Yahoo’s Messenger now has voice calling capabilities built into it with free pc to pc communication – nothing new there, but they also have the ability to call standard phone lines including the UK (rates table). The weird thing is that calling London costs 1cent a minute, but calling anywhere else in the uk costs 1.5cents per minute. Still cheap, but weird how they have different prices. Unfortunately you have to pay a minumum of $10 to start with and the prepayment expires after 180 days of purchase or last use. This slight change to the expiry date is good news as it means you can keep the $10 going for a long time as long as you use it once every 6 months.
You also get free voicemail (something that skype charges you for) which is good – with delivery to your yahoo account or IM window.
They should really give you 10 minutes of free calling though so you can try the service to see if the quality is any good before you lay out your money.
You’ll still need to buy server licences though if you are running MS servers but Virtual Server 2005 is now free. Thanks to Random Thoughts
Argggh – the state of Ohio has now come back and said they can’t find the fax that I sent to them containing my social security number, drivers licence and full address. This is very worrying as it makes you wonder just *who* has this information and what are they going to do with it. I really can’t be bothered to go through the whole i-filing process again (which seems very haphazard and not secure at all) so I’m going to paperfile my Ohio return. The only downside is that it takes longer to get a refund.
In other annoying news, Roadrunner have still not been able to send me a correct invoice for my service with them. Each month it has been wrong – so far they have lost two checks and started me on autopay despite the fact that I requested them to stop autopay until they could get their act together and bill me correctly. I am seriously considering switching to another supplier, but there isn’t really anyone else unless I drop from 5mb connection down to 150k and who in their right mind is going to do that?
I like the new Yahoo beta maps for working out my mileage for work. As I have saved the locations of our customers in my profile, with the new beta I can just pull down the customers and replan my route to get the mileage travelled for that day. As it looks like you can have multiple stops this works really well.
If you get a message “System.IO.FileNotFoundException: File or Assembly name xxxxxx.dll, or one of its dependencies, was not found” where xxxx is a random name then you need to add the Network Service account change permissions on %systemroot%\Temp as per the readme for wsus
After changing my default outlook login setup on a mail server, I realised that the SUS server was complaining that the SelfUpdateTree was not working. Fix in extended entry.
This list of smarthosts for the major isps in the US should come in handy if your dsl ip address gets on a blacklist. Hopefully the isp’s are more concerned if their own smarthost gets on the blacklist. A quick change to exchange’s smtp server and a restart should get mail flowing (to roadrunner for example) again.
Or that is certainly the impression that the US Government seems to be giving to me.
If you’ve not see the trunk monkey ads, then watch all of them
Found my 400th cache yesterday – a great day out caching – thanks for the company Team Lefor!