While Skype (which I am using extensively these days) makes it easy to call your Internet-using friends for free you normally have to pay something if you want to call a conventional phone using a voice over IP service (BBC hype notwithstanding). One organization, however, is enabling completely free of charge phoning – the fwdOUT Network. The catch is that you have to be running a Linux-based PBX on your own phone (thus enabling others to share your line) in order to participate.

Free World Dialup (by some of the same people) used to offer free calls to a number of locations around the world to anyone using an IP phone but I guess that wasn’t economically viable and it now offers straight computer to computer telephony….

If you have been reading blog.org before via RSS you may need to update the XML weblink to this (https://blog.org/wp-rss2.php) in order to read my blog now that it has moved. I also don’t know how to give each of my categories its own RSS feed at the moment though I am sure it is possible so you’ll have to read along with everything for the moment.

Just a quick note to mention to any of my friends or fellow academics that read this that I am often logged into Skype these days (now that I have a laptop with built in mic and speakers). For those who don’t know Skype is a mixture of instant message application and Internet telephone). My Skype ID is, unsurprisingly, “DavidBrake”. If I don’t know you please let me know why I should let you connect to me (I set my Skype to “contacts only”).

Update: That’s “DavidBrake” not “David Brake” as I thought…

Traditionally if you wanted a WordPress weblog (open source so free to use and arguably the most feature rich blogging product around) you needed to be techie yourself or at least have a techie friend with server space spare. Certainly it is only thanks to my own connections in the tech fraternity that I have been able to have this blog hosted using first Moveable Type and now WordPress.

Recently, however, I have discovered that blogsome offers a free hosting service similar to blogger‘s so anyone reading this could have a blog like mine. I’m a little concerned that blogsome don’t have any apparent means of gathering revenue to offset the cost of hosting so they could disappear one day – particularly if they get popular – but my guess is that by the time they do there will be lots of other places able to take over hosting.

If you are already running a weblog using another service you may need a little help getting your archives across to this new platform but once you have taken the plunge I’m sure you’ll agree it was worth it to get features like categories, password protected posts and an extensible architecture for people to add features.

I am not using blogsome myself – instead this weblog, like my other group weblog at the LSE is now generously hosted by Tim Duckett.

Hope you enjoy the new look. Feel free to comment with suggestions and do let me know if there are any problems.

P.S. If you are in the UK don’t forget to vote!

The work of the “Newington Green Action Group”:http://ngag.org/ (which I helped to run for several years) is the cover story of today’s Guardian Society section. To her credit, the journalist attempted to get at both the benefits and the drawbacks of the regeneration of the Green which I and my colleagues pushed for. Some of the criticisms levelled at the changes are justified but I also find it depressing to see how many people seem determined to see the dark side of any change.

1) I have been on holiday with my parents (to the “Ring of Kerry in Ireland”:http://flickr.com/photos/derb/ – v nice if a little unpredictable weather-wise).
2) Since my return I have been working on my thesis and occaisionally posting to my “academic groupblog”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/ – it’s hard to justify ‘recreational’ blogging these days…
3) I’m planning to move this blog from Moveable Type to “WordPress”:http://wordpress.org/ and shift it to another server. Until I get the “template right”:https://blog.org/mt/ however I can’t make the change and rather than maintain both the MT and WP sites each time I post I will probably not post for a while until I get the template sorted out.

Any help would be welcome.

A “fellow ex-pat Canadian”:http://www.claritycp.com/exec_profile_jb.html lent me a book – “Mondo Canuck”:http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/0132630885/qid%3D1112610903/702-9110123-7216867 which made me feel more Canadian than I had in years. It’s a compendium of Canadian popular culture which sparked many memories. I found myself indulging in a favourite Canadian recreation – looking for famous people and organizations I didn’t realise were Canadian and I was also reminded that I am (loosely) connected to several Canadian phenomena.

• My parents live in Oakville for example so I knew all about the importance of nearby “Sheridan College”:http://www1.sheridaninstitute.ca/ for Hollywood’s animation industry but I also know several people who worked at “Alias”:http://www.alias.com/ – animation software giant – including “Reid Ellis”:http://rae.tnir.org/ who used to host this blog.
• Another friend of mine – “Harald”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/ – (present host of this blog) knows several of the people from the bizarre Canadian comedy sensation “Kids in the Hall”:http://www.kithfan.org/ (I met them once).
• I serialised “Douglas Coupland”:http://www.coupland.com/’s excellent early novel “Microserfs”:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.01/microserfs.html in a computer magazine I worked on and my mother knows his aunt.
• Now that I am a media studies academic I feel as if I have some connection to “Marshall McLuhan”:http://archives.cbc.ca/IDD-1-69-342/life_society/mcluhan/ as well – if only because a friend of mine has studied him extensively and I recently attended two lectures on his work.
• I went to the “same college at university”:http://www.trinity.utoronto.ca/ as “Atom Egoyan”:http://www.egofilmarts.com/ and “Michael Ignatieff”:http://ksgfaculty.harvard.edu/Michael_Ignatieff (though not at the same time).

  Mondo Canuck is a fascinating book for Canadians of all ages to thumb through but, despite being endorsed by Citizenship Canada, is out of print.

I just read in “Wired”:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/start.html?pg=7 about NASA World Wind – a free application which (if you have a powerful enough PC) lets you hover over the globe and zoom in on any part you like to see a satellite overview of it. It only runs on Windows, alas.

“A home for all your digital media”:http://ourmedia.org/ – for free and forever. A very exciting prospect! See my posting on the LSE group weblog for more details.

Toshiba (which makes nuclear power plants as well as laptops – who knew?) has offered to give an Alaskan village a ‘mini-nuke’. It seems they’ll take it – after all it will reduce their cost per kilowatt/hr from 28 to 10 cents (they only pay the running costs). At the moment they get all their power from diesel which has to be barged in during the ice-free months…

(see also “my earlier posting”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_positive_uses_of_technology.html#001340 on nuclear power).