Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Last week I wrote about Voice Over IP (VOIP) and Skype on cell phones. I’ve had VOIP service for over a year now, but as I’ve mentioned, the quality just hasn’t been there. What’s more, sometimes the phone just doesn’t ring when it should. My wife and I have been talking recently about looking for other options, but instead of just going with another VOIP provider, I thought I’d take a look at Skype to see what all the fuss is about. Skype is somewhat similar to VOIP in that it runs via the internet, but it has some big differences as well. I’m already familiar with standard phone lines, of course, and I’ve been a cell phone user for about ten years now. I thought it might be a good exercise to go through some of the plusses and minuses of these various forms of voice communication. Of course what makes sense for one person isn’t going to for another, but at least this will lay things out as far as the offerings exist right at the moment – something that’s sure to change fairly quickly after I write this! Just a quick disclaimer that this is written in the perspective of a consumer in the U.S. Other countries or parts of the world, of course, will have very different landscapes!

Pricing

Mobile Phone: big range of price plans depending on the carrier and what type of plan. Few all-you-can-eat plans, but what you get in terms of free monthly minutes has gone up significantly over the last ten years. Generally you can expect to pay about $40 per month for a middle-of-the-road plan with 500-1000 free minutes per month, plus free night and weekend calling. Incoming calls still count the same way outgoing calls do here in the U.S. International calls usually are extra although within the U.S. most carriers have at least some plans that make additional roaming charges a thing of the past.

Skype: free for computer-to-computer communications, $3-5/month for an incoming phone line (you don’t pay for calls you receive), and outgoing calls priced at $.01-.05 per minute depending on the country you are calling (no matter where you call from), and the exchange rate between the Dollar and the Euro. Currently calling to the U.S. is 2.3 cents per minute.

VOIP: ranges depending on the carrier. There are different types of plans but most VOIP providers have an unlimited plan that costs between about $20 and $40 per month where you can call anywhere in the U.S, sometimes Canada, and sometimes even a bunch of other countries around the world without incurring extra fees.

Standard Telco Service: also varies tremendously based on which Telco, but they are responding more and more to the competition with VOIP and many are starting to offer their own VOIP solutions. Many are now also offering some unlimited local & long distance plans at fairly reasonable rates. For example, Verizon services our neck of the woods and has an unlimited plan for $51.

Portability

Mobile Phone: ultimate. Mobile networks are fairly ubiquitous now, although certainly there are areas that are still too remote to have service. All you need to take with you is the phone itself, and the mobile phone’s footprint has gotten very small indeed.

Skype: significant. You can install Skype on most computer platforms. Other than a high-speed connection, you need a microphone, but that’s about it. Third party adapters allow you to use a regular telephone, so for example you don’t have to be chained to the computer itself. If a laptop isn’t portable enough, you can use a Windows Mobile device with Skype, but you still need a Wifi connection, so don’t expect to use Skype while driving around in your car – not yet anyway! You can also just install Skype on a computer if you have access to do that, or alternately you can run Skype off of a USB flash drive that is smaller than any cell phone.

VOIP: significant. In some ways VOIP is a little more portable than Skype, mainly because you don’t need a computer, only a VOIP adapter or a VOIP Wifi phone, both of which are pretty small. You take these and plug them into any available high-speed network (e.g. cyber café or hotel room Ethernet port). VOIP is designed to use standard telephones as the device to talk through so unless you have a VOIP Wifi phone, you will also need to bring along a standard telephone, which makes it a little less portable, but still better than lugging a laptop. Where VOIP loses slightly to Skype as far as portability is that you must bring equipment with you to use it.

Standard Telco Service: limited. Your line goes into your house, and other than using a wireless phone to roam around your house, that’s about it. You can optionally forward your phone to another number, say your cell phone, but then this would probably incur extra charges, perhaps from both your cell and your landline provider.

Features

Mobile Phone: many. Voicemail, call-waiting, call-transfer, conference-calling, etc., are all part of the plan. Although a few features may incur some extra charges on some carriers, most are free.

Skype: some. Unlike VOIP, Skype does not have a huge array of features. There are things you can do with Skype that you can’t with other providers, like text chatting and file transfers, but this is only when both parties are using Skype. Voicemail is an extra charge, although it comes free when you pay the relatively low price for an incoming phone number. You cannot, at this point, access your voicemail unless you are at a computer with Skype installed (or perhaps using it via USB flash drive). Skype also cannot call emergency services. Skype doesn’t transmit your number when you call a regular phone, which may be useful for privacy issues, but may also prevent your call from being answered if the person on the other end doesn’t recognize your number on his caller ID. You currently can’t forward your Skype calls to another number.

VOIP: Many. Not only do you have access to most of the features you could think of, but many that you simply can’t find elsewhere. For example, many VOIP services give you the option of being notified by email when you’ve gotten a call or voicemail, or even send you a sound file of that voicemail. You can also change forwarding options, listen to voicemail, turn on and off various features all by just logging into your account from any computer connected to the internet or by calling your number from a standard phone and navigating menus. Many VOIP providers still aren’t fully compatible with emergency services – they end up forwarding you to a non-emergency number and there’s no locational information transferred. However, recently the FCC mandated that VOIP service must become fully compliant with 911 Services within the next four months. So this should not be an issue for long.

Standard Telco Service: some. While many services are available, traditionally they almost have all incurred additional cost. This seems to be changing with some of the unlimited plans as the Telcos try to compete with VOIP – even with their own VOIP offerings. Some of these unlimited packages now contain a core set of additional features (like voicemail, caller ID, call waiting, and conference calling) for no additional cost. Generally these features are not as easily changed by the consumer as with VOIP, but they still amount to a better collection features than, say, Skype.

Voice Quality

Mobile Phone: D to B- (on a standard grading scale). Some mobile phones and networks get excellent reception, some do not. There are many variables here including the type of technology being used (CDMA vs. GSM), how many cell towers a carrier has in your area, and even the model phone you’re using. Dead spots and other anomalies can caused dropped calls and other annoyances, and even at it’s best, the voice quality will seldom even equal that of a standard landline call.

Skype: D to A+. Skype has a big advantage here when both parties are using Skype on a computer (or Windows Mobile Device). Skype can produce sound that is worlds better than even standard telephone service. The dynamic range is more equivalent to that of FM radio perhaps even a little better. Unfortunately, when the person on the other end is on a regular phone line (or a mobile phone), the quality goes down to whatever is on the other end. Likewise for the person you are talking to, who will hear you only at the voice quality that there phone can handle. Because Skype is a new technology, there are still lots of glitches for some people. Instances when one of the parties can’t hear the other, or excessive static or other problems all happen from time to time.

VOIP: D to B. Because VOIP uses standard telephones as the device you talk with, voice quality will never be better then that. Again, because VOIP is new and because of inherent issues with internet transmission of data, there can be problems with voice quality, such as stuttering, static, etc. Personally when I’ve used it the reception on my end is perfectly fine, but the other has problems hearing me – my voice is to soft or it gets clipped here and there making it hard to follow. This of course will be different for different providers, it will depend on your internet connection, and probably other variables as well.

Standard Telco Service: B. This has been the standard bearer of voice communications for over 100 years. Voice quality is somewhat akin to AM radio, maybe a bit less, but since it has been around so long, all the bugs have been worked out and any reception issues are rare, or are due to faulty equipment on the part of the customer (e.g. an individual’s wireless phone which does not have good transmission quality, some frayed wiring, etc).

Although some purists like the idea of only using one type of service, this isn’t usually the best strategy in the realm of voice communications, at least not at this stage. Most people these days have a cell phone, but only a small percentage of those people have given up their landline phone as well. Of course if you are more likely to be away from home than you are to be at home, it does make sense to ditch the landline. While VOIP can provide a great number of features, it’s still a new technology and so not always that reliable. Just as with cell phones, reception issues on VOIP can sometimes be exasperating and so if its important that your phone be as close to 100% reliable as possible, neither VOIP nor Skype may be good options for you. If having Emergency services available to you is critical, there’s still nothing as reliable as a standard telephone line.

Currently I actually have all four of these different services. This is partly because I like to play with new technology, and partly because no one service does everything, at least not for a reasonable price. I’m not committed to any one of these yet, and really how can you be? As I said, this is a constantly changing landscape. Soon VOIP will need to comply with the FCC’s ruling and provide 911 services, but this may also increase their prices to where they are not nearly as good a deal as they are today. Likewise Skype is petitioning the FCC to be excluded from this mandate, but who knows what the result will be. Skype continues to add new features and functionality, but so do many VOIP providers and the offerings from the regular Telcos will certainly try to keep pace as much as possible. As the telecom infrastructure becomes more hearty with fiber optic to the home and higher and higher speed cellular data networks, ubiquitous Wifi or Wimax, this landscape will continue to change, some services merging with others, and perhaps some even dying, or at least becoming used only rarely as failsafe backup systems. It’s enough to make you want to just stick with the plain old telephone line and wait for a few years until all the battles are over! But the problem is that the battles will never be over. Newer types of services will come around that we simply don’t know about today, as technology progresses and new possibilities can be imagined. At least for some of us, it’s fun to play with the newest technology in this area. While we may pay the price in that we have to deal with the rough edges of a new technology, unlike in other areas where being an early adopter means also paying much more, at least in this realm so far many of the cutting edge technologies have been able to attract customers by their progressive pricing structures.

As a slow reader, I took to Audio Books when I first heard of Audible.com five or six years ago. Audible.com provides audio books over the internet as digital files that you can play on your computer, iPod, or many other audio devices. The pricing was so much less than it was at the book store. The ability to download and play something from a very large selection of audio books on demand was irresistible. A huge chunk of Audible.com’s selection was and is unabridged, whereas up until fairly recently it was difficult to find any unabridged audio books at a book store, and when you could find them, they were outrageously priced – probably several times the price of the equivalent hardcover.

Just the other day, the New York Times published an article by Amy Harmon about audio books and I was actually quoted in it! The article asks the question whether listening to audio books is the same thing as reading, or whether it’s inferior. My big reason, as stated in the article, for listening to audio books is that I’m a slow reader. Basically I read stuff aloud in my head at about the same pace as someone would read in an audio book. I’ve tried speed reading courses but they never seemed to work. Aside from this, of course, you can listen to a book without needing total concentration as with a written book. So I can listen at the gym, in the car, etc. Some people consider this inferior because you aren’t using your mind as much to invent voices in your head. You can linger on sentences or words without having to keep going if you want. But in general, I think it’s all very individual. Some people get a lot more out of reading a book than listening to an audio book, whereas for others they are similar, and still others audio seems to have an added value. What do you think?

The New York Times requires a subscription to read the article, but Luke Sonnier has reprinted it on his blog along with some commentary about why he thinks reading is superior. There’s also some discussion going on in his comments that indicates some of the contentiousness of this issue. Neil Gaiman, a professional writer no less, makes some good points in favor of audio books and why those who assert the superiority of the written word are snobs.

Back to Audible.com. This week the IT Conversations Podcast’s show Web Talk interviewed Audible.com’s Founder and CEO, Don Katz. While not the most scintillating orator, Don Katz does let us in on a lot of interesting info, particularly on where Audible may be going in the near future. In particular he talks specifically about how they are planning on offering over-the-air downloadable content. So, for compatible devices, specifically smartphones like the Treo 650 which can both download data from the internet and play Audible files, soon you will be able to download this content directly from anywhere. Up until now, one has had to be chained to a computer that syncs such data onto your device, but with the increasing speeds of cellular data networks, smartphones rely less and less synching to an individual’s computer for transferring information.

The other subject that Katz talks about is podcasting. Actually a good part of the interview centers on it. Katz is asked whether it threatens their business and predictably says it doesn’t, but it seems like even more traditional forms of media he has been smart to take it seriously enough to get Audible somehow involved in the whole podcasting phenomenon. There hasn’t been anything announced, but it sounds like there may be plans to court some podcasters for inclusion as programming that Audible sells. This will, of course, be very different from the current, completely free (or voluntary contribution) model. Will podcasters take advantage of such a system and make only part of the podcasts freely downloadable? Or none? Will they only provide their last podcast for download and let Audible sell their archives? Some of course will. But many will, I think, be resistant to forcing people to sell something that they have labeled with the Creative Commons license. Who knows, Audible could even offer podcasters a salary and let them, as Katz said “quit their day job,” as long as they could sell their content (and likely have it not freely available otherwise). I will admit that since I got into podcasting, I’ve had so much to listen to that I haven’t listened to many books over the last 6 months! I’m not about to unsubscribe to Audible, but I do think that there’s so much great content available freely via podcasts that for many, it will be hard to convince them to pay a monthly fee for more, even if it is stuff that is not available via free podcast.

While I love Audible in many ways, I thought I would get off my chest a couple of things that have nagged me about them for a while, and I know I’m not alone. The first is related to Audible’s web interface. There are often problems where if you search for an author or title, it doesn’t come up with the books you know they have. But this is an occasional annoyance. My major issue is with their wish list and search functionality which I think are extremely clunky! Audible has tons of books in their library and so it’s very easy to build up a wish list that is hundreds of books. In order to keep this up to date and prune it so that it doesn’t get completely out of control, Audible should make it easy to remove, and sort the list in different ways. Instead, you have to look at your list in 20-book increments for one, and secondly, while you can sort on various fields, you cannot sort in revers order. In order to see the books I’ve added to my wish list most recently, I have to click on sort by date added and then page forward a dozen or more times. Audible’s site is often sluggish making this a time consuming process. I’m a web developer by profession and so I know these changes to the interface are not huge ones. I realize that Audible has many other places to put its resources, such as in actually recording the books and customer support, but it seems like the way most people browse and buy books could be improved quite a bit. Katz did say there were improvements coming in these areas, so I await them with great hope, but really it’s been a long time coming!

While Audible has tons of material, my one wish would be that they would carry more “special interest” material, such as computer books, reference books, instructional manuals, etc. Audible occasionally has something close to this in the way of kinds of “self-help” material, but it is almost always in abridged formats. I think this is the last big market for Audible. If they could somehow convince publishers to produce unabridged audio versions of books that aren’t just categorized as fiction or non-fiction (historical, political, etc), then I think they could attract even more readership.

Finally, I wish that Audible would give more choices in the formats they offer for various devices. Audible has four formats they offer their programs in; level 1 being the poorest quality and level 4 being the best. Of course level 4 takes up much more spaces than level 1. Audible offers level 4 for iPods, but not for my Treo 650. Perhaps this is some technical issue with the Treo not having enough processing power or battery power to play the file, but my guess is that it is more likely a decision Audible made based on the file size. Since the Treo has only a very small amount of internal memory, it would be infeasible to expect people to store their books anywhere but on an external memory card. While a couple of years ago probably 128MB or 256MB would be the largest most people would invest in, one can now get a 1GB card for $70 give or take and if price is now object than you can even get a 2GB card. Even 1GB still will store just about any unabridged book in its entirety, and up to several depending on length, all at level 4. While I like the thought of having all my books on my iPod, it sure would be nice to listen to everything on one device. But not having that extra fidelity does make the decision to ditch my iPod for most occasions not a very likely one.

Aside from these relatively minor annoyances, Audible and Audio books have changed my life in the last five years. I’ve read upwards of 60 or 70 books, whereas the previous 5 years I probably read 6 or 7! In my mind, the fact that I didn’t read these on paper makes no difference. I can still recall the good ones in detail and many greatly influenced my thinking.

Voice Over IP (VOIP), the technology that lets you use your internet connection to make and receive phone calls (with a regular telephone, not just your computer), seems to be expanding its reach daily. Many of the big telecom companies have been adopting it, or imitations of it in the hope of staving off more customers leaving landlines in even higher numbers. Many younger people have been abandoning landlines since cell phones are now almost required in our society today. At most, a landline may be kept for the purposes of a broadband DSL connection, but with cable broadband, landlines aren’t a necessity even for those who need such connections. But cell phones often have reception issues and the pricing structure means that one often has to be careful not to make too many calls between 7am and 9pm on weekdays, when calls are usually metered. Per minute charges over your monthly allotment can very quickly skyrocket.

That’s why VOIP makes an excellent supplement for some. The cost, especially if not using one of the large telecoms’ VOIP services, can be quite inexpensive. For example, I pay $20/month for my Broadvoice line that gives me unlimited local and long distance here in the US, and even international calls to 21 different countries. Additionally, all the other services that you normally have to pay for like call waiting, *69, voicemail, etc., are free with most VOIP services. But there’s a lot more functionality offered free than phone companies offer period. For example, many of these services allow you to go to a webpage where you can listen to your voicemail online. Even better, I’ve set my account to send me an email everyone someone calls my VOIP number. It also sends me an email when someone leaves a voicemail, and actually attaches that message as a sound file which I can play on my computer or on my Treo 650 (which I also check my email with).

Don’t get me wrong, VOIP is still not flawless by any means. There are lots of quality issues. I’ve been dealing with them myself for many months. Even after I increased my bandwidth (a common reason for poor voice quality is insufficient bandwidth), I continue to have problems.

The other problem that VOIP has is that, well, it isn’t a cell phone! You can’t take it with you and talk while you’re at the beach, driving in the car, etc. It does have some portability in that you can take your VOIP “adapter” (or a VOIP Wifi Phone) with you anywhere that you can get access to a fast internet connection and use it there. The adapter usually needs a hard-wired Ethernet connection whereas the Wifi Phone, as you would guess, is meant to pick up Wifi signals. But of course, these connections are not nearly as ubiquitous as cell-phone networks – at least not yet and probably not for a decade or more.

There’s yet another option out there which is kind of a cross between VOIP and the old internet voice conferencing applications like NetMeeting. “Skype” has become a real phenomenon among lots of bloggers, podcasters and geeks in general. The voice quality is not only supposed to match a regular telephone line, but with broadband speeds to actually surpass it by quite a bit! It provides voicemail, conference calling, and many of the features you would want out of a telephony product. The only problem is that at least for the time being you have to use a computer in order to make calls. You can’t use a real phone. Aside from this, it seems to be a great product except that the pricing structure is very different from VOIP. To call other users on their computers, it’s free, but if you want to be able to call people on their landline phones or cell phones, you will have to get the premium “SkypeOut” and then you will incur a $.01 to $.04 charge per minute give or take, depending on what country you call. For the U.S., the charge is $.026, which would give me about 770 minutes for the same $20 that I pay my VOIP provider for unlimited calls (I rarely call internationally). Depending on your call volume this may or may not make sense, but just remember that at least for now you’ll be chained to your computer.

Of course the ultimate in convergence here would be a cell phone (in particular a smartphone) which would also be able to use one of these internet telephony services, and thereby avoid some of the pricing weirdness of mobile phone plans. Microsoft has built in VOIP over Wifi functionality into their newest Windows Mobile 5. Vonage, probably the best known and perhaps oldest VOIP provider already offers a version of their software that works with Windows Mobile devices, including smartphones. Skype has also has a version for Windows Mobile Devices. So what about the large contingent of Pa1mOne Treo 600 and Treo 650 users - a number that might dwarf the number of Windows Mobile Phone users? Well, unfortunately, Skype has said that they have no plans to make a version of their software for PalmOS. Vonage, it seems, has been investigating a PalmOS version, but apparently it’s harder than it looks, but unlike Skype it seems they are still trying to struggle through these difficulties. They suggest they will probably offer a PalmOS version this year. The only question is, will it be for the current Treos or will it only be for more powerful Tungsten or LifeDrive units, or even a future, more powerful Treo that hasn’t been announced yet? While the Treo 650 was indeed an improvement over its predecessor in many ways, it is still lags behind in processor power to Windows Mobile phones that came out a year ago or more. Likewise, the battery power still does not seem to be adequate to power an SD Wifi card, something that Windows Mobile phones have been able to do for years – heck they’ve even had Wifi built into some of them. Enfora will soon be releasing a Wifi “Sled” which solves the problem in a unique way, so perhaps at some point there will be a VOIP sled, if indeed battery power is one of the constraining issues. One issue that is definitely a constraint is the actual data throughput of these services. Certainly the older GRPS data networks will not be able to handle these calls, and even the 2.5G EDGE may not. It’s very possible that you will need to have either a CDMA/EVDO phone, or if you need a GSM phone than you will have to wait for the 3.5G HSDPA Networks to be built out, something that probably won’t start appearing in any significant number for at least another year, maybe two or three.

I think the main benefit that will come out of all these technologies converging will be to drive prices down even more, and, one would hope, to increase the overall voice quality. This hasn’t necessarily been true so far, but with bandwidth expanding and these technologies maturing, within the next few years I see at least on the higher end a move to a single device (a smartphone) with which you can subscribe to cell phone service, but which you can also subscribe to VOIP or Skype using that same cell network or whatever Wifi network you can attach to. Eventually Wimax may come in and we’ll have yet another potential convergence between cellular networks and Wifi networks, but that’s another story and probably one that’s at least five years out!

For those who need yet more motivation to check out podcasting, here’s a site that Tod Maffin has put together that consolidates a list of podcasts of traditional radio shows. (note - the site is no longer available) (via Amanita.net)

When podcasting started, it was mainly with the idea of giving a voice to anyone who had a microphone and wanted to record their words and upload it to a server - kind of an audio version of blogging. And it still works this way. The vast majority of podcasts out there are by individuals who may not have any broadcasting experience, professional equipment, etc. Likewise, there is no regulation of podcasts like there is of traditional radio, no financial structure unless a podcaster has been able to secure some advertising support, and no real pressure to post a show at any given time, except perhaps from clamoring fans egging you on, if you’re lucky.

But what began as a kind of pirate radio movement, has become much more than that because traditional broadcasters recognized that people liked the power of not having to be chained to a stations schedule but rather have a Tivo-like timeshifting ability. Likewise the idea that no government or corporate entity was going to come and tell them what they could and couldn’t listen to because it might hurt some segment of the audience.

It appears that more and more traditional radio are getting the message and are offering their content online as podcasts. This list that Tod has put together shows just that. I think public broadcasting is probably much more insulated, due to the fact that they don’t have to prove audience numbers to some advertiser and can just rely on the donations of members. Public Radio has been at the forefront of providing this new format, although they are still providing only a tiny fraction of their programming this way.

It will be interesting to see how this trend plays out especially as the commercial stations try to figure out how to switch to this format but continue to make money. Certainly I think the hyper-commercial radio that has commercials take up one third to half of their programming are going to die, because now that the growing number of podcast listeners has thousands of choices (which will only grow even more in number), why would you choose to listen to a station or podcast for that matter which has more than one or two 30-second commercials every half hour?

By the way, Todd’s list isn’t just of public radio, even though that’s the title. It does include a section for “Commercial Radio” and other shows or whole sections are not public – E.G. Leo Laporte on KFI, or Air America Network shows.

Meredith over at Amanita.net passed along this foreign language meme, so I thought I’d respond:

What’s your native language? Do you speak any foreign languages? If so, how did you come to learn them?

My native language is English (apparently 60% general American English, 25% Yankee, 10% Dixie, and 5% Upper Midwestern).

I have studied a bunch of languages to one extent or another, so I’ll list them one by one in chronological order:

1. Hebrew: I took this language in Hebrew school from I don’t know, maybe 9 or 10 years old? Unfortunately, I seem to recall that we weren’t really taught how to speak or understand it, it was only in order read prayers in preparation for my bat mitzvah. Of course I picked up a few words here and there, but I would have never been able to actually construct even the simplest of sentences. Since having my bar mitzvah I’ve lost even most of what I did learn, although I still can pick out some letters.
2. Spanish: I took this for at least one year in elementary school and two years in high school. At the time I was not very interested in foreign language and got pretty horrible grades. I can understand some Spanish still, on a very basic level, and can say some words and phrases, but not much else.
3. Russian: I took Russian in college and got so into it I ended up changing my major. I took a summer program at Norwhich University, spent a semester in Leningrad, and went onto grad school to study it some more. During that time, I could speak it fairly well, although still probably not quite “fluently.” I would call myself “proficient.” Since then, (for about 10 years now), I haven’t really used it at all except for listening to a Russian friend try to tell me some joke or trying to make sense of some Russian spam email. If I attempted to speak now, I probably would have a tough time saying a whole lot, but I studied it so much that I think I could regain at least 50-75% of my proficiency if I dedicated a couple weeks to a month of constant review.
4. Polish: one semester in grad school, I remember some fellow students telling me about a course in Polish that was fun and relatively easy. I thought it sounded like a fun course considering all the other very demanding courses, so I signed up for the second semester and proceeded to study the book towards the end of the semester and during the entire winter break. I felt like I was really understanding it well considering it was all on my own, and then enrolled in the second semester course. At that time the professor who was teaching it along with a native speaker decided that the course had been too easy, and so he doubled or tripled the amount of work. This meant attempting to memorize upwards of 100-200 vocabulary words a week, and this, as just one of several courses I was taking, was just too much at the time. What I had thought would be a fun and easy way to pick up a new language became the opposite and so I had to drop it.
5. Italian: five years ago, my family decided to take a trip to Italy and I got the idea in my head that I wanted to try to pick up some Italian before going, especially since we were going to be renting a car and traveling ourselves and not in some big tour group. So I picked up a tape and a book and did a bunch of studying. I was not able to speak at all fluently, of course, and my command of the language was basic at best, but I did feel like I could construct some basic sentences enough to make myself understood. Some of this was helped by a pocket electronic translator for vocabulary words that I didn’t know how to say, but knowing how to conjugate verbs and construct sentences along with that translator made it feasible to try to communicate at least basically. Since leaving, unfortunately, I haven’t kept up studying or reviewing, so while I still remember a few phrases and words, I would have to do a lot of review to get back to where I was. I found Italian a lot more fun to learn than Spanish, but of course I was doing it in a very different way. I even found that many of the Italian words I learned seemed to make some kind of “sense.” I’m not sure how to explain that, but maybe my nascent study of Spanish all those years ago was still hanging out in some corner of my brain and so the Italian, which is not all that far off from Spanish linguistically, didn’t seem all that unfamiliar.
6. (Swiss) German: A couple of years ago we went to Switzerland to visit friends and so I thought I’d again try what I did with Italian. Unfortunately, though, German just was not as easy for me to get into and then ¾ of the way through the lessons I found out that they didn’t speak German per se in Switzerland but a variant called Swiss German, and I could find no instructional tapes or books on Swiss German at local stores.
7. French: On the same trip to Switzerland, we were also to stay for a very brief period in Paris and so we also bought French tapes. I had actually tried to learn French in grad school ten years earlier, because there was a requirement that we would have to translate French in order to graduate. Somehow I managed to pass that test, but of course forgot whatever little I had learned because there really was no reason for me to use it – some research is written in French, so that apparently was their justification, but since I was not going for a Ph.D., I did not have to really do any formal research. Anyway, back to our trip, I simply didn’t have enough time to pick up anything of much use, but I was really surprised at my ability to speak and understand the words on the tape. French was a language that always seemed impenetrable to me – mainly it’s pronunciation. But when listening to the tapes, it didn’t seem all that bad.

Alas, with really all these other languages, I have not had the motivation to keep studying when there is no real reason to other than the mere enjoyment of the studying and perhaps the notion that at some distant time I might be able to use it on a trip. In some ways I envy Europeans because they are so close together that they end up having to use other languages whenever they go on even a small trip to the country next door, which very often could be just a couple of hours. The closest thing to that here is the many Latino communities that exist here, and while I’d love to learn Spanish again, their just isn’t a huge reason to. Just about anyone in many of the Latino communities learns enough English to communicate with you. I suppose even in Europe, from what I’ve heard, and this probably goes for many other places around the world, English, more and more, is becoming the Lingua Franca - yet another fact that makes one unmotivated about learning other languages. Americans have been accused of linguistic arrogance and not wanting to be bothered with learning foreign tongues, but I think it’s an unfair accusation because except for areas that are very linguistically mixed (Florida, Texas, California), or areas which are just very close to the border with Mexico or French-speaking Canada, nothing but English is spoken for thousands of square miles. Certainly there are communities that speak their native tongue, be it Spanish, Russian, Polish, or whatever, in the street, in businesses, etc. But most of those people also speak English and so unless you have a specific inherent desire to immerse yourself in a new language (or you intend to use it in your career), there’s no big practical reason to learn another for every day use.

Today the long-awaited LifeDrive from Pa1mOne was announced. TreoCentral has a great synopsis and links to various articles about it on the web.

I applaud Pa1mOne for being the first PDA to actually use a hard drive expanding their line to include a hard-drive-based device. What took these companies so long? Apple has had the hard drive iPod out for what, 5 years almost? They’ve even had their Mini iPod with a very small 4gb (now up to 6gb) hard drive. Frankly this is overdue. It’s also a bit ironic considering the debacle that Pa1mOne caused by not only keeping the same low amount of memory from their Treo 600 to their Treo 650 phone, but adding insult to injury by actually making the memory significantly less efficient thereby effectively decreasing the amount of it – something that they are still trying to fix.

Nevertheless, as I said, hands off to you, Pa1mOne, now let’s see this same hard drive technology expanded to other devices, in particular, your next smartphone, the Treo 700, or whatever it may be called… “CallDrive”? Obviously there are many advantages that flash memory has over a hard drive including speed, resistance to breaking, etc. But the one big advantage that hard drives still have over flash is cost.

The other key features that the LifeDrive has which will really make it the premier PDA until the competition can catch up are the screen and built-in Wifi. Some PocketPC’s have enjoyed built-in Wifi capability for a while, but this is the first PalmOS device one of only two Pa1mOne devices to have this feature built in. Most PalmOS devices (Treos included) don’t even have an option for external Wifi solutions, although Enfora will be offering options for Treo 600’s and 650’s any day now. As PDA’s and smartphones become beefier and more realistic alternatives for carrying around a laptop, a large, high-resolution screen is a must for legibility. Who wants to read a document or a web page that will only show you 30 characters per line, or only one third of a picture until you scroll (or shrink it down so much to fit inside the screen that you can’t tell what it is)?

The only disappointment for me is that the LifeDrive doesn’t come with a keyboard. But I realize this is a personal taste and that many can get along fine with handwriting recognition, and there are always external small keyboards for those who need them. It also doesn’t have a built-in camera, which would have been nice. Finally, LifeDrive runs on the same OS that my Treo does – PalmOS 5.4 or Garnet. While I certainly don’t mind this, it would have been that much more irresistible if Pa1mOne had actually been able to wait until Cobalt, their next generation OS, is out. Cobalt will make the big jump into a truly multithreaded OS which will improve the usability of PalmOS devices by an order of magnitude.

Todd Cochrane from Geek News Central has been talking about an upcoming announcement on his podcast for weeks. Well this morning I finally listened to his show #64 that he had been touting with great fanfare. The news, as it happens, is that Todd has teamed up with Wiley Publishing to produce the first of what will sure soon be an avalanche of books about podcasting. The book is titled Podcasting: Do it Yourself Pirate Radio For the Masses.

From what Todd spoke about, it seems like this will be a very detailed book about all aspects of podcasting and how to go about creating your own podcast. In other words, a tremendous resource in one package instead of having to go and grab bits and pieces out of individual websites. The technology will likely be changing and allowing for easier and easier production, but at least for the foreseeable future, this book should provide a great foundation if not a complete (or just about) picture of the world of podcasting.

Congratulations, Todd, for being first out of the gate with this one! I can’t wait to take a look at it myself, even though I don’t have any real intentions of creating a podcast myself. Not that I haven’t thought about it, but at this point I’m not ready. Maybe Todd’s book will give me the inspiration to really consider it in a serious way.

Yahoo! Just came out with their new internet music offerings and it appears they’ve upped the anti over their competitors. Last year I belatedly found Yahoo’s Launchcast internet radio, and after playing with it for a week or two decided it was an amazing deal at $3.99 a month. Not only was this significantly less than the XM Sattelite Radio I was listening to, but you could set it up so that everything you heard was catered to your tastes based on your own ratings of genres, artists, albums, even individual songs. By doing this, Launchcast learns what kind of music you like based on other people who share your tastes and can offer up artists you may have not even heard of, but who are very much in tune with you.

With Launchcast, though, there were have been a couple of inherent problems, at least the way I saw it. First is the idea that you cannot tell Launchcast exactly what to play. It is, like a regular radio station, going to play songs in a somewhat random manner. If one is in the mood for a particular album or song, you’re out of luck. About the best you can do is create a custom mood, but all this does is let you specify a target genre to play, something you can do by just listening to one of the many non-customized Launchcast genre stations (or a standard radio station for that matter). In other words, Launchcast is not an “on-demand” service.

The other problem has been portability. One can listen to Launchcast anywhere that you have access to a high speed internet connection (and a computer that can listen to streaming Windows Media). While that may be great for home and office, even internet cafes, and hotels, it still doesn’t come close to the ubiquitous reach of Satellite Radio, which can be received anywhere in the U.S. at least if you are outside, and in many metropolitan areas when inside as well.

Yahoo!’s new offerings seem to solve both of these previous shortfalls, although perhaps not 100%. The new offerings are divided into two parts, Yahoo! Music Engine and Yahoo! Music Unlimited:

Yahoo! Music Engine gives you access to your own Launchcast station, but not the premium Launchcast Plus, so the songs are lower quality. The Engine is also the application itself which lets you play your own CD’s and MP3’s that are on your computer, burn music to CD, etc. You can search through the catalog and play 30 seconds of any song on demand and alternately buy it for $.99, similar to the way iTunes Music Store works. All of this is free.

Yahoo! Music Unlimited is the premium offering but includes everything that the Music Engine has. In addition, your Launchcast station is the premium Launchcast Plus with CD-quality songs. Secondly, one isn’t limited to 30 seconds of songs when doing the on-demand search and play - you hear the entire song, or entire album if you like. You can also purchase these songs for offline playing on a computer or device capable of playing Windows Media with copyright protection (DRM), and for a slightly cheaper $.79. Unfortunately neither my iPod nor my Treo 650 will play these files, but many other devices do have this capability.

Apparently Yahoo!’s competition (Napster and Rhapsody come the closest to offering the type of services Yahoo! does) costs $15/month, or at least $13.32 if purchased for a year. Yahoo! has priced their service to blow their competition out of the water. They are offering Yahoo! Music Unlimited for $6.99 per month, or $4.99 if you pay for a year at once. This is of course an increase above the Launchcast plus price of $3.99/$2.99 annually, but it is still a bargain compared to the higher priced services like Napster and Rhapsody.

My main use for these services is just to listen to music when I’m in the mood, but there are lots of other features that will be useful to others. One example is the integration with Yahoo! Messenger, so you can invite friends to listen to what you’re listening to, you can play what your friend is listening to, etc. You can also bookmark artists, albums, and songs for easy access (instead of having to search for them every time you want to play them), and even create an unlimited number of playlists from these bookmarks to play back at any time.

In addition to the built-in functionality, there is a growing community of plug-in developers that will allow all manner of additional features. These developers must have been using an early beta of Yahoo! Music Engine and Yahoo! Music Unlimited because they started submitting these months ago and there’s already a nice collection of them. One I downloaded was a minimal version of the player application so that it’s less obvious that I’m listening to music if someone happens to walk by and see my desktop screen at work. The mini version that comes with the application is not very good for this purpose! But there are tons of other plug ins that I want to play with and this is just a couple of days after the initial public release!

So, I said that Yahoo! has solved most of the “problems” of its earlier Launchcast service. But in my mind there is another issue remaining within the portability category. While you can download and transfer songs onto an MP3 player or a CD, this, in my mind, is still a somewhat clunky solution. It can also be a costly even at $.79 per song. In my mind, the whole idea of paying a subscription for content means that you shouldn’t have to shell out even more for whatever reason. I know, the idea is that you are charging people more so that they can listen to that content in whatever way they want, giving them more “rights” over it. But isn’t that what “fair use” is to begin with? I don’t know. I just can’t pay twice even if I’m getting something “more” for the added money. But that’s just me. Personally, I still thing the ultimate in killer music applications would be to have a portable Yahoo! Music Universal that would stream to your portable device over a wifi or even cellular network. Wifi is now available in many locations throughout the world, and is even being implemented as a municipal utility in some cities that will have blanket coverage over the entire city. Still this isn’t nearly the range that cellular phones carry. But now that higher speed EDGE and EV-DO networks are truly being rolled out here in the U.S and even faster networks in some parts of Asia, the issues of bandwidth is starting to go away. I really think this could be a possibility in the near future. Yahoo! representatives have said that they are looking at mobile options like the ones I mention, but of course there’s no timeframe or specifics they can offer those of us who are chomping at the bit.

Yahoo!’s competitor’s (even including Apple’s) stock prices have all fallen since the announcement indicating that Yahoo! really has something that could trounce the likes of Napster and Rhapsody, at least in the stock market’s assessment. I personally have not tried these other two services, so I can’t speak to how they compare, but I don’t believe that they have the customizable station based on ratings that Yahoo! has had for years, and of course they are signicantly more expensive – although that can be alleviated very quickly by them simply dropping their price in response to Yahoo!

In any case, I would highly recommend this option to you if you spend most of your time listening to music in a location where you have high-speed internet. The ability to call up any of over a million songs by a simple search is truly amazing. It’s kind of like having a 3 Terabyte iPod that you can instantly call up whatever you’re in the mood for. Also great and as far as I know not available in any of the other major internet music offerings is the ability to customize a random playlist of music (your Launchcast channel) that is created as you listen to and rate music. Yahoo! also makes all of this stuff very simple and straightforward. Their Yahoo! Music engine application is easy to operate and makes sense, and if you still are confused about features and functionality, you can always access their extensive and well-written help documentation. Definitely a great service!

Update: As you can see, I’ve crossed out the paragraph above where I talk about portability. Thanks to Matt New of Yahoo!, I’ve now gotten the correct info about portability and Yahoo!’s new music services, so I’ll try to explain them here:

Normally when you listen to songs via Yahoo! Music Unlimited, they are streamed to your computer. Alternately you can download individual files for playing on portable players or for burning onto CD. If you want to burn them onto CD, they are considered a “permanent download” and you have to pay - $.99 if you don’t have the premium Yahoo! Music Unlimited, or $.79 if you do.

If you only want to listen to them on a portable device (and not burn them to CD), you can indeed download them for free, given that the device is one of those that is “subscription-music compatible.” While these devices are still not very numerous, hopefully this will change soon. I can’t tell you how delighted and surprised I was to learn about this free downloading option. This does, in my mind solve the one remaining “problems” that YMU had in my mind. While it would be great to have a fully portable device (meaning being able to download or stream music from Yahoo! anywhere over the air via cell phone protocols like EDGE, EV-DO, or the upcoming HSDPA), this is really the next best thing, and perhaps even better in some ways because one doesn’t have to rely on having a good signal, but can just offload your music and have access to it wherever you go with your device.

While I think this portability truly makes YMU shine, for me it still isn’t an option unless I want to carry around a third gadget, and even for me that’s a bit much! I still will listen to YMU at home and work, but I already have two devices that I use to listen to audio, my Treo 650 Smartphone and my iPod. The main reason I have the iPod is the capacity, but also its ability to play Audio Books from Audible.com. Unfortunately the only device that is compatible with YMU that is also compatible with Audible is the Audiovox SMT5600 Pocket PC Phone, and the Dell Axim X50 and I already have a Treo 650 and I’m perfectly happy with it. Besides these devices will only give you enough room as what you can fit on their external SD memory, and right now 2GB is the largest capacity being sold. I really hope that Dell decides to make the Digital Jukebox Audible Compatible as it has done with it’s Axim, since I know that Apple is probably not going to introduce a feature that makes the iPod compatible with any other service or software that ones that Apple owns!

In the mean time, I just wanted to point everyone to a quick interview with Ian Rogers on Make Magazine’s Podcast. Ian talks about all the great plug-ins that can be and are being coded for use with the Yahoo! Music Engine. That reminds me I have to start downloading more to play around with! I see that Ian also left a comment below, so thanks, Ian, as you read, Matt cleared everything up for me.

I’ve never been the best about IT security. Part of the reason is because in all the years I’ve been working or playing with computers (over 20 years total but about 15 years on a PC, 12 or 13 years on a Windows PC starting with Windows 3.0), I’ve seldom had any issues. I may have had a virus once, but it didn’t do any damage and was eliminated with a virus checker. But for years I ran no virus protection. Spyware is much more insidious and so I’ve run spyware checkers for a while. When it comes to passwords, I’m really lazy. I know the ideal thing to do is to have a unique username and password - or at least a unique password for every site you go to. But who wants to write all these down, let alone remember them. If you put them in a file on your computer, than you risk losing it, or someone getting access to the file. So like most people I’ve generally kept things simple and had a few variations on usernames and a few passwords, so that I can usually guess within a reasonable amount of time.

Luckily, within the last few days I heard Todd Cochrane mention something on one of his Geek News Central podcasts about a password management “bookmarklet.” I didn’t quite understand what it was, but Todd suggested it was a way to have unique passwords by just remembering one master password.

So I followed his link and found that this was indeed the answers to that kind of uneasy feeling I’ve had for a while that my way of dealing with passwords was really vulnerable. Basically, this guy Nick Wolf created a JavaScript that uses a standard encryption scheme, MD5, to generate a password by combining your own “master password” and the site’s domain name. So all you have to remember is your master password.

The “bookmarklet” is something that you link as a bookmark in your browser, possibly on a link toolbar for easy access. When you go to a given site, you click on this bookmarklet, enter your master password, at it automatically fills in your password (you need to be on the login page for it to do this of course). Of course before you get to this stage, you need to create the password. You can do this by going to the form that Nick has provided. However, while the form doesn’t save the information that you’re typing to some database, this is always a possibility, and even if you trust the site, unless it is encrypted via SSL (the URL would be https instead of http and you would see an icon of a closed lock in your browser), then there’s always the possibility that someone could intercept those bytes along the way and discover your master password. But because this is simply JavaScript, you can run it on any JavaScript compliant browser. It doesn’t need to be sitting on a web server, it can be sitting on your local PC. This way, communicating with it will not need access to the internet, and will not be sending anything outside of your PC. I’ve even tried this on my Treo 650 smartphone’s browser (Blazer) and while it took a little while to finish, it did provide me with the password needed.

There are some other people who’ve taken the script and made some changes to it that might be of value to some. For example there’s someone who changed the encoding scheme to one that allows for a potentially more random password as well as a longer one (Nick Wolfe’s is only 8 characters long). There’s another version of the script by Chris Zarate, which actually distinguishes between subdomains. This way, for example, if you had a couple of blogger accounts, bigtacos.blogspot.com, and sushicoma.blogspot.com, you could have unique passwords for both of these. Nick Wolfe’s script doesn’t distinguish between the two as their domain name (blogspot.com) are the same, only their subdomains differ.

There’s even a movie that gives you a quick demo of how it works if you’re still confused.

I think this is great and I’m starting to go through all my sites to change my passwords. But there are so many! I don’t know where to start and a lot of the sites I go to are logged in automatically via cookies, so I don’t have any recent memory of actually logging into them. I guess I’ll have to start looking through my history to jar my memory as to which sites I go to which might require passwords. As for the master password I’m using, it’s something that has a bit of meaning, but would be random enough looking to most people and included upper and lower case letters, numbers, and punctuation. It’s not hard to think up something like this especially when you consider that this will be the only one you’ll have to remember for a while. Just don’t use one of the passwords you have been using, because you never know if the server they were on has been hacked at some point.

My only wish would be that you could use this for things other than websites - mainly stand-alone applications or even network or system passwords. But I guess those will still need to be handled by some kind of password management application if indeed you have a bunch to keep track of.

Update: Chris Zarate just informed me that I got a bit mixed up. Apparently his version of this script actually ignores the subdomain, whereas the original script accounts for it. Somehow I’ve been using his script for months without noticing, oh well! Thanks for the clarification, Chris!

eAs I’ve written about many times before, I am constantly seeking ways to digest various forms of “content.” What I mean is radio, blogs, news, tv shows, books, you name it. Anything that will make this process easier, faster, and more efficient, is something I’m constantly looking out for.

So, I was surprised when I recently found Nextup.com which makes a variety of text-to-speech software products. I read at a pretty slow rate and since I’d rather be out enjoying fresh air than sitting in front of a computer screen, having audio versions of a book, as I do with Audible.com, I’m able to “read” a lot of stuff that I normally would not. It’s not just for when I take walks, but of course whenever I’m doing something where I can listen to stuff in the background. So, commuting, exercising at the gym, cleaning, and so forth, all become activities that I can utilize for hearing all this content.

RSS, the mechanism by which I can subscribe to news feeds of blogs and other types of content, is a great invention, but it has piled on the additional amount of stuff that I want to read by huge amounts. Most of this stuff just gets unread because I only have so much time and given my slow reading speed, I’m not getting through a huge amount even if I devote hours per day reading all of these feeds.

These text-to-speech programs could really fill a huge niche in this respect by allowing me to listen to stuff that otherwise I could only read because they don’t exist in audio format. I know what some of you may be thinking. Computer voices, blech! Well, yes and no. Certainly they don’t convey the richness of intonation that a human voice does, but they also are not nearly as robotic sounding as they used to be, and it appears that they are being improved constantly. Some words still get mispronounced, but not many.

The main program that I’ve been playing with is called TextAloud. You can cut and paste text from any source, or open text documents into the application and it will read it aloud in a selection of different voices, or alternately will save the audio to wav, mp3, or wma. You can specify the bitrate (quality) of the recording, and you can control the voice’s pitch, volume, and even speed. So I can speed a voice up to make things go even faster, “speed listening” similar to what you can do with the 4th generation and later iPods, but with much more control, and the ability to speed things up to a ridiculous level. TextAloud also integrates with your clipboard so whenever you hit cut or copy in a windows application, a dialog box asks you if you want to add this text and overwrite or append what’s already in TextAloud.

I think the best voice that comes with TextAloud is “Jennifer RealSpeak” but it looks like there are even some better ones if you are willing to spend the money. AT&T Natural Voices, NeoSpeech, and Cepstral all make additional voices you can plug in. Unfortunately they are pretty pricey! TextAloud itself (which includes a bunch of voices) costs $30, but these additional voices are $30-35 each. Actually NeoSpeech offers two voices for $35, but you can’t buy just one for less. Some of these voices seem very good based on the samples they give you on the TextAloud voices page, but while there’s a fully-functional trial version of TextAloud itself, there’s no such trial for any of these voices. About the best you can do are these samples as well as a form that lets you paste in a very short string of words and hear them via the AT&T Natural Voices. If you don’t mind paying for these extra voices, there really is a nice selection both in English (with regional accents, as well as different types of voices both male and female), as well as lots of other languages. In fact, you can paste English into the online Natural Voices form for various other languages and laugh as the non-English voice engine tries to pronounce it in another language. It doesn’t even sound like accented English, but rather a weird mixture of that and the native language.

As an example, I took a story and copied it into TextAloud. I converted this to a wav file in only a minute or so even though the audio file that was created was about 20 minutes. The wav file was only about 30MB. The same process took a similar amount of time to create an MP3 and at 64Kbps, it only took up around 9MB. Unfortunately I can’t share these with you here because of licensing issues. Apparently only some of the voices that come with TextAloud are open for free distribution. The ones from the third-party companies you can distribute but a license must be purchased, some of which are somewhat reasonable and some of which are astronomical! This is the only gotcha I’ve found with the product so far. I was thinking of actually providing an audio version of each of my