Jacob’s Technical Blog

I just received a Nokia N810 today for my two week evaluation. The first thing I wanted to do was to call home and brag to mom and dad. So I installed Skype and made the call. It was rather pretty easy. I went to the Skype website for the Nokia devices (following a link from the web browser menu) and clicked the download button. Then I had the option to open the install file which caused it to open in an application manager which downloaded and installed the Skype application for me.

Skype worked well… very nice audio using just the built in speakers and microphone. I talked to my mom for an hour and a half, with only some choppy audio for two brief moments.

I was disappointed that Skype didn’t take advantage of the built in camera to do video conferencing. This isn’t Nokia’s fault, but instead of Skype.

A while ago, I found myself needing to upload many document files into Google Docs. I saw that Google had a new API for doing such, so I decided to write a quick little app for the Mac to do just that. Just drag and drop documents onto the icon, and away their uploaded.

I had never written any sort of real Mac application, so I just kind of glued something together out of Python, applescript, and a couple of helper apps. I threw the source up at Google Project Hosting, which has been good, because otherwise I would have been supporting the thousands of downloads.

Recently, my little droplet app became more famous. It was featured on lifehacker.com as a featured Mac Download. My favorite line from their post was, “Gdocsuploader is still new and a bit unpolished.” I think it should be considered more than just a bit unpolished. They should have said, “this thing might work, and is about as unpolished as lava rock.”

There have been a multitude of other posts about my little project:

• Web Worker Daily claims it could save you a bit of friction.
• VinodLive says it shines with some cool drag and drop options
• i use this shows 2 people are using it. I wonder how many people use i use this.
• samjones jaiku’ed it saying it saves time. Erik also jaiku’ed it when he added it to his del.icio.us bookmarks.
• Geekout.tv actually mentioned me by name! Thanks to them for the nice personal reference
• It hass even gone international at macworld.idg.se. I don’t know what they’ve said, but I hope it is nice.

Thanks to everyone who wrote something nice about it.

In my attempt to clean up my jacobbrunson.com inbox (hosted through Google Apps; powered by Gmail), I wanted to take all the email messages about voicemail from GrandCentral, Gizmo Project, and others, and apply a label to them so I can sort them away.

I thought an appropriate label for these types of messages would be Voicemail.

When I tried this, it returned the following error message:

System specific names are not allowed. Please try another name.

I don’t understand why Voicemail would be a system specific name, unless Google has something special coming to Gmail.

I think we all probably manage our email in different ways. I’m usually the type that only ever looks at the top of the unread message list and goes on with life not worrying what messages might be left around.

However, recently I found that I’ve accumulated 2500 messages in my inbox. I’m not sure it is necessarily a bad thing, but it is something I’m trying to fix.
Continue reading Cleaning out the inbox…

Thunderbird is an email software sibling to Firefox, the excellent web browser from the Mozilla foundation.  Today I found out that version 2.0 was released for Thunderbird.  Among the new features are:

Continue reading Thunderbird 2.0…

I noticed recently that Google has a web page widget for Google Talk.  I have one major suggestion:

I manage an instance of Google Apps for Your Domain.   It would be more than great if Google could work out an instance of the Talk Widget to work with a Google Apps domain.  The widget could be either added to the customized Google Apps homepage, or it could even be added to another homepage for the domain.  

Continue reading Suggestion for Google Talk Widget…

I’m considering buying an HP 1320 LaserJet printer. The printer specs say that it will do up to 22 pages per minute, and it will also do two-sided printing.

Now here is my question:
How many pages per minutes can be printed in two-sided mode?

If the duplexing was completely costless timewise, then it should be 11 pages per minutes. However, I’ve seen duplexers work, and it often takes extra time to move the paper around, so it really should be less than that. But how much less?

Today Slashdot ran an article about Skype verses SIP. The premises for the article is actually kind of stupid, because Skype is a program and service and SIP is a technology.

I’ve started using Skype, and I like it a lot. Not only does it work out of the box, even with firewalls, but the interface is clean and innovative. It also works natively on both Mac OS X and Linux, which are big bonuses in my book.

I’ve never used SIP, but I would like to know more about it. Brigham Young University uses IP phones all across campus, and I heard that you can call any of them with a SIP client. This is pretty cool stuff too, I just would like to try it out.