I have been using VOIP phone in my house for more than 2 months now. There have been no issues yet. I'm using the service from Lingo. This is very nice. I get all the great features of normal phone including Caller-ID, Call-Waiting, Simultaneous Ring, Call forwarding, Voice Mail and many more which can only be offered in a VoIP phone. For example I can set rules that allow me to forward calls to my cell phone when I'm not home (or only during certain time etc.). My voice mail can be automatically forwarded as an mp3 attachment to my email. I will never have to change my phone number again. All I really need is Internet connection. With broadband becoming ubiquitus this should not be a problem in the future.

Transition to Gentoo has been very smooth without any major issues. I like Gentoo. It is designed with developers and system admins in mind. The community is very much like Debian.

I don't know somehow even though I'm a gadget guy I have never even had as much as curiosity to look at the iPod... let alone put it on my wish list....

I bought a new GPS bluetooth navigation system (Navman 4410) about 6 months back. Now after using it for a while I'm realizing there are differences in the quality of Map data that the GPS software uses. The Navman GPS I have uses map data from Teleatlas. Most other popular GPS vendors use map data from NAVTEQ. Navteq has a sort of monopoly in this area. So they charge a premium. Even google maps uses data from NAVTEQ.

I am really excited about this new site. My site http://amit.bapat.net and Shraddha's site http://shraddha.bapat.net are created using a Content Management System called 'Drupal'. This is pretty awesome. It lets you create a wonderful site without much need to know any programming at all!

After getting my machine up and running a couple of weeks back, I created many partitions on my 80GB harddisk to install various Linux distros and compare them. I want a distro that is user friendly and easy to use as a desktop. Since this machine is going to be used primarily as a desktop for Photo Editing using Gimp (preferabley 2.0) and playing music and browsing net, I wanted a distro that could detect all my hardware and setup all the network shares (using NFS), CUPS printers, SAMBA printers, SAMBA shares etc, without having to edit any configuration files by hand.

In a comment to my blog Vikram asked what's the best way to write in Devnagari?

Have you heard about Google Maps? It's a very innovative way to see and browse maps which is a lot different than how other map sites (MapQuest, MapsOnUs, MapPoint) do. The most interesting part is the map that is shown to you always fits in your browser window and is made up of tiles. You can drag with mouse on the map to pan it in all four directions. Everytime you pan, the unshown tiles are downloaded and shown to you. All the tiles at each resolution are fixed. So if you use a map of a small area over and over again most of the tiles won't even need to be downloaded as they are already cached by your web browser. This reduces the network traffic and improves the user experience.

SPAM is becoming such a big problem and I don't see any comprehensive industry-wide solution emerging anytime soon... there's a lot of talk but very little action...

I know there are a few solutions in the works but why are they taking so long?

जब मैने देखा की blogger.com में UTF-8 सपोर्ट हैं तो सोचा क्यों न हिंदी में कुछ लिखें?
अगर आप इस पन्नेको ठीक तरह से पढ़ सकते है तो कृपया इस पोस्ट के साथ अपनी टिपण्णी जोडे. (Click on comments below)