Monday, June 14, 2010

Setting up - IKEA, Contacts and Tomato

I've been busy for the last few days. The non-computer related part was buying and assembling a bunch of IKEA furniture - surprisingly all my fingers are still intact and the things didn't fall apart yet...

I also found a little time to do one of those things that you know you should, bet never get to - I got all my contacts from the phones, gmail, facebook, linked-in, etc., merged them, cleaned up the phones and email info and put them in Google Contacts. This guide was quite helpful in the process. My only annoyance now is that I'm used to manage people on the phone by their Hebrew names, but on Contacts it's all in English, and I haven't thought of a good way to sync them.

I also finally set-up a WiFi network at the new appartment, so I can have internet without relying on the kindness of strangers with public wifi. Since my wifi router is a bit away from the computer, behind a couple of walls (I'll be splitting a neighbors internet connection) I wanted to make sure the signal is strong. This can be done by installing a custom firmware on the router called Tomato which gives you a lot of control over how your router works including transmission power. It also has a better GUI, nice graphs, and a bunch of tools and settings to play around with, such as prioritizing traffic by application (for example - giving VOIP traffic higher priority than p2p).

That's all for now, will be playing with some more stuff in the near future.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Email is for old people...

I've been chatting on Facebook with a distant cousin of mine who said she still didn't receive some link I was meant to send her. She was quite surprised when I told her I emailed it a week ago. "Email? You should have told me! That's for old people..." was more or less her reply.

When I think about it, my 12 years old brother doesn't use email much or at all, and most of his online communication is via facebook and chatting. Maybe as they get into university or corporate environment they will start using email, or mayble the world is changing and I'm now an old guy using email...

What are your experiences on this?