Jay Meydad's Life Mashup

If you don’t read Engadget or other gadget reviews websites you might find this helpful.

Here is how you could save a few hundred dollars per year on your home phone bill. It is called MagicJack, a VOIP service that requires a computer (PC or Mac) and an internet connection to provide extremely cheap local and long distance phone calls using a very small device that looks like a disk on key.

To get started you need to sign up for the free trail on the company’s website (or you could buy it at RadioShack). Once you have the device, simply plug it into the PC/Mac USB port and connect a regular phone to the jack on the other side (as in the photo below). Once plugged, your computer will automatically start running the dialer software and take you through a simple sign-up process, where you will be asked to select a phone number (currently they don’t support number portability). That’s it.

The service costs only $20 per year (no taxes, tolls and other hidden fees). The device itself costs $20 so your first payment (after the 30 days free trial is over) will actually be $40, but any subsequent year will be $20. And if you really want a great deal and lock the price for the next few years, you can prepay $60 for 5 years. That’s a pretty sweet alternative to AT&T’s $45/month + tolls and taxes, or Vonage’s $25/month.

Couple of side benefits some people might not be aware of:

1. MagicJack makes your home home phone portable while you are traveling  (assuming you travel with a laptop).
2. MagicJack gives you other features for free including call forwarding, voice mail and voicemail to email as attachment notifications
3. If you have relatives/friends who live abroad (like I do) and you & them spend a decent amount of money every month on international calls, you might want to buy a MagicJack for them. This way they will have a US number and all calls done between them and you will be completely free.

I have been using it for a few weeks now and very happy with the overall experience. The call quality is excellent. Rarely I had any echos problem and disconnects. And when those happen, I simply unplug the device from the USB port, reconnect and restart the dialer program. This “hassle” is worth $550/year in savings.

By default, Microsoft Entourage automatically adds a signature at the very bottom of an email thread. I reply to dozens of emails every day and for a long time I used to cut the signature from the bottom and paste it to the correct place.

You might ask yourself how come I kept doing this. Very simple, I just could not find the right setting under the Preferences pane that would change the behavior. There is also no setting related to the positioning of the signature under the “Signatures”window to address this.

I finally found the time and did some online research and was able find the answer. I figured others could benefit from this tip as well. So, here it is. To get Entourage automatically add the signature at the top of the reply/forward, make sure you have the following setting:

BTW, Gmail used to have the same problem but recently added a fix to the Gmail Lab called Signature tweaks. Hard to imagine this has not become a standard feature of every mail client.

I was checking the new LinkedIn search feature earlier today and noticed that the results displayed once you start typing inside the people search box were covered by the 300×250 flash ad.

This issue exists on many web sites where Flash objects appear in the front, and cover dynamic HTML content. One example are pages that have embedded YouTube videos as well as Snap Shots that appear as a layer under the video player instead in front of it .

To solve this issue, you should make sure the Flash object (ad, embedded video player, etc.) has a transparent background. Depending on whether you are using the OBJECT or EMBED tag:

• Add the following parameter to the OBJECT tag: <param name="wmode" value="transparent">
• Add the following parameter to the EMBED tag: wmode="transparent"

Once you change your code, you should not see an issue similar to the one below.

During the years of my professional career, as I move to a new company or a new role, I usually don’t spend too much time thinking about the past. I try to do my own post mortem analysis shortly after I leave, and summarize to myself what worked and what did not, as well as what were the lessons learned. Then I try to quickly disconnect and ‘clear my brain’ in order to make room for what’s coming next. Later on, when I come across a company name, product, former colleague or former partner that I had worked for/on/with, usually only the good memories come up.

Lately, I find myself thinking more and more about Galleo, a company I worked for back in the first bubble days (2000-2001) and touched on in the past. Galleo had a very innovative approach of how a mobile multimedia communicator should work and what type of applications and features it needs to contain. The company invested a lot in technology & intellectual property but clearly did do enough to protect it. To be more accurate – we began the process of filing several patent applications and registering numerous trademarks but as the company run out of cash and went out of business this process was never completed. With everything that is going on around the iPhone and the (upcoming) GPhone, some of those patents & trademarks could have been really valuable assets. Entrepreneurs – learn your lesson, always save some cash to cover future IP related fees. 

But wait, there is a good part for this post as well. As I was reading the July 2001 Linux Journal article about the Galleo, I came across a quote made by Daniel Benenstein (Galleo’s Dir of Engineering). If you slightly modify his quite, and since both the iPhone and the GPhone use Unix/Linux, it turns out that Daniel’s prophecy is today’s reality…

Mass production is ahead for wireless, embedded Linux multimedia communicators that will contribute even more to make Linux, without a doubt, the OS for the Internet.”

Too bad Galleo did not survive the bubble burst. It could have been a really big company with really big product, and maybe even something Fred Wilson would consider as his dream phone.

Technorati Tags: Mobile, iPhone, GPhone, Galleo, Tips for Entrepreneurs