Status-Q

Today I made my first call with Skype To Go. I've no idea how long this has been around, but I was impressed: I made a long call to the States from my mobile, and it was flawless, and free.

Here's how it works:

• You apply for a Skype To Go number in the location of your choice. Mine is in London.
• You call that number. It's a speed-dial on my phone, and I have more free minutes than I ever use, so it doesn't cost me anything.
• You are prompted for the number you want to dial. You can use the Skype website to set up some favourites which can be dialled in a couple of keypresses.
• The call is routed over the Skype network and charged to your Skype account. From the UK to the USA costs a penny a minute, which is 1% of what O2 would charge me for calling direct.
• The favourites you set up on the website can include Skype accounts - and calling them is free. Since my friend Hap was sitting at his computer, I used that option, and saved even the 1% I would have paid.

The call quality was very good and there was no noticeable latency. Now, since I have an iPhone, I could have used Skype directly on the phone. But that would have depended on a good data connection: much harder to find than a reliable voice channel. Recommended if you call abroad regularly.

Leo Laporte is the host of the TWIT.TV network. He's an excellent host and his range of podcasts on a variety of topics have been the background for most of my shaving for some time!

The nature of the group discussions on the shows mean, however, that you never get to hear Leo for more than a couple of minutes at a stretch, and he's a very smart guy with a lot of interesting experience. So it's great to be able to hear the whole talk he gave at the Online News Association conference.

I've loved this image since I first saw it some time ago, and have just managed to track down a copy. I don't know its... errm... origins, though. Does anyone else?

Found this in the past, somewhere out there on the net...

Look at the dot in the centre and move your head towards or away from the image - the surrounding circles seem to move.

Anyone know why? Could you use such effects to make advertisements, or road-safety signs, more noticeable?

Here's a fun page - enter your birthday and you can find out the number one hit on the day you were born. It gives the UK, US and Australian charts.

This could almost be a kind of astrology - what does it say about me that I was born to Sandie Shaw's Puppet on a string? Was I destined to seek out VC funding? (Actually, I was born in Kenya, rather a long way from any radio that would be playing the UK charts, but still...)

My brother became a doctor, no doubt inspired by Lily the Pink's 'medicinal compound', about which he might have heard much in his first few days.

I found this thanks to a tweet from Martin Weller and retweeted it. A couple of my more senior friends responded that the nearest they could get was Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock, because the charts didn't go back far enough. And I guess any kids born in the recent past won't know what the charts were...

If you don't get to see the sights of Europe during your lifetime, don't worry. If you're really good, people may take you on holiday after you're dead.

A casket containing part of the remains of St Therese of Lisieux is starting a month-long tour of Britain this week. Don't miss the show! Apparently, this ex-nun is something spectacular - and a mere tour of old Blighty will be as nothing to her. Bits of her have even been sent into orbit, and other bits were also taken to Iraq in hope of averting the war.

So it obviously works well, then.

For more exciting nun news, visit St Therese's web site.

Anyway, it reminds me of Blackadder:

Percy: Look: I have here a true relic. Edmund: What is it? Percy: A bone of the finger of our Lord. It cost me thirty-one pieces of silver. Edmund: Good Lord: is it real? Percy: It is, my lord. You stand amazed, Baldrick. Baldrick: I am. I thought they only came in boxes of ten. I could have let you have one for a couple of groats. Fingers are very big at the moment.

Bill Thompson thinks Google should be allowed to digitise the world's books. And he also thinks the proposed deal allowing them to do so should be rejected.

Here's why.

Here's another unit you'll want to get used to over the next few years: the lumen. If you're not familiar with it, it's (roughly) a measure of brightness. A traditional pearl 60W bulb gives out about 700 lumens.

And this is important, because you're not going to be able to buy a traditional pearl 60W bulb in Europe for much longer - that's the theory anyway, though a loophole may help out - and it turns out that manufacturers of low-energy replacements have been misleading us somewhat as to how bright they are, claiming that bulbs are '60W equivalent', for example, when in fact they're quite a bit dimmer.

So, look at the lumens, not the watts, because the watts, they are a-changin'.

And I'd better start stockpiling incandescent bulbs until someone produces a low-energy one that works with the dimmer switches that are throughout my house. Thankfully, they're not far away...

Well, I'm only about 9 years behind the times, but that's because of my classical education.

As any well-educated computer scientist will tell you, most things in computing are measured in powers of two; a natural result of the fact that all of today's computers are binary-based. And thus it is that a kilobyte is not 1000 bytes but 1024 bytes, because 1024 is 2 to the power 10. A megabyte is 1024 kilobytes and a gigabyte is 1024 of those.

That, at least, is how most of us were brought up, but there was always a certain degree of confusion caused by the fact that marketing types wanted to use 1000 where computer scientists used 1024, because it made their hard drives, flash drives etc look bigger. This is why, when you were sold a 100GB hard drive, and you took it home and plugged it in, it would look rather smaller; computers would report the size using a gigabyte that was about 7% bigger than the marketers', so they would tell you that you had fewer of them.

Now, in 2000, the IEC established a new set of prefixes which are unambiguous, and have names which sound funny to those of us who have got used to thinking that 'gigabyte' is a normal sort of word. They are kibi, mebi, gibi etc - the 'bi' indicating 'binary'. So a gibibyte (GiB) is 2^30 bytes, while a gigabyte (GB) is officially 10^9 bytes (a billion bytes), which is somewhat smaller.

Most of us have just ignored this change, but some systems now - like Apple's 'Snow Leopard' operating system - apparently reports sizes in 'official' GB, so your 500GB hard disk will actually look like 500GB when it's plugged in.

It isn't really any bigger though. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...

Traditional hospital gowns are being phased out in NHS wards across Britain after patients complained that the garments left their bottoms exposed, says this article.

A pleased patient is quoted as saying:

I for one will be glad to see the back of them.

Note, though, that this is another (like this) somewhat over-enthusiastic Telegraph headline: it says the gowns are being 'axed' and 'phased out in wards across Britain'. Well, yes, Southampton is getting rid of them, and the manufacturer of the alternative gowns says that another couple of hospitals have bought some as well. I'm not sure that this really represents a dramatic trend sweeping across the nation...