I ordered a ThinkGeek Bluetooth Retro Handset to use at home. When I come home I plug my phone in to charge in my room, but then I can't hear it ring
elsewhere in the hosue. The idea was to take this handset which wirelessly connects to cellphones via bluetooth and place it in another part of the house so that I can tell I'm getting an incoming
call. The only issue I have with that setup is that it ringing isn't any louder than conversations held over the phone, that is, the ringing is a little quiet.
The handset pairs with cellphones in the same manner as any other handset over bluetooth. It has an internal rechargeable battery which is charged via a standard USB port built into the base of the handset and it comes with a USB cable. Next to the USB port is the only button on the phone which is pressed to answer a call, hang up a call, or begin voice dial, held down to turn the handset on and off, and held down longer to begin pairing with a cellphone. There's a blue LED in one of the holes in the microphone portion of the phone which blinks to indicate if its on or trying to pair. Transitioning between on, off, and pairing produces a cute sound and a change to the LED.
Overal I'm pleased with its simplicity and use of common parts although I wish there was a way to adjust the volume of the ring.
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is available now. I can finally talk about some of the stuff I've been working on for the past year or so: activities. Activities let you select a document, some text on a document, or a link to a document and run that selection through a web service. For example, you could select a word on a webpage and look it up in Wikipedia, select an address and map it on Yahoo Maps, select a webpage and translate it into English with Windows Live Translator, or select a link and add it to Digg.
IE8 comes installed with some activities based on Microsoft web services but there's a page you can go to to
install other activities. However, that page is missing some of my favorites that I use all the time, like del.icio.us.
Accordingly, I've put together a page of the activities I use. MSDN has all the info on creating Activities.
Activities are very similar to other existing features in other browsers including the ability to add context menu items to IE. There's two important differences which make activities better. Activities have a preview window that pops out when you hover over an activity, which is useful to get in place information easily provided by developers. The other is that the interface is explicit and takes after HTML FORMs and OpenSearch descriptions. Because the interface is explicitly described in XML (unlike the context menu additions described above which run arbitrary script) we have the ability to use activities in places other than on a webpage in the future. And because activity definitions are similar to HTML FORMs, if your webservice has an HTML FORM describing it you can easily create an activity.
At the grocery store the other day Sarah and I attempted to find shallot for a recipe, but I can't
tell the difference between shallot, sweet onions, yellow onions, etc. etc. We found something that we decided was the closest we'd find in the store and I believe we picked correctly because at
checkout the cashier rang it up as shallot.
I think this could be
a practical problem that the 20q Pocket Mind Reader should be able to solve: obtain the name of an unidentified object. When we got home
I decided to test the 20q Pocket Mind Reader on shallot. Unfortunately, it told me I had an onion, but I think if these were designed for identifying unknown objects based solely on information you
can obtain by looking at it, rather than requiring knowledge of seeds, where it grows, etc. it would do better. Or I could just ask someone who works at the grocery store.
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