Skype: P2P telephony

25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: General | 2 Comments 

I've recently used Skype as a way to get in touch with friends instead of using older methods such as MSN, and I have to say that it's amazing. The whole thing works based on a P2P (peer-to-peer) technology similar to the one used in popular filesharing P2P apps such as Kazaa or eDonkey but instead of sending music files or the latest w4r3z, we are sending voice.

I have to say that the quality is amazingly good, even better than a traditional phone. However, due to the unreliability of the IP network sometimes the sound will be totally screwed (garbled sound, cuts and silences in the middle of a conversation, etc) But when it works well (around 85% of the time) it does work well! If you would like to save some money when communicating with your friends, give it a try There are clients for Windows, Linux and OSX even though the Windows client is the most advanced and supports things like group conversations. The Linux and OSX clients are still under development and can be considered beta quality but work quite well nevertheles... Finally, you can also make calls to normal fixed phones and mobile phones via Skype by paying a small fee per minute, something they call SkypeOut credit. I don't think that 1.7 eurocents/minute is not so much compared with normal telephony rates...

moblogging

25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: General | 0 Comments 

I am testing my new 'moblog' plugin. Do you think it'll work?

Oh, but this time... it has an attachment

IT'S COMING!!

25/12/2004 19:29 | Categories: General | 5 Comments 

I promised myself I wasn't going to say anything until I have it here, but... IT'S COMING!!!

Rediscover the web with a different browser: Firefox

25/12/2004 19:29 | Categories: General | 0 Comments 

The Mozilla project launched a couple of days ago the newest version of its browser Firefox (formerly known as Firebird). It's fast as hell (way faster than IE, and it's not just my own perception of it), provides pop-up blocking, tabbed-browsing, which is a thing I can't live without and has awesome add-ons such as AdBlock.

About the browser, I can't really recommend it enough... specially because of its amazing rendering speed, not to mention that its memory footprint is lower than its bigger brother Mozilla, and that it's way more secure than IE to use. Also, about AdBlock, I don't see any more flash adds, annoying animated ads and so on. It takes a while to configure it since you have to manually tell what content you'd like to block and from which servers, but once you've done that, browsing feels soooo much better!

Firefox also runs in Mac OS X if anybody's interested, even though its speed is not as fast as its Windows counterpart. It feels a little faster than Safari 1.2, though.

The funny game: part 2

25/12/2004 19:29 | Categories: General | 0 Comments 

Remember that really successful flash game where you had to smack the penguin to make it fly (and slide!!) as far as possible? The second part is here! It's much more trickier than the other one, and it has nothing to do with it, actually. Feel free to share your scores with us

Let's go to Fucking (Austria)

25/12/2004 19:29 | Categories: General | 1 Comments 

This is a funny one There is a village in Austria called Fucking and its citizens have recently decided not to change the name. After all, it's a funny one... I wouldn't have change it either The funniest thing is that very often english and american tourists steal the traffic signs! Of course who wouldn't like to have a traffic sign saying "Fucking" in his living room?