I love my iPhone

So I really like my iPhone. It's the Linksys CIT200 iPhone and works with Skype and you'd might not even realize it was a real phone. It looks more like a generic Nokia cell phone than a home phone and it works great. Actually, the one thing that makes it “not normal” (which doesn't bother me as much as others on-line) is if you are manually dialing you need to dial the “+1” before all calls, to me it's slightly silly, you should be able to configure it to have a default country (and area) code.

You can see all the people you have on your Skype list on the display of the phone so you just scroll down and pick who you want to call. I've wandered all over the condo and it's clear everywhere (I'm on the 3rd/4th floor and it's clear on the first level too!). It's got a headset jack on it, a great speaker phone and supports call waiting. From the USB base the plugs into the computer it even has a button to press so you can page the phone so you can't misplace it. You do need to route the audio on the computer so it properly goes to the phone (Skype has audio settings but it seems like the computer overrides them).

I initially set up Skype when I dropped my land-line phone. I wanted a way to make phone calls in case I forgot my phone somewhere (or it broke) and wanted an easy backup. Plus when I'm out of the country if I have interent access, I can make phone-calls to the US very inexpensively (2.1 cents a minute).

If you use Skype it's a must have, if you don't have Skype and you need an extra phone line in the house get Skype and pay for unlimited outgoing calls to land-lines in the US and Canada for $30 a year. If you don't get a phone like this you just use a headset on the computer.

What don't I like about my iPhone? It's got a crappy wallpaper background and while they have several to choose from, none are a plain background so it's always hard to read the screen. The “+1” is a minor annoyance, but since I really don't use it that much, it's okay. The audio configuration is mildly annoying, I'm hoping an update fixes that (update: I did just install the Jan 22, 2007 update and the audio confusion seems better, we'll see how it feels after a few days).

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Posted by Gary on Sunday at 12:53 PM on February 4, 2007.
Related categories: money, reviews, technology
Gary Said... http://garysaid.com/

iLike Music (especially FREE music)

So I keep forgetting to mentioned that I found iLike, it's kind of a music social networking site.

The big difference is it recommends music to you and allows you to download it for free. It appears to work best with iTunes, if you download the iLike sidebar it'll upload lists of what you listen to most and make recommendations in the sidebar where it'll let you preview music and download it directly to iTunes. Now the free songs are mostly artists that you haven't heard of, but that doesn't mean they aren't any good, I'm really enjoying some of my new found music. It seems like most (all?) of the new music comes from GarageBand.com

My iLike page is at http://ilike.com/user/garylapointe

They just keep adding new features that they're pretty god a keeping you up-to-date on the iLike Blog. And they've got a widget for your web page (which I'm hoping is showing up on your screen as you read this) and it'll even let you play my recently played songs as you read this post!

What I don't like about it is it calculates favorites based on the songs in iTunes on your hard drive and not what's on your iPod (even if this was some manual option I had to select I could deal with it). I've got a 60 GB iPod, I don't have that much room on my laptop to carry around all my music on it all the time (besides I've probably got it with me on my iPod). So really what it thinks is my favorite is what I've bought from the iTunes store that's on my laptop and played the most (on the laptop or the iPod). So Conjure One is what it lists as my absolute favorite and while I like them a lot they wouldn't be listed as my favorite. And when I was playing a lot of Christmas music (which I also had on my laptop) it push that up on my favorite list (I see Kenny G is still high in my rankings because of Christmas.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iTunes, music

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Posted by Gary on Sunday at 3:29 PM on February 4, 2007.
Related categories: apple, money, music, web sites
Gary Said... http://garysaid.com/

I made the 2000 Bloggers List!

So I made the 2000 bloggers list that I mentioned last week. It was kinda hard to find my picture (the one to the left) buried in with the other (almost) 2000 but I found it. As of today it looks like there's still room for about 400 or so more (nope see the update below).

If you arrived here from a 2000 bloggers list PLEASE leave a comment!

UPDATE: Due to all sorts of reason dealing with linking and indexing the 2000 bloggers list has been removed from the original site. Worries and threats of it being considered a “link farm” to trick search engines caused Tino to remove the original list. It's funny because while the list was replicated, I don't think anyone was told to replicate it (even though the code was easily made available). And some people were put on it without their knowledge so how can you penalize them? I just wanted on the list to generate some new viewers (and it has). Forget raising my Technorati, since my posts somehow don't show up on their site (everyone else seems to index me), how does a higher ranking help me?!? Getting a few more readers (and being more findable) is one of the reasons I signed up on Technoriti, but without content, I'm not very findable (even if my rank goes higher). I'm not sure if anyone came here via Technorati (did you?).

I'm not sure if the list ever actually made it to 2,000. Does anyone know for sure?

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Posted by Gary on Sunday at 4:15 PM on February 4, 2007.
Related categories: blogging, me + myself + i, people, web sites
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