Now that we have told everyone to use 1899 to ring us in the states at 3p per call, they’ve only gone and increased the price to .5p per minute. Still a good bargain but does make it a bit more expensive than it used to.

you can actually ring tv licencing on a freephone number, 0800 3282020 which isn’t advertised on their website. Useful when cancelling the licence as why pay yet more money on a national rate (0870 241 6468) phone call when you can do it for free.

A how to format email addresses to send messages via sms

I’ve talked about 1899 and 18866 before and I’m even more convinced they are the same company – they even both have “(NEW SERVER)” in the title of their web page. Anyway, 1899 is slightly cheaper than 18866 although you pay more on a per connection basis, 3p as opposed to 1p, but the calls are cheaper – free to US, Canada and UK landlines.
However, 1899 also has Voice Over IP at the same rates so you can actually use it whilst connected to broadband to ring other people in the uk for just 3p on their home number. This would work out cheaper than skype but the same price as using your home number. This does mean that you can use this anywhere in the world and get cheap phone calls though – so in theory I could ring a US phone number from the states, long distance, for 1p……Might even be worth installing this on the parents-in-law pc so they could ring me for 3p.
Incidentally, the funny thing is that you can also ring your home phone number at the same time and caller ID shows it as your home phone number ringing.

and thats it…you pay 3p to call a LANDLINE in the states (or the uk) and nothing else per call.This international phone call business is getting really cut throat (and hard to remember which company to prefix with)

Finally figured out a way to get my Nokia mobile synched with outlook 2003. As Outlook normally runs in cached mode, the nokia software keeps prompting me for a password when it synchs (and it doesn’t have a password). However, by setting a profile up on the machine to be online all the time and then telling nokia pc sync to use this profile, it doesn’t prompt me and everything synchs. I do still get the “this program is trying to use outlook – do you wish to allow it” prompt but this is bypassed using ClickYes

The good thing about not being able to make any calls since Monday is that our phone bill will be substantially cheaper. The bad news is that the mobile bill will be substantially higher. We’re still without dial out access from home, but can receive calls. BT’s automated “looseyouinaqueueofbuttonpressinguselessness”(TM) phone system is currently stating a fix time of 68 hours. Add that to the 36 hours and we’re hopefully looking at a nice lot of line rental rebate.

I was suprised to see on the Guardian’s blog that AT&T users can now send sms texts to European mobile users. I thought that as sms’s were just texts to numbers, that they were therefore global and they could already send us texts. I’ll have to see if my Brother In Law can send us texts…

I’ve started to see quite a lot of press about Skype and did wonder how they were going to make their money as their plan to offer free voice calls to other skype users seemed to be a great idea but bound to crash under the volume. However, The Register reports that Skype are likely to charge for premium services. Not sure what these would be. I don’t know anyone who uses Skype – hands up anyone?