Paradoxium.com

I found this excellent article explaining how cellphones work.

http://db.tidbits.com/article/9796

One very interesting thing that popped up is why sometimes you’ll get a VoiceMail notification even when the phone didn’t ring (and also why texting will work when you can’t call).  Basically, text and notifications are sent on a dedicated channel, so even when the regular voice channels are all busy, you can still text and receive notifications.

Early on when they invented GSM, someone decided it would be useful to dedicate a small part of this signaling to sending messages to your phone. They added a feature to send 160-character messages over the signaling channel. The initial idea was to use it to alert you to new voicemail messages, but then someone thought it might be nice to also send some short text messages, and thus the Short Messaging Service (SMS) was born.

That’s why you sometimes get voice mail notifications without hearing your phone ring. If the local voice channels are all filled, the call can’t get through and callers are forced to leave a message, but since the notification uses that signaling channel, it still reaches you right away. A nice side benefit is that SMS messages will often go through even when regular calls won’t. When I’m wearing my part-time hat as a disaster worker, I often find myself using SMS when I can’t make regular calls. If you are at that big concert, game, or Steve Jobs keynote you might try SMS instead of battling your neighbors for scarce voice channels.

I’m sure everyone’s seen in the news (if you go online at all) that The Mozilla Foundation has released their 3rd version of Firefox.  It’s good.  Is it much better then the previous version?  I’m not sure..everyone says yes, but I haven’t really felt the significant speed improvement that everyone’s talking about.

I do like it though, part of me thinks they made it look to Vista-ish..but oh well. It does look more polished.

But what I wanted to bring up, is the reason to use firefox.  I won’t talk about how it’smore secure, doesn’t use ActiveX (the cause of many headaches), but the addons that you can install.

My top 4 addons that I always install on a fresh installation of Firefox are:

• Adblock Plus
• FireFTP
• WebDeveloper
• IEview

Adblock Plus is an awesome extension for Firefox that blocks any and all advertising on websites.  It uses databases of known advertising sites, and blocks them from being loaded, no matter what page you are on.  While browsing well-built websites that don’t bombard you with annoying ads, this isn’t a big deal, but I think the straw(s) that broke a lot of backs were the ones that autoplay loud obnoxious sounds.  Let me tell you, when it’s 2am in the morning, the house is quiet the worst thing is to instantly be hit with some blaring music. Other eye-gougers were the ones that instantly take over the screen and start playing some stupid looping video.

Many website developers liken the blocking of ads to stealing content, but as many point out: Nobody cared about ads until they became so annoying.  Nobody cares about google’s text-based ads.  It’s the audio-visual ads on the “other” sites that look like a 6 year old designed them that we care about.  For years these advertisements were forcefed upon us, and the web has revolted.  No more.

Fireftp is a cool extension, because it inserts a nice FTP client into the browser.  It doesn’t really sound as nifty as it is if you don’t care about FTP, but it’s handy to have if you do.

IEview is another cool extension, because for those 2% of websites that aren’t built-to-standards, you can open them up in Internet Explorer, inside a tab in Firefox.  I don’t like to have a lot of program windows open (maybe 6-7 max), so this allows me to keep the web inside firefox.

Webdeveloper..I believe this was the FIRST extension for firefox that anyone said “this is a must have.”  This extension dates back to the beta days, and anyone who was anyone had this installed. (well, anyone who created web pages).  So, for anyone building websites:  This is a must have.

There are a ton of other addons, that many people have deemed worthy, but for me, these 4 always make it on all my installs…ok maybe not IEview, as that’s windows only and Linux and Mac don’t have IE (at least not my Linux or Mac installs).

Go forth and download: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

I wanted to be sure that people know about Microsoft’s free anti-spyware/malware application.

I was helping 2 people clean up their virus/spyware laden computers, and after running a collection of software that I have (industry antivirus programs) I thought about giving up.  As a last resort I tried using Windows Defender.

You know what happened?  Of course you do, or I wouldn’t be talking about it:  It worked!  It completely cleaned the system of the malware.  I was in shock..and awe.

So for all you Windows users out there, go to microsoft.com and download windows defender.  It’s one of the few programs that Microsoft makes that is worth the cost (free).

Now, don’t expect it to always work.  But so far in my experience, a few computer besides those first 2, it works as well or better then other stuff out there, and that other stuff costs good money.