I have had a Google Voice number from before it was Google Voice, from back in the Grand Central days. I have my Google Voice number set up to ring to a free inbound Internet phone number through SipGate. With my Internet phone “modem” I now have a free “home” phone number with outbound calling provided by Google Voice. I’m not sure how long this will last but I’m enjoying it for now.
So Google Voice has a lot of positives if you choose to get your own Google Voice number, including the ability to dial out from it to the US and Canada for free. (Technically, it dials your phone and then connects you to your caller.) For the purposes of this review I’m looking at how Google Voice compares to its main voicemail competitor, YouMail.
Visual voicemail is a method of accessing voicemail that is similar to email. In other words, your messages come in, they show up on a list, and you get to pick and choose which one you hear first. Traditional voicemail means you have to sit through your friend’s long-winded rambling message just to get to the message you really want to hear.
It’s really crucial to understand there are two levels of Google Voice service. One is where you get your own Google Voice number assigned. (This will give you the ability to call out with that number.) Two is where you do not get your own Google Voice number but instead tie your cellphone number to use Google Voice’s visual voicemail services. Very important! When signing up for Google Voice, you MUST ask for a free phone number immediately or you will have to pay for an “upgrade” later at the cost of $10. You can always tie your cellphone voicemail to Google Voice even with a Google Voice number, so it’s always best to choose to get the free number when signing up. (Google purposefully makes this very confusing, it seems, so choose carefully when selecting which path upon signup.)
If you don’t want a Google Voice number, and just visual voicemail, then YouMail might also be a good option for you.
I recently started using YouMail because I wanted visual voicemail on my cellphone and needed an alternative to Google. Google Voice offers visual voicemail for cellphone numbers, but when I originally tried it, my number via my provider (Sprint/Nextel) was not set up for “conditional call forwarding” and I could not get it to work. When I heard about YouMail, I decided to try that instead. Somehow they way YouMail does forwarding through your phone’s settings vs. dialing in with a code as Google instructed works for me.
I also felt like I’d like to keep my cellphone voicemail separate from my Google Voice…if just because I’m sick and tired of Google encroaching on every aspect of my life! Google, youire great, but there is too much of a good thing. So I like to try alternatives.
Here is a look at the pros and cons of both:
The big difference is in transcriptions. YouMail offers its visual voicemail service for free, but unfortunately charges for transcriptions. Google Voice offers free automated transcriptions, but they are generally known to suck to the point of being useless. YouMail decided to scrap automated transcriptions in favor of pushing a “premium” transcription service that utilizes live human beings to clean up the transcriptions.
For business people, paying for YouMail’s much more accurate premium service is probably worth the monthly cost. For personal use, I’m not so sure it’s worth it. I thought I might miss having my visual voicemails transcribed in YouMail because I’ve had them transcribed so much in Google…but surprisingly, I don’t miss it much. When it comes to my friends, I’m really more interested in being able to pick and choose the order in which I play my messages. If YouMail had a really cheap automated transcription option with their “pro” package I might upgrade, but I’m not motivated enough to pay a premium for human-edited transcriptions. Others, however, swear by the premium transcription service as a major timesaver.
Interface. Google’s website interface is much better. YouMail’s is covered in big graphic ads if you are a free customer. I don’t mind advertising supporting my free services, but did YouMail really need to stick a big graphical block in the top middle of my home page? However, I much prefer YouMail’s interface when it comes to my Blackberry app. It’s simpler, cleaner, and will even show pictures of my contacts. Google scrunches everything up so that it’s too small to scan easily.
Extras. Google Voice focuses on the basics. Voice mail. Transcription. They don’t offer any “fun” frills. In fact, they removed them when they took over Grand Central. I remember Grand Central had all sorts of neat options, such as the ability to change the ringer that people hear when calling you. That’s all gone now. You get only the most basic of options now. You can use your phone to record a new greeting at Google Voice. You can even have different groups be routed to different phones (if you have the full Google Voice number) or messages. But you can’t easily customize beyond that.
YouMail, on the other hand, is a lot more fun. You can easily upload an MP3 file to be your greeting. Their automated system will also say caller’s names if you choose their “SmartGreeting.” There’s an entire community of YouMail users who submit user-created MP3 greetings that you can use on your phone. It’s extremely easy to swap out greetings and you can even assign them to individual callers.
All in all, I think YouMail is a slightly better service when it comes to visual voicemail services and if you truly need top-notch transcription, I hear their service is stellar. However, Google Voice is also an excellent visual voicemail service, and its transcription, though lousy, might save enough time to be worth the mistakes it brings. (One time I had Google Voice identify a caller as “Charlie Sheen.”)
Since both basic services are free, it can’t hurt to try them, and see which one you like the best.
There are tons of places that offer free file storage online these days. Microsoft has recently launched its “SkyDrive” with 25 gigs free. (Alas, there’s also an upload limit of 50 MB.) But if you want to sync with your Linux desktop, Microsoft’s SkyDrive won’t have software for you.
Dropbox offers online file storage and sharing with software for Windows, Mac and Linux (plus many mobile platforms, but alas for me, the Blackberry version is not ready yet). So as a Linux user I was pleased to actually have current software that works…the syncing is not only easy but super fast.
With a free account you get 2 gigs, which is not a lot, but you will receive 250 MB extra for each person you refer (up to 8 gigs). Of course, I have a referral link I want to share with you…if you use it when you sign up for an account, you’ll also get an extra 250 MB:
The pricing plans for upgraded accounts with more storage are reasonable, but not amazing in terms of gigs per dollar; but the service does not limit file size, and supposedly everything is encrypted so you have your privacy.
I’m finding the service most useful when I want to share things with someone else who is not local. You can just drag and drop files into a shared folder and it adds the files to the Dropbox folder on the other user’s computer almost instantly.
I just got an email from China saying that someone in China was looking to trademark my domain name and register a number of variations on that name. I’m always suspicious of these kinds of emails and so I looked it up. Sure enough, it’s a scam. They send these letters to try to sell people on domain names they don’t need at ridiculous prices. For more information, see:
I like Hulu for its online streaming video, but one of the main reasons was that it was free and had very brief commercials. Unfortunately, getting current episodes in any sort of timely fashion (and keeping up with them before they expire) has not been the easiest on Hulu.
Hulu is “solving” this problem by adding a $9.99 monthly paid service. The main “benefit” is that you can access entire seasons of many TV shows. Problem is, you still have to watch ads, and Netflix trounces Hulu when it comes to movie availability (and lack of ads). Judging from the comments posted on this Yahoo news article, the reception to Hulu’s new Plus service is not just negative, but downright hostile. As one commenter said succinctly:
Hulu actually has employees with business degrees and they come up with this?
Really?
Really?
What Hulu isn’t getting is that they are not just in competition with Netflix, but DVRs and torrents. I’d consider paying $9.99/month for no advertising and a huge selection along with high quality streaming, but I certainly wouldn’t at Hulu’s current level of service. They are promising HD quality for the extra fee…which would be enticing were it not for the fact that half the time my Hulu videos are as jerky as webcams were back in 2002, and I often manually lower the video quality to try to improve the streaming experience.
It remains to be seen whether Hulu’s new Plus service will take off. In the meantime, if you want to try another free streaming video site, check out Crackle. They have a quirky selection and actual real staff members respond to your questions in the comments.
One thing that will be going the way of the do-do eventually with all of this online streaming will be the hard copy DVD rental. Red Box and Blockbuster watch out!
Google has their own operating system that is being developed for Netbooks – call it Chrome OS or Chromium, your choice. I downloaded a version bootable by USB, developed by a very smart 17-year-old. With bootable USB in hand, I was able to get Chrome OS running on my laptop. Here are my first impressions:
Basically, Chromium is Google’s Chrome browser set up as an operating system. When you boot up and login, you are put into Chrome. From there, you can use Google Apps to get your work done via the “cloud.”
There is no way to save things to the hard drive or install native applications. It’s designed that way. You have to have Internet access to do anything.
This might be fine, but in my first attempt to use the OS, it did manage to find my wifi network, but froze on the authentication. It also didn’t seem to like my external mouse much. Ultimately, the system hung and I shut it down. I’ll play with it more later.
I’d say, this is a promising “lite” operating system, if just to have on USB for those times when your hard drive dies and you just want to login to the Internet to check your email. Whether it will be robust enough for daily use remains to be seen.
Just what we need – another reason to upgrade our televisions and create more electronic waste! Though, at least this TV will save some space in the landfill once it’s thrown out. It’s the new LG super flat flatscreen. It is less than 7 millimeters thick. There’s no official name for it. Just think of it as the skinny jeans of the TV world:
So I downloaded and burned a copy of Fedora 11 Linux and found it won’t work at all on my Gateway laptop with the ATI built-in graphics card. The LiveCD wouldn’t work. Couldn’t even get to a desktop. I tried a bunch of different boot options (and yes, I tried “nomodeset”) and still it didn’t work.
Apparently, the latest bleeding edge Linux kernel doesn’t have ATI drivers that work with it. OK…why release a distro that won’t even work with a large number of graphics cards? That’s just strange to me.
I’ve downloaded Dreamlinux 3.5 instead. The LiveCD works perfectly and I’m installing it now, over a Linux Mint Elyssa installation, which was out of date. Review of Dreamlinux to come. (I still like Mint and I use it on my main computer.)
Thing is, I hate burning these CDs and then wasting them when they don’t work. A lot of useless techno-trash. I’ll give the Fedora CD to a friend who can hopefully use it.
Twitter is abuzz with this admission from Greenpeace that it was “emotionalizing” (i.e., exaggerating) the global warming issue:
The problem with this “emotionalizing” is that it discredits the environmental movement and gives power to people who say global warming is a hoax. I personally don’t find the global warming issue to be a compelling one. I have been around long enough to remember that environmental scares come in waves: for a while we were focused simply on “pollution.” Then “acid rain” came in vogue. The hole in the ozone layer was a focus for a while. Lately, it has been global warming.
There are so many other problems the environmental movement could focus on. For example, I would prefer to see more focus on overpopulation. Let’s face it: Our environmental problems are caused by too many people on a small planet. I would prefer to see the environmental movement support education and family planning in third world countries as a means of helping keep birth rates down. Global warming in and of itself is too open to debate and gets us off-track on more important issues, such as the toll our big cities are taking NOW on our watersheds.
Whether or not global warming is man-made, part of the cycles of the planet, or both, it doesn’t really matter to me. What matters to me is that we humans are burdening the planet in a manner that is not sustainable. Let’s focus on that and not so much on polar ice caps, which just ends up causing ridicule against environmentalists.
My old Pentium III laptop has served as my testbed for Linux distributions that can work on older computers. So far, I’ve had Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS 2007, Linux Mint, and Puppy Linux installed. Most worked fairly well, except Linux Mint had a problem recognizing the 1400×1050 pixel monitor, and Puppy Linux screwed up my USB mouse.
I did like how fast Puppy Linux was, but the USB mouse problem was something I was unable to fix and made it not worth keeping the distro. (I also found Puppy to be a bit too techie in its style.) PCLinuxOS 2007 was actually the best, most stable Linux distro I’d had on here, but I was concerned they were moving to KDE 4 and knew that would never work on an old computer. Concerned about upgrades, I dropped PCLinuxOS to test other distros.
Of course, I opted for the LXDE install. I’d never tried it, much less heard of it, but the screenshots looked nice enough. The LXDE version of PCLinuxOS comes as Live CD that doubles as the install disk. Installation was fairly easy, but I missed the information about logging in as root when I signed in. Because I was logged in as “guest,” when I hit the install button, I was asked for a password. You’d think after years of playing around with Linux I might have figured out to type in “root,” but I had no clue what to do. (I had to search the Wiki to see what to enter.) This could truly throw off a newbie.
This minor gripe aside, the rest of the installation was a snap, and I had the system running in no time. No painful configuration to deal with – pretty much everything worked out of the box. Even video including, amazingly, Flash in the web browser! PCLXDE comes with Midori as the default web browser. I have no idea what Midori is based on, but it works great on this old laptop.
The stripped down LXDE version of PCLOS includes a small selection of programs, including the AbiWord word processor, a simple soltaire card game, and a few basic Internet tools. OpenOffice.org is easily installed with pretty much the click of a button. Synaptic Package Manager is available on the toolbar for easy installation of other programs. And the best part about PCLXDE is the Control Center, which makes it easy manage the system. This is really one of the most professional-looking aspects of PCLinuxOs, which is sure to impress non-Linux friends who might be otherwise skeptical of Linux.
As for LXDE, it is an amazing desktop. Fast, attractive, and very easy to use. I have Gnome running on my Linux Mint installations, and I am never quite happy with it. It just doesn’t feel “modern” to me. But LXDE has that nice polished feel that makes you feel like you are actually using a modern-day piece of desktop software. I don’t feel like I’m using “Linux” here…I’m just using a computer.
I had a few minor problems: I screwed up installing my wifi card but somehow managed to get it working after some poking around. For a moment there, though, I thought I had really screwed up my wifi drivers. This could be improved in terms of making it a bit more bulletproof.
The monitor also had to be manually set to the 1400×1050 size, though at least this setting held once I adjusted it (as for some reason Mint didn’t like those monitor specs and kept starting up X server with the wrong monitor resolution). And the installed Twitter application would not let you open your account unless you had put in your “default keyring” password, which you would not know because you haven’t set it yet. (You have to go into your home directory and delete the default keyring file hidden in there to get this to work…kind of annoying.)
Otherwise, I am excited to be web browsing and even watching YouTube on this old computer – though it’s a bit jerky due to the low RAM I have on here (only 256 MB). I have had so many problems with Flash on my other computers with Mint installs that I’m wondering if I shouldn’t just switch them to PCLOS. We’ll see.
Verdict: Big thumbs up. I would highly recommend PCLinuxOS 2009, the LXDE version, to anyone who has an old computer that needs new life breathed into it. This is probably the best Linux distro I’ve found for this computer, and I’m going to keep it.
Computer:
Sony Vaio
Pentium III
850 MHz
256 MB RAM
20 Gig harddrive
Netgear PCMCIA Wifi Card (WG511)
PCLXDE default installed software:
Midori – Web Browser with Flash and Multimedia playback
Abiword -Word Processor (Get Open Office available after hd install)
ePDFView – PDF Viewer
Leafpad -Tex Editor.
Transmission – Bittorrent Client
Emesene – Instant Messenger
XChat – IRC Client
Sylpheed – Email and News Reader
GRDC – Remote Desktop Client
GPicView – Graphic Viewer
MTPaint – Graphic Drawing Client
Alsaplayer – Music Player
Mplayer – Video Player
PCMan – File Manager
Simple Backup – Backup Software
Xfburn – CD/DVD Burning Software
Gnome PPP – Dial up Client
File Roller – Archiving Software
PCLinuxOS Control Center – Adminstration Tool
LXDECC – LXDE Control Center (provided by Lord UnR34l)
AddLocale – Convert LXDE into your language
XPat2 – Card Playing Suite
Tiwtux – Twitter Client
Grsync – Graphical Rsync Client
Virtualbox Additions added
Here’s an interesting way to recycle those Altoids mint tins: Turn them into MP3 players! 
My old Pentium III laptop has served as my testbed for Linux distributions that can work on older computers. So far, I’ve had Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS 2007, Linux Mint, and Puppy Linux installed. Most worked fairly well, except Linux Mint had a problem recognizing the 1400×1050 pixel monitor, and Puppy Linux screwed up my USB mouse.