Really need to admire the Auto-Tune the news videos
I would be really cool if they got Katie Couric to actually be on these videos.
Category: Cool (page 9 of 11)
I’m not fully awake but saw this via Reddit.
Very cool and excellent landing.
Sometime you do find fun things on Reddit.
Yesterday was fun as the family did the Christmas day trip to my brother’s house. We had a great time but I’m coming down with a serious nose cold. I think I only got two hours of sleep last night. Good thing I’m off all next week, I’d really hate to get sick at work…
Jane Wells wrote a nice thank you to the WordPress support volunteers. I’m listed among the “Generally active volunteers“. Coool. Intimidating that Whooami has been involved in (a little arithmetic here…) 10,417 threads!
I purchased my Nikon D300s for a simple reason: I was sold on the D300 and I’m a stickler for getting the current model. I’ve been very satisfied with it.
Now Canon has come out with the 7D which lines up directly against the D300s. DPReview has a really good in-depth write-up of the Canon 7D. Look at this page for a comparison of the 7D, D300s, and the Pentax K-7. No surprises there, but what I found interesting is that the K-7 is much cheaper and yet competes with the two big boys.
I’ve invested in Nikon and unless they suddenly go out of business, I’m not getting a new DSLR system. But for new buyers Pentax might be a workable option.
That was easy. I ordered Vonage yesterday and my V-Portal arrived today.
All I did was plug the Internet port into my FIOS router and my wireless phone into the phone jack. Once it acquired an IP address, it downloaded a firmware update and rebooted. That was it and I was off and running.
Before I converted to FIOS, my Optimum Triple Play came with a phone line via the cable modem. I had the regular house line with Verizon and a home office line with Cablevision.
I used that line strictly for work. It was the number that the NOC would call in the middle of the night when I had to provide support. That way only myself and Lily got woken up and the rest of the family did not get disturbed.
Since I discontinued Optimum Online, I lost that line. Going forward Lily and I plan to use a second line for both work and personal use.
Today I ordered the second line with Verizon. It came out to $44.99+tax each month and had the Verizon Freedom Essentials plan. No international calling but calls to the US and Puerto Rico were bundled in. A quick check with Vonage’s web site and I called back Verizon and canceled the order. I ordered the Vonage World plan for 24.99+tax per month and that includes calling internationally to 60 countries.
For anyone that has been under a rock for the last 6 or 7 years, Vonage provides a box that connects to your network and does VoIP. One end of the box goes into your LAN/Internet connection, the other end goes into your telephone. No Internet connection means no Vonage.
There are several things I like about Vonage.
Caller ID and call waiting. Vonage looks like a regular phone and has all the usual features that you expect these days.
Transcribed voicemail. You setup in your Vonage dashboard your voicemail so that it’s not only accessible form the web, you also get a transcribed e-mail with the WAV file as an attachment. I can have that go to multiple e-mail addresses so both Lily and I know when someone left a voicemail as well as the text of what they said. It works, I’ve already left myself a voicemail and got a kick out of the e-mail that soon followed.
Call forwarding and SimulRing. Call forwarding is one thing, but ringing multiple lines can be cool. There are times when we’re expecting a call and we don’t want to miss it. Now we can forward the call to ring both our cellphones. After 30 seconds the call will go to voicemail.
Network Availability Number. If your Internet connection goes down, you can have a standby number for forwarding to. No Internet connection? No problem, just forward to your cell phone. This forwarding will only occur when the Vonage box falls off the network.
My Vonage V-Portal (the hardware to provide a phone jack) is arriving tomorrow so I expect to beat up the service a lot.
A Verizon tech came out yesterday morning and replaced a splitter on my cables. Poof! The TV guide is now working. I’ve had it for less than a day but the wiz bang factor is making the service look great.
My Internet and TV viewing works well but for some reason the guide data is not being loaded onto the set top boxes. While I am waiting for the (hopefully) Monday morning fix to my TV guide data, here is what you get with FIOS.
1. A weather sealed FIOS box that performs the hand off from fiber to copper telephone line and cable TV. This was mounted on the outside of the house.
2. A battery backed UPS unit. This is solely for the Verizon FIOS box and it’s to maintain the phone line in the event of a power outage. The POTS lines are on a separate power circuit so when the town goes dark the phone lines still work. Since the fiber connection does not have electricity this is necessary so that the phones are always on.
3. A very cool cable modem with built in 802.11b/g wi-fi and 5 Ethernet ports (1 WAN and 4 internal LAN). This plugs into the cable line and provides a very complete turn-key solution. I turned off the wi-fi since I already have a wireless network and don’t feel like redesigning my setup. But for the non-technically savvy customers this is a good fire-and-forget solution.
4. And of course all the set top boxes.
Each of the set top boxes is assigned a DHCP address from this router on the 192.168.1.0/24 network. I connected my Internet gateway to an Ethernet port and was also assigned a 192.168.1.x address. I like to access my basement remotely so I setup TCP port forwarding on specific ports on the Verizon box to my gateway. Initially I had all ports forwarded but I narrowed it down to a few specific ports and it’s all working. I did have to change my ddclient.conf settings but that was very easy.
The setup boxes get their configuration data via the Internet router. If the router goes dead, the TV signals will still work but the guide data will stop updating. No guide data means that the DVR is kind of pointless.
The phone is flawless and the Internet connection is amazing. See the SPEEDTEST.NET results to the right.
I just have a small problem with my digital TV service. At the moment I have no picture at all. Earlier I had picture and all my channels but I did not have the channel guide. An hour later, no channel guide and no picture.
I’m not really worried and here’s why: everyone I have dealt with on the phone or in person has been polite and professional. The installer arrived around 11 AM and wrapped up the install before 3:30 PM. He did mention that the programming data might take as long as Monday morning, but all the channels worked and I could live without the guide for a weekend.
I just got off the phone with Verizon and they are working on getting my service back. I’ll see how it goes.
