Sick of paying $1.80 a minute for international calls?

(plus a 40c flagfall?)

Try fring, which installed & works on my (Symbian OS) Nokia E63, then open your Skype account through it. Skype calls to US cell-phones are 2.7c per minute.

My Virgin $29 cap includes only 20MB of data per month for the ’phone itself, which is not an enormous amount of talking, but OTOH, the most I’ve used in a month sans fring/Skype is 1MB, & I can boost that quota by 50MB for $5 (or 300MB for $10).

Pull a figure out of the air, & call that 4200 kilobits per minute, so about 90 minutes of talking for $5, or 5.25c per minute for data, plus 2.7c for Skype time, gives ≈8c, which certainly beats 180c per minute.

If I wanted to yak for 9 hours a month, that works out to 4.45c per minute.

The wonders of modern technology... (-:

Comments

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b

new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

Plantagenet Penguinista

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