Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Twitterfone - a shiny new toy to play with!

Thursday, May 15th, 2008 by Frank
4/5
Twitterfone

I had been given a sneak preview of TwitterFone by Pat so I was looking forward to playing with it, but I’ve been so busy I only now got a chance to check this out.

The premise is simple: Sign up, call a local number, speak and what you say will be submitted as text to Twitter.

If you don’t know what Twitter is then this will be meaningless to you - video explaining Twitter in plain English here, and a blog post by me on Twitter here.

TwitterFone is a very cool site, looks lovely and worked perfectly for me on my first go. I have seen some rather interesting transcriptions arising out of it from other people, but it’s all part of the fun if you ask me!

Take this for example:

At 15 May, 2008 08:21 conoro said “Waiting for Louise and (Phelan?) Colder in Dublin. I would tell you there is moist in my t-shirt. yeyeah….”

I’m not sure that’s quite what Conor meant to send to Twitter, but it gave us plenty of entertainment, so who’s complaining? :)

I love the fact you can go and listen to the original recording, TwitterFone puts a link to a page with the sound file when it submits a tweet, at the time of writing this I couldnb’t check what Conor recorded, and I did also have some small issues in figuring out the registration process, but I think all those problems may be because the site is a little slow responding, I’m guessing because it’s been too successful. Now there’s a good complaint!

Well done Pat Phelan, and everyone involved on this really fun site.

Go and check it out. It’s fun to speak your Tweets!

Rated 4/5 on May 15 2008
Vote on Frank’s reviews at LouderVoice
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Cheap international calls from your mobile with Call15.com

Saturday, April 5th, 2008 by Frank

Call15 have a new way of getting cheap international calls from your mobile. Check it out:

  1. You have to be with O2
  2. You dial a Call15 number to get a preset number of minutes (there are different numbers for different call lengths).
  3. You then dial the number you wish to speak with.
  4. You get a warning when you have less than a minute left, in time to say your goodbyes and end your call.
  5. You get billed a set amount to your account.

That’s it. No set up, no registering, no codes to remember, no standing on one leg and rubbing your tummy while holding your phone in the air.

Until I tried it out, and double checked everything, I had trouble believing it could be so simple, easy and cheap - so in case you are like me and ridiculously sceptical here it is again:

  • Call the special number
  • Dial in the international number
  • Talk
  • Pay a set rate for a set amount of minutes.

So if I tell you the numbers now, and you have an O2 phone, you can get cheaper international calls right now. The numbers are always the same, but the rates differ somewhat depending on the country you are calling - check out their site for full details.

Here are the numbers, and example rates which at the time of posting applied to the UK, France, Spain and Italy (Poland is even cheaper than rates below!):

Access
Number
Rate
per Minute
Call
Charge
Minute(s)
Given
1512
778877
€0.039
€0.39
10.00
1513
778877
€0.036
€0.80
22.00
1514
778877
€0.033
€1.00
30.00
1515
778877
€0.033
€1.30
40.00
1516
778877
€0.033
€2.00
60.00
1517
778877
€0.035
€2.80
80.00
1518
778877
€0.033

€4.00
120.00

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that I may in the future do some illustrative work for Call15.com which is how I came across them (yes, i work as well as post on BifSniff - oh, and thanks to Pat Phelan for the introduction!) but I wrote this post simply as someone who has seen his bill spike horribly from calls to family in the UK and can see the HUGE potential in such an easy way to cut costs.

As an added bonus, Call15 are currently running a competition to win an iPhone, and are also giving away O2 sim cards (for a limited time) - so if you’re not currently with O2 you can still start making cheap calls.

If you try this out, let me know what you think… am I overly excited about this? Is it old news? Have I been living under a rock? The new economising Frank is well impressed.

You gotta love this..

Thursday, March 6th, 2008 by Rich..

You’ve also got to be of a certain age to appreciate it. My slide viewer was a Hanimex and I thought it was the coolest thing ever when I got it. Anyway go check your attics or wherever else your old junk is stored..

Flag Tags - the latest craze…

Saturday, February 2nd, 2008 by Frank
loudervoice

You may have noticed lately a spate of film reviews with star ratings, like this review for Gone Baby gone, these were done using the WordPress plugin for LouderVoice.

Loudervoice is a very clever review site… like a ‘community driven review aggregator’, if you like. In other words it pulls together reviews written by people on a whole host of technologies - SMS, Twitter, Blogs and other popular platforms, and it also allows users to then rate the reviews themselves, so that over time you can learn to trust reviews based on the rating they got from other users.

So if I review Gone Baby Gone and other people who have seen the film agree with me, they will rate my review highly and you can assume the review is fairly dependable.

Right now LouderVoice is really in it’s infancy, and the more people who jump on board, the more useful the site will become.

More users on LouderVoice means:

  • More useful review content for visitors to the site
  • More meaningful ratings on the reviews themselves
  • More visitors to the site who are looking for reviews for items, and therefore more traffic to blogs like this one who input reviews.

So the bigger LouderVoice gets the more useful it gets both as a source of dependable reviews for items, and a source of traffic for websites/blogs who provide review content.

LouderVoice is constantly improving and updating it’s services, at the moment a complete overhaul is scheduled to be rolled out in the next month or so. The current site makes it a little difficult to get your head around the value of LouderVoice, but I believe the new site will be fantastic - watch for it.

Currently, the latest rollout from LouderVoice is Flag Tags (yes, I came up with the name, so shoot me if you hate it - apart from that I have no affilliation with LouderVoice apart from being signed up!). Flag Tags are tags you give a blog post to alert LouderVoice that the blog post is a LouderVoice review.

All you have to do to use them is first log into your LouderVoice account and in your settings add a source for LouderVoice to look for reviews. You add your blog’s RSS feed and from then on you include the name of the item you are reviewing in the blog post title and simply add two tags:

  1. the word “review”
  2. A tag/label “rating=N” where N is an integer from 1 to 5

Makes blogging LouderVoice reviews extremely easy. I highly recommend checking out LouderVoice, you can review by blogging, SMS, Twitter or directly on the LouderVoice website itself.

Tell ‘em I sent you!

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Send secret files in a jpeg image…

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 by Frank

bookRemember those books when you were a kid that taught you how to send secret messages using lemon juice?

Well for the current generation here’s how to send a secret text message in a jpeg image…

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