I’ve bitten the bullet and ordered both a USB Bluetooth Dongle and a Bluetrek G2 headset. The headset is on sale until tomorrow for only $48.00 with $20.00 in rebates bringing the final cost down to $28+$3.95 S&H. I couldn’t pass it up for that price. Hopefully the dongle and headset will be here by the end of the week and I’ll be using it with Skype shortly after! It should also be a nice headset for my Treo 650 when it arrives and just a decent headset to have laying around for loaner, etc.

I’m looking at getting a couple of handsets for use with Skype for us to use as a inexpensive way of doing conference calls. Currently, I’m using a Logitech USB headset which works fairly well…but it’s still a headset and not a real phone. While that’s not an issue for me, I think that my partners would probably feel more comfortable with a honest to goodness phone handset. I’ve found several options. There is the Skype CyberPhone available directly from Skype. The other two vendors that have equipment that is of interest are PCPhoneLine and CUPhone. Another options that I haven’t really investigated fully is using something like a Bluetrek G2 (onsale) with a BT dongle. This would be nice since it would also work with the Treo 650 that we are all going to be using fairly soon.

Links of interest:

PC Phone Line

CU Phone

Skype accessories

VOIP Info.org

Tom Keating’s VOIP Blog

mytreo.net has Treo 650’s for $369 with a free shirt, hat and a compact DVD player. Pretty good deal compared to the $599 from Sprint. I’m still using my 600 and will probably hold off until sometime in December to pick my 650 up, maybe as a Christmas present for myself!

MediaWiki is the Wiki that runs wikipedia. I’ve just downloaded it and started looking around as I would like to setup a personal Wiki and possibly a business one. MediaWiki looks like Plone, but it isn’t. It’s PHP based and they probably just borrowed the icons and the like. I’ve also grabbed ZWiki, which integrates with Plone and could be a better choice for GCG as we are already Plone based for out CMS.

A New York woman who ran up debts of $951,000 on her Amex account is sueing the company for $2m for allowing her to hammer the plastic, Newsday reports.

Antoinette Millard, 40, says American Express should have realised she was mentally incompetent when she opened the sky’s-the-limit Centurion account. Her court filing states that American Express “knew or should have known that [Millard] was acting impulsively and and irrationally at the time she entered into contract”. She cites anorexia, depression, panic attacks and “head tumors” as contributory factors to her mental incompetence.

Just like the category, all I can say is: WTF??? Why didn’t I think of that? Run it up and sue like hell! Read more here.

I’ve integrated WeatherReport into the site. I had to do a fair amount of hacking around a couple of issues:

• First, I had issues with the DB access. I keep fairly restrictive access to my backend DB and I had add a specific premission for weather report. I’m not sure why this was needed, but it resolved the issue.
• Second, I had much pain and suffering around the CSS needed to make it appear to ‘belong’ in the ‘Silver is the new Black’ style I use. I ended up with a set of #weather CSS tags that seem to get the job done, but not exactly how I wanted. My neophyte status with CSS is showing though, but it was a good learning experience. I assumed that I could sub a #id with new properties and they would override the stuff above it, that doesn’t seem to always be the case.

If you have more than one computer and you haven’t heard of Synergy, you should have. It’s a very cool software tool to allow you to control two or more systems with a single keyboard and mose. It works across most flavors of UNIX, Windows and OSX. It also support a ’shared’ clipboard which is very useful. No more having to copy that text to a file and then load it into Word or Outlook, just copy/paste and keep on going.

I’ve been using Synergy for several months now and can’t imagine how I ever lived without it.

I’ve put my partial CentOS mirror online, it can be found via FTP here or via yum here. Currently I only have CentOS 3.3 mirrored, minus the ISO’s. I will be putting more online as I get feedback from the CentOS folks. We have about 25-20GB of space that I can offer to them, which isn’t enough for the entire cAos mirror. I do have 1TB a month of bandwidth to offer, which I hope will alleviate some of their recent bandwidth issues.

The Cowboys managed to win one today. I was impressed with Drew Henson, except for the pick, and Julius Jones was amazing. Julius showed the speed and power to make things happen. The Defense even managed to get some positive things going.

I’m not sure why the Tuna put Vinny back in during the 3rd quarter, that seemed an odd move. I had to chuckle at Dat Nguyen when he got his pick and dropped down. I know that is the “right” thing to do, but I’m sure he’s going to get a razzing!

Xcompmgr, transset and transparent windows and other eye candy for Xorg X11. This is some serious X level compositing and the like. I’ve just discovered this and have been playing around. It’s still in it’s infancy as far as management of it, but it’s going to make for a very cool looking X world.

My wife and I have been on a binge for it lately, it’s got the perfect amount of tartness with sweetness. It’s only 25% juice and it’s got high fructose corn syrup, but we don’t care. It’s good stuff!

I’ve reworked the website for our company, please take a look and give me some feedback. I’ve done a fairly extensive amount of work to customize the Plone CMS to fit out needs. We use our site for almost everything, knowledge base, issue tracker, marketing, DAV…you name it, it’s there.

Go get Adblock! it is an excellent Adblocker. I’ve installed it and it’s been wonderful. Here is the Link to the install page and HERE is the latest rules you can download. Grab the latest .txt file and save it, then import into adblock.

Seems I should have a new item for people who are looking for the Cygwin/Gentoo Toolchain. It can be found on the right under links. This is a link to the latest version of the toolchain which allows a Windows box with Cygwin installed to be used as a DISTCC_HOST. What this means is that you can use your Windows boxes to help your Gentoo box do compiles.

My old blog was nuked by a server dying and me not having a good mysql backup. This will be my new and improved Blog!