Mattsapundit

Last week, I finally got the email I waited months to get:

You are invited to open a free Google Voice account.

If you know about Google Voice, you’ll understand my excitement. If you don’t, read on.

Google Voice is a free service that uses Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) technology to allow management of phone communication, including voice, text messages and voicemail.

Here’s a quick overview:

The service has been described simply as “one number to rule them all.” Users can choose a number in most U.S. area codes. Vanity numbers are even available. The Google Voice number then becomes the user’s central contact number. A simple web interface allows the user to link that number to existing lines — work, mobile, home, etc.

Call Routing

Calls to the Google Voice number can be routed in any number of ways, even down to the level of individual callers. For example, I can configure the service so that if my wife calls, all my phones (home, work and mobile) will ring simultaneously. When I answer, the call is routed to the correct phone through Google’s network. Unknown callers can be sent directly to voicemail or blocked outright.

Routing rules can also be enforced on a group basis. This means that I can restrict work contacts from calling me at home, or send family calls to all my phones.

In-Call Management

Google Voice offers several features during a call. Press “star” while on a call, and your other phones will ring, allowing you to transfer the call to another phone. Press 4, and Google Voice will record the call and make it available to listen or download from the Google Voice site. If another call comes in while the user is on a call, he can merge the calls into a conference call. The process can be repeated, allowing four callers to confer simultaneously.

Voicemail

This is where Google Voice really shines. Users can configure different outgoing messages for different classes of callers — informal for friends and family, or strictly business for work contact. Greetings can even be customized to individual callers.

Voicemail messages are stored online and can be retrieved by phone or via the web. When a caller leaves a voicemail message, a Google algorithm transcribes the audio into text and notifies the user via email or text message. In practice, the quality of the voicemail transcription is poor. Transcription is by far the weakest link in the Google Voice system, but it’s improving.

Mobile access

Google has created Google Voice applications for the Android and Blackberry platforms, allowing users to access the full spread of features from their mobile devices. Users of other mobile devices can access a limited feature set via a mobile website.

Looking ahead

The biggest drawback to Google Voice — the one thing that will keep people from using it — is the high switching costs. It’s just a big hassle to change phone numbers, inform all your contacts, update business cards and the like. I’ve had the same phone number for more than five years, and I’m pretty tied to it. But Google plans to allow users to port their existing number to Google Voice. If Google can pull this off, the results would be huge. Users could transition seamlessly and switching costs would fall to almost zero. It remains to be seen whether mobile carriers will cooperate, however.

Are you excited yet? Go get an invite.

For more information:

• Lifehacker
• CNet
• PC World
• Wikipedia

Matt Bramanti | July 20, 2009 at 7:49 pm
Posted to Tech, Uncategorized

1 comment

Hey, this is pretty cool.

You can have animated favicons in Firefox! The icons for each site on the Firefox tabs are animated and when you bookmark them, the bookmark icon is animated too. A quick peek at the HTML of a page with animated favicons shows they simply have a 16×16 animated gif and point the page to that as their favicon with this:

link xhref=”images/favico.gif” TYPE=”image/gif” REL=”icon”

That can be pretty slick, if it’s done well. I’ll have to add one. Need to add transparency, too.

Matt Bramanti | November 15, 2006 at 2:11 am
Posted to Blogging, Design, Tech, Uncategorized

7 comments

Got my phone yesterday and got it all charged up. Works like a charm, so I’m back in modern life.

It sucked not having a phone for a couple days, but from a customer-service perspective, it was a pretty good experience. Got the phone via FedEx when I was supposed to, and it worked beautifully. Verizon’s customer service has always been really helpful, and I strongly recommend the company.

I didn’t want to re-enter all the contacts manually, so I used a little app by Verizon called Backup Assistant. It backs up contacts to a remote server over the air. Then when you get a new phone, or your phone gets wiped out, just install the Backup Assistant app and restore all the contacts. It worked great. Costs $1.99 a month, though.

I used it and then deleted it, because I’ve got better uses for two bucks a month.
If the application also backed up ringtones, photos and text messages, I’d gladly pay $2/month. Are you listening, Verizon?

Matt Bramanti | September 15, 2006 at 11:34 am
Posted to Personal, Tech

2 comments

Don’t forget: today is Monday, which means there’s another free 25-song sampler on iTunes.

Matt Bramanti | September 11, 2006 at 11:10 am
Posted to Music, Tech

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I went to the Verizon store yesterday to see about getting a new phone. It was actually a pretty good experience. I had to wait in line longer than I would have liked, but I explained the problem, the guy looked at the phone, and offered to replace it.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have any of my model phone, so they’re shipping me one via 2nd Day Air. Pretty sweet. All I have to do is ship the crappy one back when I get the new one, and we’ll be good to go. I should get the new phone on Wednesday.

Until then, no cell phone for me. If you need to get in touch with me, drop me an email.

Matt Bramanti | September 11, 2006 at 9:18 am
Posted to Business, Out and About, Reviews, Tech

1 comment

Today, I decided to add to my music collection. Drastically. I looked around and found quite a few sites that offer free, legal downloads of unrestricted music, mostly from indie labels. Some of the sites are traditional labels, some are net labels, some are blogs and some are fansites.

I got a ton of leads from E.C. Brown’s link archive. It’s about as comprehensive as you can get. Here are some of the sites I found with the largest number of free MP3s:

• 3Hive: Indie blog, lots of genres.
• Oddio Overplay: Several themed compilations.
• Comfort Stand Records: Lots of electronica and samplecore.
• Big Neck Records: Tons of rock.
• I Wanna Be Your Dog: A few dozen covers of Iggy Pop’s “I Wanna Be Your Dog.”
• The Crutch: Big indie-rock archive.
• You Ain’t No Picasso: A very-frequently updated review blog.

Here’s the cool part. I discovered a feature in Download Accelerator Plus that lets you mass-queue downloads. The download manager is integrated with Firefox, so when you come across a page with a bunch of links (a discography, for example), you right-click anywhere on the page and select “Download all with DAP.”

This brings up a dialog box listing every link in that HTML document. The list is sortable by type. So you sort, pick all the MP3s, and add them to the download queue. DAP uses a proximity test to pick the fastest server, and away it goes. When I started this post, I had 1,617 files in the queue. The vast majority are single songs, though there are quite a few albums and compilations in there.

Now the queue stands at 1,811. I figure there are probably about 2,000-2,100 songs in there. Add that to the 270 I downloaded today and the 3,100 already in my iTunes library, and that’s a pretty good-sized catalog.

Matt Bramanti | August 17, 2006 at 8:31 pm
Posted to Music, Tech

5 comments

Regular readers of Mattsapundit will notice that this blog is devoid of comment spam. No Viagra from Canada, no midget porn, no 1% mortgages, none of that crap.

But scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page, and you’ll see that I’ve had more than 1,300 attempted spam attacks, all of them rebuffed without incident. This is because I use Spam Karma 2, an excellent anti-spam program.

The way it works is this: as comments come in, they’re automatically put through a series of filters, each of which can be configured for strictness. Each filter looks for a specific trait common to automatically-generated comments. One looks for comments generated too rapidly, one checks comments against an IP blacklist of known spammers, another checks for an unusually high number of links, while yet another checks for comments on older posts. There are 10 filters in total.

Each filter assigns the comment a karma value based on its performance. This value is cumulative as the comment makes its way through the chain. Suspicious comments tend to have more than one spam-like attribute, so the negative karma builds up. At a certain point, determined by a very high negative karma value, the comment is obviously spam and it’s automagically discarded. Buh-bye, scumbags.

Conversely, real, human-generated comments get good karma. They might have one or two suspicious attributes (originating from a browser that doesn’t support JavaScript, for instance), but they’ll pass the other filters and get posted without a hitch.

The software works almost perfectly. No spam gets through. I haven’t had a single spam comment since I’ve been using Spam Karma 2. That’s pretty impressive, considering I’m just using the default settings. Even better, it’s given no false positives to date. Every once in a while, the software isn’t quite sure whether a comment is spam, and it holds it in moderation for me to approve or deny manually, but that’s only happened maybe three times.

All in all, it’s a nearly perfect anti-spam measure. If you use WordPress, check it out.

Matt Bramanti | June 7, 2006 at 12:29 pm
Posted to Blogging, Reviews, Scumbags, Tech, Uncategorized

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I can’t believe I missed this in my post about useful phone numbers, but PayPal lets you send money via cell phone. Quoth Lifehacker:

To start sending money from your phone, log into PayPal and associate your mobile phone number with your account. I know. I hate giving away my phone number too, but PayPal’s already got my bank information, so that makes the voice digits seem like less of an issue. Once you enter your cell phone number in your PayPal account and set up a mobile PIN (separate from your account password), PayPal’s voice robot calls your phone on the spot and asks you to verify the PIN. Once the PIN’s matched, your phone is PayPal-enabled.

Then, to send someone else’s phone $5.50 in cash, text message PAYPAL (729725) the message send 5.50 to 7185551212 where the recipient’s phone number is (718) 555-1212.

PayPal doesn’t exactly advertise this (it’s buried in their help pages), but you can PayPal someone’s email address from your mobile, too. Just make your text message send 5 to editor@lifehacker.com instead.

The cool factor is pretty good, but I could see myself using this on the run, for splitting checks and things like that. Check it out.

Matt Bramanti | May 30, 2006 at 11:22 am
Posted to Business, Products, Reviews, Tech

1 comment

Besides the standard numbers everyone carries around (girlfriend, mom, bookie), I’ve got a few reference numbers that come in handy on a daily basis:

• Free411 (800-373-3411): Just what it sounds like — free nationwide directory assistance. Every once in a while, you’ll have to listen to a short commercial before getting your listing. Interesting business model — if you’re looking for a business, Free411 will serve you an ad for that business’ competitor, and you can press ”1″ to be connected to the advertised competitor.
• 411Metro (800-411-6387): Same thing, less catchy name.
• Auburn Information (334-844-4244): The Foy Student Union at Auburn University. It’s the information line, where you’d call for campus schedules and things like that. Except there’s a tradition at Auburn of answering any question that a caller comes up with. It’s like having your own talking Google machine.
• TellMe (800-555-8366): This is a voice-driven service that offers the same sort of information you’d find on a portal like Yahoo — sports scores, news headlines, weather forecasts, stock quotes and the like. A cool feature is the ability to flag favorites that can be recalled whenever you call back from the same phone number. You can even play blackjack against a Sean Connery sound-alike.
• U.S. Naval Observatory (202-762-1401): This is the official time of the United States, as determined by a phalanx of atomic clocks.
• Audioblogger (415-816-0205): This service allows users to post audio messages to Blogger blogs. You can even jury-rig a WordPress conduit.
• The White House (202-456-1414): I’ve never called the president, but it doesn’t hurt to have his number in the cell. That way, if he calls in the middle of the night, it’ll show up as “President,” giving me precious extra seconds to sober up.

I also use a number of services via SMS text messages:

• Google SMS (text 46645): Send a text message to Google to retrieve quick snippets of information. I frequently use this to get phone numbers by listing type and area (“pizza 77079″).
• Houston Transtar Alerts: Sign up to get text messages from Transtar whenever there’s a major traffic problem on one of Houston’s freeways. This happens about a million times a day, so you can narrow down the alerts you want to receive by day, time, route and type. I get the Katy Freeway from 7-9 a.m. and 6-7 p.m.
• Yahoo Alerts: You can get text-messaged alerts on anything from sports teams to Amber Alerts to low airfares. I get the weather every morning.
• Verizon TXT Alerts: Same idea as Yahoo Alerts, but with a broader array of niches, many co-branded (Maxim, CNN, WaPo).
• Facebook Mobile: Takes the social-networking site and puts it in my pants.

In addition to these, why not get familiar with the rest of the N11 family? Here’s what’s available from my phone (a Verizon line in the 713 area code):

• 211: Community services, state benefits, etc.
• 311: City of Houston services
• 411: Directory assistance
• 511: Nothing
• 611: Verizon customer service
• 711: Relay Texas (allows relay calls to the deaf)
• 811: Service to locate underground utility conduits
• 911: Houston emergency services (Good friggin’ luck)

Then there are the toll-free customer service numbers that are nearly impossible to find.

• Amazon.com: 800-201-7575
• eBay: 800-322-9266
• PayPal: 888-221-1161

Got any more useful numbers? Leave ‘em in the comments.

Matt Bramanti | May 28, 2006 at 12:29 am
Posted to Out and About, Personal, Tech

3 comments

I was looking over my blog’s stats today, and I was blown away by the sheer volume of numbers involved. In the 489 days I’ve maintained Mattsapundit, here’s what my readers and I have generated:

• 768 posts (1.6/day) in 43 categories
• 298 comments (0.6/day) from 78 commenters

Here are some stats on my traffic since I’ve been on WordPress (80 days):

• 4,323 unique visitors (54 visitors/day)
• 8,622 visits (108 visits/day, 2 visits/visitor/day)
• 78,567 pages served (982 pages/day, 9 pages/visit)
• 1.53 GB of data served (19.6 MB/day, 186 KB/visit)

And here are the records:

• Highest-traffic day (visits): April 28, 2006
• Highest-traffic day (MB): April 3, 2006

Most popular time for viewing Mattsapundit is 4:00-5:00 p.m., and the least popular is 1:00-2:00 a.m. The highest-traffic day of the week is Tuesday, and the slowest day is Sunday.

The top referring sites are Lone Star Times, the old Mattsapundit and blogHOUSTON.

The vast majority of readers are in the United States, which I expected. The second most common country is the Netherlands for some reason. I have no idea why. Canada rounds out the top 3.

Windows XP is the most common operating system of Mattsapundit readers, followed by Mac OS X and Linux. Internet Explorer (yuck) is the leading browser, followed closely by Firefox, with Safari in a distant third.

Google is by far the most popular search engine, garnering 89.3% of the searches that end up here. Yahoo and MSN are both in the single digits.

Speaking of search engines, here’s the fun part — the most common search phrases people use to find Mattsapundit. Here are the top 10:

1. soul glo
2. wetback mountain
3. houston roller derby
4. soul glo video
5. soul glo audio
6. mattsapundit
7. just let your soul glo
8. carlos mencia wetback mountain
9. russ sartain
10. carlos mencias wetback mountain

As a highly trained statistics professional, allow me to make a hypothesis. Y’all really like Coming to America. Good crowd. Along with the popular search phrases, though, there are a lot of bizarre ones. Here are a few:

• beat you like a redheaded stepchild movies
• alexander euthanize oliver stone
• bizarre hooker september holidays
• transgendered razor bumps african american
• dried feces on pizza

I’ve asked this before and I’m sure I’ll ask it again: What the hell is the matter with you people?

Matt Bramanti | May 4, 2006 at 10:50 pm
Posted to Blogging, Overanalysis, Tech

3 comments

Facebook, the social networking site beloved by college students everywhere, is now mobile. Users can interact with the site, post messages and “poke” other users via SMS text messages.

Sending Facebook messages via cell phone, to me, isn’t that great. Why not just text-message the person directly? No, the real benefit is that the new service effectively puts all the contact information for your social circle online. With just a text message, you can look anyone up.

It’s funny, but as mobile devices and services get more and more powerful, they act more and more like dumb terminals.

Matt Bramanti | April 25, 2006 at 8:30 pm
Posted to Out and About, Personal, Tech

No comments yet

My eagle-eyed readers will notice several new buttons at the bottom of each post. What the hell are they? I’ll tell ya.

The post’s permalink.

A printer-friendly version of the post, suitable for framing.

A form allowing you to email the post.

The post’s comments.

The RSS 2.0 feed for the post’s comments.

Possibly coming soon: buttons for converting a post to PDF and sending a link via AOL Instant Messenger.

Matt Bramanti | March 31, 2006 at 5:57 pm
Posted to Blogging, Tech

4 comments

I just got done upgrading to Wordpress 2.0.2, which has some security fixes. Kinda nerve-wracking, since I had to delete the whole blog and upload it again, but it seems to be working just fine.

Leave a comment if you notice anything screwy.

UPDATE (5:45 p.m.): Spoke too soon. The following features are broken:

• The “Print” link, which gives you a printer-friendly version of each post. Fixed.
  
• The “Email” link, which allows you to email the post to a friend. Fixed, but it’s ugly.
• The blogroll, with the exception of the “Houston” category. That’s weird. Fixed.
  

I’ll get crackin’ on those tomorrow morning.

Matt Bramanti | March 27, 2006 at 5:40 pm
Posted to Blogging, Tech

No comments yet

I need an excuse to try out the apparently-excellent Flickr Photo Album plugin, so here goes. When I finally get around to publishing my autobiography, I think I’ll put this photo on the cover:

St. Patrick’s Day was fun.

Matt Bramanti | March 27, 2006 at 1:05 pm
Posted to Blogging, Personal, Photos, Tech

No comments yet

I bought a 1GB Memorex USB drive today, and now I have to figure out what to put on it. So far, I’ve got a few applications:

• Portable Firefox — Browser
• TerraIM — IM client
• Portable OpenOffice — Office suite
• pStart — App launcher
• TrueCrypt — Encryption utility
• CCleaner — Registry cleaner
• Converber — Unit converter
• Fusion — Media player
• Foxit Reader — PDF viewer

Plus a smattering of music, work-related files, etc. Any other suggestions? Leave ‘em in the comments.

Matt Bramanti | March 23, 2006 at 4:23 pm
Posted to Personal, Tech

7 comments

I installed the WP-Email plugin this morning, which puts a handy-dandy “Email” link at the bottom of each post, allowing you to send my posts the the few poor souls who might not have seen them. A couple test runs show that it works just fine.

Here’s the problem, though: When you click on it, you’re treated to a very, VERY ugly rendition of the post. I’ve tried to dig through the template to find out why it comes out so damn ugly, and I can’t make heads or tails of it. I’d appreciate it if someone with experience in PHP and CSS could help me figure this out.

UPDATE (3:00 p.m.): Thanks to niziol in the WordPress support forums for helping me out. Works like a charm now.

Matt Bramanti | February 28, 2006 at 1:05 pm
Posted to Blogging, Tech

No comments yet

At the Mattsapundit Research & Development Directorate, scores of underpaid Indian engineers have been coding day at night, and they’ve come up with a few technical improvements around here.

• The “What I’m Reading” and “What I’m Watching” features in the sidebar allow you, the enraptured reader, to learn and emulate my preferences in literature and film. Click on the book or movie title to be taken to Amazon.com, where you can buy the item, thereby funneling money into the Mattsapundit Beer Acquisition Fund.
• The “Print” link now at the bottom of each post brings up a clean, printer-friendly copy of that post, perfect for Xeroxing 500 times and stapling to telephone poles all over town.
• The new categorized blogroll lists my favorite spots from all around the blogosphere.
• I’ve also installed plugins under the hood to allow me to manually order links/categories, generate Google Sitemaps, backup the database, mass edit comments, weed out spamming scumbags and other cool things that you don’t get to see.

Coming upgrades include:

• An “email this post” link after every post.
• A better title image.
• A slick image uploading/resizing/posting mechanism.

Stay tuned, folks…

Matt Bramanti | February 22, 2006 at 5:48 pm
Posted to Blogging, Tech

1 comment

I’m downloading a viewer so I can display CAD files for work. Apparently this software has government restrictions on it, preventing it from being exported to hostile nations. Before I can download it, I’m asked to reply affirmatively with the following statements:

I am not a citizen, national or resident of, and am not under the control of, the government of any country to which the United States has prohibited export of technical information, such as (as of 6/15/01): Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, or Syria.

I will not download or otherwise export or re-export the software, directly or indirectly, to the above-prohibited countries nor to citizens, national or residents of those countries.

I am not listed on the United States Department of Treasury list of Specially Designated Nationals, Specially Designated Terrorists, and Specially Designated Narcotics Traffickers, nor am I listed on the United States Department of Commerce Table of Denial Orders.

I will not download or otherwise export or re-export the software, directly or indirectly, to persons on the above-mentioned lists.

I will not use the software for, and will not allow the software to be used for, any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, for the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons of mass destruction.

Uh, okay. I know the company is just legally covering its ass on this one, but this step is just stupid, insofar as it’s intended to stop nefarious activities. I cant imagine that Mohammed al-Nutcase is getting ready to work on some nuke blueprints, when he reads this warning and gives up.

It’s also a pain in the ass for me, Law Abiding Citizen, because in order to answer affirmatively and honestly, I have to look at the Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Nationals list. And good luck finding the other lists.

Dumbasses.

Matt Bramanti | February 21, 2006 at 5:31 pm
Posted to Crime, Stupidity, Tech, Terrorism

4 comments

Mattsapundit now has a new home right here.

The new blog has all sorts of changes. Obviously, my own domain, hosted by the good people at BlueHost. The new blog is also running WordPress, which means I can have niceties like trackback, categories, Technorati tags, multiple themes and all sorts of other goodies.

Tonight I’ll try to find a better theme than this one, and start the fun and adventure of screwing with plugins. Gonna be drinking a lot of coffee tonight…

Matt Bramanti | February 13, 2006 at 12:12 pm
Posted to Blogging, Tech

No comments yet

I’ve used Gmail since 7/9/05, when I bought an invite on eBay for a couple bucks. I’m just now downloading it all via Thunderbird, and the volume of information is absolutely staggering. In the 571 days I’ve had the free account, I’ve sent and received 17,037 emails, plus spam. As I was downloading it to Thunderbird, it occurred to me that Google products turn our traditional sense of organization on its head, and I’m not sure that’s entirely a good thing.

On one hand, you’ve got traditional organization of information. Think of a public library, with floors and floors of stacks and stacks. All the books are carefully organized by topic, author, you name it. The same mindset used to work for organizing email. You put stuff in folders of various types. Some of them group messages by sender, some by subject, etc.

That’s all out the window. Now you’ve got the benefits of organization — rapid recall of information by referring to meaningful associations — without the work. My inbox used to be an array of meticulously arranged folders, which required conscious effort to maintain. Now, it’s as though I tore every page out of every book and tossed them all in a swimming pool. But when I’m looking for something, I can dive in and grab the right page, every time.

In making traditional organization quaint — if not completely obsolete — I wonder how we’re fundamentally altering our thinking about organization. Does the benefit of organization come from having access to a set of well-sorted items? Or does it come from the act of sorting the items, making hundreds of subconscious connections as you go along?

I relate this to note-taking in college lectures. I always took pretty good notes, but I rarely went back and studied from them. I used the act of taking notes — the act of organizing — to straighten out my thoughts.

I would bet that if you rigged someone up with a machine to monitor brain activity, you’d see different areas light up when they’re searching on Google than you would when they’re looking for something in a library, and I bet the Google-stimulated areas would be related to social dealings and relationships.

Now if I can just get a grant…

Matt Bramanti | January 31, 2006 at 1:29 am
Posted to Design, Reviews, Tech

3 comments