cheap calls and carbon footprints

Cheap Calls

Maxroam.com is the place to get your SIM Card to enable up to 80% reductions in your  calls home from overseas.

To make cheap calls from Ireland to overseas locations he recommends RebTel.com. RebTel allows you to call your overseas friends through a local number with sharply reduced rates.

Elonex WebBook

379 euros from the Carphone Warehouse.
80GB hard disk and 512MB of RAM. (Compared to 4GB solid state disk for eee-PC).
2.5 hrs battery life.
Lovely small form factor PC.
Nice keyboard but needs larger space bar and backspace key.
No Firefox or Skype (preinstalled on eee-PC).
Nice big hard-disk (but not solid state).
Heavier than eee-PC.

A great ultra portable PC if you need a lot of hard disk space.

If the World Could Vote

Nice site that offers a poll offering a choice between McCain and Obama.  So far Obama has 86% of the vote. thats 79,000+ votes across 167 countries.

Track your carbon footprint with your Phone

Carbon Diem (Carpe Diem, geddit) will track and report and automatically calculate your you carbon footprint using your mobile phone. Its 100% accurate on trains and planes and about 65-75% accurate on cars and buses. The main thing is you don’t have to spend the rest of life typing stuff into a manual carbon calculator.

Archos Personal DVR – Not quite Soup

Archos 705 WIFI Personal Video Player

I looked at the Archos 705 WIFI Personal Video Player today. Bit of breach of the trades descriptions act their, it barely does WIFI and kept dropping my home network (in a location where my Sony VAIO Laptop happily gets a full signal).

There’s worse to come though, it won’t play any video format files without buying another piece of software, the DVD plugin which will cost you another 20 euros on top of the 360+ euros you dropped to buy the player in the first place. Its like buying an iPod and having to shell out more money to listen to music. Don’t even get me started on the ridiculous hoops you have to go through to give them your money, including entering two weird keys and making sure to pick the right model number.

Consumer electronics must succeed on three counts,

• Save you time or save you money
• Win on usability and convenience
• Do what they say on the box

The Archos WIFI Personal Video Player is an Epic Fail on all three counts.

Picasa Will Group your Images

A new feature soon to be launched on Picasa Web Albums (The Google photo sharing service) will group your photos based on the image contents.

Robot Skeleton helps paralysed Walk

Amazing technology to help people paralysed from the waist down walk with with aid of a robotic frame that the user straps into. We are designed to be upright and this device removes the problems associated with wheel chair use