versions.

Here is why prefer WinAmp over other media players:

I love the sub-string incremental search in the Media Library.

Visualizer has the most number of visualizations than any other player I've seen. I like the automatic random transitions from one visualization to another.

Click on the picture to download the best media player for Windows!

Fotki.com on-line photo sharing site has recently added an ability for the users to maintain on-line journals a.k.a. blogs (abbreviation of "web log"). I have started to add content to my journals as soon as they have added that feature. But today I noticed that they enabled co-branding with journals. This means that I can make my journal entries look like whatever I want by adding my own HTML. I was waiting for that for a long time and was very happy to discover that they finally did it. So now it's 5:30 AM and I just finished incorporating the journals into my website. Now I have my blog on the front page.

I've been using fotki.com for more than 2 years and it has been the best experience ever. I now have more than 4.7 gigs of photos stored and organized on this site. The site is very fast and allows people to view the photos at original resolution - something that many other popular photo sharing sites don't allow you to do. As a webmaster, the co-branding feature very cool and fotki.com is the only website that offers it. I would like to thank the staff of fotki.com for creating the best on-line photo sharing service that I have ever seen.