January 2005, Week 4 -- The New Wave

   "Call Wave" www.callwave.com has a new service that lets you screen incoming cell phone calls. The fee is $4 a month.

   It's designed primarily for people taking cell phone calls at home or the office. You can hear the speaker but they can't hear you. If you want to take the call, press "1" on the cell phone. If you press "2," the call can be transferred to a land line at your home or office number, or recorded.

   If your cell phone is off but you are near one of your PCs, the software will detect the incoming call and put on your computer's speakers. You can click on a button to transfer the call to a regular land line.

   All this requires some inconvenience. In order to have the call screening you have to get a "Call Wave" number. Only calls coming in on that number can be screened or transferred to land lines. That means giving that number to friends, family, business contacts, etc., so you can screen or transfer their calls.

  Call Wave sells a similar service that lets you see calls coming in on a regular phone line while working on your computer. As with the cell phone screening, you can listen to the incoming call on the computer's speakers before deciding whether or not to take it. The cost for this service is also $4 a month.

   If your computer is on a broadband connection (cable or DSL), this essentially creates a second phone line since the computer will still be active while you take the call or decide to ignore it. There's a 30 day free trial for either of these services. More info at their web site: www.callwave.com.

Home movies, and everything else, on call

   "Streamload" www.streamload.com is a service that lets you send, receive and store megaloads of data, including streaming videos.

   For $10 a month you get 10 gigabytes of online storage and the software for sending and receiving high quality video in real time. That's a little more than two standard DVDs. You can email videos as easily as you email photos. Of course once you're going digital you can do the same with music or any other file. Share your photos as thumbnails, and the recipient can print any picture at home.

   Prices go up along with the size of the storage, till you reach 720 gigabytes for $400 a month. Actually you can go up to 50,000 gigabytes, often written as 50 terrabytes, at a price that can be negotiated. That's is probably enough storage and file transfer to handle everything Congress or any other government has ever done.

The numbers report

   From Lycos http://fifty.lycos.com we get the top search engine requests for 2004. Five of the top ten were searches for news and pictures about women. Janet Jackson and Paris Hilton were one, two; Britney Spears was fourth; Pamela Andersen was eighth; and Michelle Vieth was ninth. Rounding out the rest: Clay Aiken, third; Nick Berg, fifth, KaZaA sixth, tatoos seventh and poker tenth. President George W. Bush was 81st on the list, just after "prom hair styles" and slightly ahead of "golf clubs;" Fox News was last among the top 100 searches.

   Meanwhile, to the surprise of absolutely no one, the top search for consumer items at Yahoo.com was for digital cameras.

Internuts

-- www.epa.gov/waterscience/fishadvice/advice.html A long web address that finally ends up giving you information about dangerous mercury levels in specific kinds of fish and seafood. Go easy on the swordfish. But you knew that, right?
-- www.epa.gov/airnow  Shows a map of the U.S. with a depiction of what's going on weatherwise each day. It shows where there's unhealthy air for that day, including particle and ozone pollution.
-- www.worldcommunitygrid.org  An organization that's trying to create a giant public computer grid. They ask that you donate time on your computer when it's normally idle. One project involves searching all the possible shapes a protein can be folded into. They don't ask for your identity when you sign up.

Books

   "The PC Magazine Guide to Digital Photography," by Daniel and Sally Grotta; $25 from Willey Press www.wiley.com.

   PC Magazine does a ton of coverage on digital cameras and from that sea of verbiage they have culled some interesting tricks. While almost any effects can be done with editing software, quite a lot can be done with the camera itself. Among the most interesting: shooting in infrared instead of visible light, which can give beautiful, other-worldly effects. While digital camera manufacturers usually try to get rid of this effect, quite a few still have it if you know how to kick it in.

That's Entertainment

   "Oddworld, Stranger's Wrath," from Electronic Arts, $50, for Xbox only right now.

   This is one of the most famous computer games of the last several years. It is a very odd world indeed and many of the characters are well known to fans of the game. "Stranger" is a bounty hunter taking down Oddworld outlaws for fun and profit. The disk contains an hour of animated Oddworld movies.

   "CSI: Miami," from the French software house UbiSoft, $50 for the PC. Copies the popular television show, using the same cast. You can examine the clues along with the team and try to solve any of several crimes.

Copyright 2005, Universal Press Syndicate