Continuing towards that magical 1.0 version number, today I released version 0.8 of my Jajah Dialer dashboard widget. Thanks to some more fantastic work by Jason Sonnenschein, the issue with searching for anything with a space in it has been resolved. Get it at http://www.gregsmithies.us/jajahdialer/

I just released version 0.7 of Jajah Dialer. The new version now has support for address book searches with multiple results, a highly requested feature. Almost all of the work for this was done by Jason Sonnenschein, so many thanks to him! Get it at: http://www.gregsmithies.us/jajahdialer/

New photos of St Patrick's Day and the House's Tragos party are up. Check the Photos section.

I've been looking around for an easy to use and cheap backup solution and think I may have found the solution: Mozy. First of all, the price is fantastic - they offer two consumer packages, the first is FREE for 2 GB of storage space. The other is $4.95 per month for UNLIMITED storage. That's right - you can back up your entire illegal MP3 and movie collection no matter what the size for $4.95 per month. The client software that you load onto your computer handles everything for you. You simply select the folders to back up, and every time a file changes it backs it up to Mozy's servers. It does block level incremental backups, making them incredibly fast as it only backs up the parts of a file that change. All in all a great service. There's a Mac client coming soon too! Give it a try: http://mozy.com

I thought this was absolutely hilarious, but the Associated Press reports that a group of Mayan priests are so disgusted with the thought of George Bush visiting an ancient archaeological site that they are performing a large scale purification of the site to cleans it of "bad spirits" after he leaves. From the article:

"That a person like (Bush), with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked, is going to walk in our sacred lands, is an offense for the Mayan people and their culture," Juan Tiney

The rest of the article is available at: Yahoo News
Also, check out my small collection of marvelous quotes by the man himself available here.

I just wanted to apologise, especially to my Jajah Dialer users, for the downtime for most of today. Apparently my domain registrar (GoDaddy.com) had a bit of an issue with the new Daylight Saving chang-over dates, or at least, their servers didn't take kindly to it - probably the Windows ones! ANyway, if you're reading this it means that all is back to normal. THough this shouldn't reflect too badly on GoDaddy, other than this incident, they have given me flawless service over the last year and a half, and I'm really happy with everything that they've done. I'd still recommend them to anyone in the market for a Domain, or hosting, plus they're bloody cheap - I just got gregsmithies.com for $1.99 per year for the next 5 years, not too shabby!

For fans of just about any type of new, chilled out music, Mercedes Benz realeases a free album every 6-8 weeks of new, generally unknown artists. Volume 16 was released on the 27th February, and giving it a listen now, it's pretty damn good, especially at the price they're offering - free! Each volume is themed to fit with one of their cars. This volume is made to match the new C-Class, and it definitely does that well with a young, acid-jazzy feel, whilst still holding onto that Mercedes level of class. Give it a listen: http://www.mercedes-benz.com/mixedtape/

Tags: mixed-tape

Creeping ever closer to a final 1.0 release, I released Jajah Dialer today. The widget now has support for searching the Mac Address Book for numbers, as well as a much more unified interface. FInally, I've added back a "Classic Jajah" mode that allows the user to use the widget just as if it were the original widget prior to version 0.4 - in other words, using the Jajah native interface for dialing as opposed to the Apple native one. Jajah itself is an internet telephony company that allows you to make free or very cheap international calls through the internet. However, where it differs from other services like Skype is that one doesn't need a computer with microphone and speakers. Rather, Jajah uses any existing phone, landline or cellular, as the interface, leading to better sound quality, and much easier use. As always, the widget is available at http://www.gregsmithies.us/jajahdialer

I just discovered what is quite possibly the most useful online application I've ever found - it's called Spreeder, can be found at http://www.spreeder.com, and it is a tool that FORCES you to sped read any text that you submit to it. Whilst speed reading may not be ideal for technical subjects, when you need to simply get the bigger picture overview of something, it is ideal. The only problem when doing it from a book is that there's nothing forcing you to keep going at pace, and so you usually slow down to your normal reading speed. Spreeder flashes the words at you one at a time at a pace you decide. I started out at 300 words per minute (already faster than I normally read) and after about 5 minutes of using the tool, I was already up to 450! This will definitely get a lot more use from me in future!

In what has been a crazy two day marathon of bashing out in the region of a thousand lines of code, Jajah Dialer 0.5 is now ready for the prime-time. It's completely rewritten from the ground up, and its most notable new feature is full integration with the Mac OS X address book. Get it at http://www.gregsmithies.us/jajahdialer