I spent Thursday roaming around downtown San Francisco going from one wireless hotspot to the next testing some new features that we’re adding to Devicescape‘s hotspot login service.
I got off the ferry from Alameda just after 8:40am at the ferry building and walked up Market Street (in the rain). First stop was a Starbucks to get my email and do a quick test of a new, faster way to connect to T-Mobile hotspots.
Having been a big supporter of the Gizmo Project for the last couple of years, I was disappointed with their change of policy on call-out credit expiration, and even more so with their attitude towards the outcry on their forums. The change was that any new call-out credits bought now will be expired in six months. Other providers, including Skype, expire credits too, but they do it only on inactive accounts (normally defined by no use of the feature in the last six months). Gizmo Project’s bean counters have decided that tracking user activity is too much for them to handle, and instead have gone with a simple 6 months from purchase.
When I started using Gizmo Project, using $10 in six months would not have been too difficult. Now though, after I have encouraged most of the people I call most often to join, combined with their All Calls Free promotion, I haven’t even been using that much in a year. I need a few credits there for the occasional call to a PSTN number somewhere in the world, but not that much anymore.
So, I started looking for another VoIP provider that could connect my calls to PSTN numbers around the world, and wouldn’t expire credits based on a simple fixed calendar. As luck would have it, one of our early users at Devicescape recommended a VoIP provider called VoiceStick. They have a number of fixed rate plans for US and international calling, as well as one called NextToNothing, that just charges per minute of call out time. More interestingly, they provide a local call in number for free as well, allowing people to call me on a regular phone number and get my VoIP line. But most interesting to me is another service, i2Bridge, that allows me to call my VoIP number from my cell phone (or any other phone I nominate) and then lets me dial any other number and connects me using my VoIP minutes (something I’ve often wished I could do with my Gizmo account).
Over the next few months I’ll be transitioning to VoiceStick for my VoIP service. I’ll keep the Gizmo account running on my ATA, but only for Gizmo-Gizmo calls. And I’ll be getting as many as possible of those contacts I got using Gizmo to switch to VoiceStick too so we can take advantage of the free in network calling.
Been a busy January! Lots to do getting the house set up (and still a lot more to do), then three days in Las Vegas for CES 2007 followed by a week in Puerto Vallarta with friends for a much needed break!
There have a been a lot of updates to Devicescape’s hotspot login service too in the last month (and there are more things on the way). This week we are at DEMO’07 showing off the hotspot login service. We have almost 40 networks in the list (10 confirmed working, the rest still in an experimental state) and are adding them as fast as our community members send them in.
I’m a long way behind on photo uploads; I still need to rebuild my office following the move which has not helped – hopefully I’ll get that done this week. I need to sort out which photos to get prints of for the house too, and find a way to display my magnetic photo collection (my old apartment door was metal so I had the inside of it covered in magnetic 4×6 photos).
So here is what I’ve been working on for past few months… a service that helps you login at wireless hotspots. What is the big deal there you ask? Well, from your laptop it is only a small inconvenience to jump through a hotspot’s sign-on page, but on a phone like the Linksys WIP300 it is impossible normally since the phone doesn’t include a web browser.
With Devicescape’s firmware in the phone, you can walk into a hotspot (currently a US T-Mobile location, any FON hotspot worldwide or Google’s Mountain View municipal network, with more to follow soon), switch on and start making calls using your Gizmo or other SIP account.
Want to try it? Sign up at http://www.devicescape.com/, download the software for your device (currently supported: Windows XP, Windows Mobile 5, the Linksys WIP300 and the Nokia 770 web tablet), enter your account info and roam around town. Remember, it’s a beta so if you encounter problems be sure to let us know and we’ll try to fix it.
Seen a lot of in-store equipment recently that has crashed and is either in the state shown in this photo where Windoze is trying to reboot and failing, or it is stuck trying to install/upgrade something.
Seems that people still haven’t learnt not to rely on Windows for something that needs to keep running, although in the case of the Dell console at Costco I guess they could be forgiven there since they’re selling Windows boxes. Hope the ones they sell keep running better than the console though 🙂
I’ve been getting a lot of Google Alerts about Microsoft’s new Zune media player recently. First it was an iPod killer, then it wasn’t, then it was coming soon and finally it arrived. I’m sure you’ve read it all elsewhere, so I’m not going to comment anymore on the device.
Instead, I am puzzled by the website that accompanies the device and will act as the marketplace for buying or subscribing to media. A few weeks back that was announced too, but rendered really badly on my laptop. I assumed this was a temporary thing, but it appears that was not the case. The device is on sale, the site one assumes is live, and yet I still see a page that looks like it was put together by a novice just learning HTML. I’ve seen MySpace pages that look better than this (actually, most MySpace pages look better than this).
I assume that nobody at MS uses anything other than IE. Some of us out here in the real world do use other browsers though, and as somebody that creates web content I know enough to at least check that it renders roughly how I want it to in the top 4 or 5 browsers. The problem seems to be that they totally omitted the CSS that would make the page look right. There is no style sheet information embedded in the page, nor linked to it.
Reading about FON handing out free wireless home gateway boxes, which just happen to act as public access hotspots at the same time, I noticed this comment from one US ISP:
“People need to know that sharing their broadband service amounts to theft,” says Time Warner cable spokesperson Maureen Huff.
More misuse of the word “theft.” Of course, Time Warner is also one of the companies that is screaming theft for other things. That’s not to say it is not wrong. It is almost certainly a violation of the terms of service that the company requires you to agree to before providing service. I’m not a lawyer (thankfully), but I don’t think that’s theft. Sounds more like a contract violation.
I have a FON AP, but it is running on our office network. It is one of several that we have at work in fact. The new La Fonera boxes are also very small. The switch from the Linksys WRT54GL to an Atheros based design of their own allows them to offer virtual APs, so the box has the unencrypted public access network, and a second private wireless network that comes configured for WPA-Personal.
This is a close up shot of the underside of the hard disc that I froze to recover the contents from it. By the way, that same disc is running just fine as one of a RAID-1 pair in another machine now (both my main office machines are now using RAID-1 pairs – shame the laptop cannot, but the X40 only has space for half a hard drive as it is.
Gizmo Project, my preferred VoIP service which I’ve been using for over a year now for all my international calls and many others, has just started offering a new plan called All Calls Free. The plan makes calling many other Gizmo members free even if you call their home landline or, in some countries, their mobile number.
Calling any Gizmo member in Canada, China, Cyprus, Guam, Hong Kong, Malawi, Malaysia, Puerto Rico, Russia, Saipan, San Marino, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, United States, US Vigin Islands or Vatican City is free on either their registered landline or mobile number as well as using their Gizmo name or number.
Calling members in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, French Antilles, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Guadeloupe, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, United Kingdom, Venezuela or Zambia on their landline is free, but not on their mobile numbers.
Members just need to make sure that their landline and mobile numbers are stored in their profile and other Gizmo members will be able to call them for free.
I have heard a recording of Alaskan US Senator Ted Stevens talking about net neutrality a few times now. Each time I hear it I am puzzled initially by how somebody who has so much trouble speaking coherently got into an office where public speaking is so essential. But then I wonder whether it is just that he feels so passionately about this issue that his mind is racing ahead of his mouth (I’m sure we’ve all been there before).
Once you get past that issue though, you can easily separate out his arguments: