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

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.

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...

boundaries

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Plantagenet Penguinista

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