That old symbol of East Germany The Trabant car returns albeit in an updated electric form. The Channel 4 reporter is temporarily either aghast or disbelieving of the quoted driving range per charge.
The BBC reports that businesses are increasingly selling on personal details in order to boost their sales figures.Credit card information through to even sexual orientation disclosures were sold on to other companies with 60% of the firms surveyed accepting they had suffered security breaches in respect to storage of personal data.In 90% of these cases the firms had not informed customers of any security lapse.
I suppose this is nothing new. Way back when I used to advertise in the Yellow Pages I was aware that they sold on my details on to other firms. I was often deluged with telephone cold calling a few months before the new directory came out and these companies already had the details of the new advert to hand.
A short time ago the DVLA was discovered to be selling on car driver’s personal details and only stopped this once publicity surrounding this became adverse.
For many our personal details are a commodity to be bought & sold on the open market.
As household budgets get squeezed and environmental concerns play a bigger part in our future purchases an increasing focus is being thrown on our daily carbon footprint and resource consumption.
Water is increasingly supplied via a water meter in the UK and so many are charged in direct relation to usage (In Australia water consumption is already rationed due to long drought periods).
Washing machines are another household item whose water usage has come increasingly under the spotlight and next year Britain will see the introduction of a washing machine that only needs around a cup of water to clean clothes.A project that came out of the University of Leeds intends to bring the near waterless washing machine to market. It uses plastic chips to clean the clothes and no drying will be required after the cleaning cycle.
Washing the Statistics
Washing machine usage in the UK has risen by 23% over the past 15 years. The average daily consumption of water used for clothes washing amounts to 21 litres, some 13% of the total average daily water consumption.
The typical washing machine uses 35 Kg of water for every kilogram of clothes washed and consumes electricity to heat the water and operate the cycle program.
Annually Britain buys around 2 million washing machines a year with market market value of around 1 billion pounds.
“”In the present credit crisis, traders may feel the noxious effects of chronic cortisol exposure, and end up in a psychological state known as ‘learned helplessness‘.”
The Level One VOI 7000 is an Internet voice over IP phone I purchased a short while ago to augment an existing Linksys ATA and help bridge a small number of sip telephone accounts and DID numbers that I use.
3 Accounts On One Phone
The main attraction of the phone is that it supports the use of 3 sip account registrations, only the the first of which is used for outgoing calls making it ideal for those who wish to assign additional incoming accounts. In my case I have an overseas DID number and an additional non geographic telephone number assigned to the phone as well as my main incoming and outgoing sip account.
The phone uses the open sip protocol (so it’s not a skype compatible which is its own proprietary island) and connects to the Internet via Ethernet. This model is for Internet use only and so is not equipped with an FXO port to bridge to a conventional phone line (which I don’t have and so didn’t need).
Web Interface Problems
Sip account and additional parameters can be changed via a web interface or directly on the phone via the keypad using the LCD display. I will say that I have found the availability of the web interface to be some what flaky in that it can seemingly become unavailable and recovered only by unplugging or rebooting the phone itself. Once set-up the parameters stay in place even if the phone is unplugged from the mains for periods at a time. Maybe any future firmware revisions will deal with the variable availability of the web interface.
The phone set itself features programmable memory allocations for phone numbers (click thumbnail for larger image), hands free speaker phone operation and in call volume adjustments. Registered caller ID’s are displayed on the green back lit LCD display which can be flipped up and positioned at various angles. Handset as well as internally programmed call transfer features are available.
LAN, WAN and NAT
The phone has LAN and WAN ports and can perform its own network address translation (NAT) if needs be or both ports can be configured to be transparent allowing NAT to take place at the router level.It’s relatively straightforward to change the pre programmed default IP address to bring it in line to your own network IP addresses or to let it accept an initial address from a DHCP service on your network (such as from your existing router).
Ring Tones
Incoming call ring tones can be one of four options, three of which are quite laid back musical tunes with the fourth being a standard US style continuous ring tone. Unlike many ATA’s there is no option to apply call plan strings or apply a standard UK style incoming call ring sound.
I’ve toggled through the four ring tone options here:
Call quality is good though maybe not quite as good as some ATA’s which provide more more detailed codec and associated settings but maybe that’s down to the supplied receiver.
For more detailed specs the data sheet PDF is available here.
Value For Money
I paid a little over £20 for the set new and am pleased with the feature set and reliability for the price I paid. If you’re looking for a voip phone solution for home office or personal use and need to accommodate more than one account or DID but don’t need to delve into the call transfer complexity of asterisk then I’m more than happy to recommend this voip solution from my own personal use experience.
“Depending on the nature of your response, Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!’s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal.”
Part of Microsoft’s letter to the Yahoo board of directors that reserves the right to pursue a likely hostile takeover attempt should they decline the current £22 billion on offer by Microsoft to merge the Yahoo brand and its technologies into Microsoft.
I’m listening to the radio and countless callers moaning about the current UK wide postal strike and am slightly amazed at how many businesses still rely on both payment by cheque and the sending of paper invoices the same way. I am surprised that so many companies do not bank and invoice electronically. Me, I’d set up bank transfers, on line payments and invoice via fax and email for the week but I guess I’m already used to that. People hate change.
Typically the public seems to have very little time for the postal workers plight (lots of talk akin to ‘life’s tough, get over it’) and sadly it would look like this strike action could all be part of a very drawn out suicide note (I tend to feel that there’s been a concerted effort to undermine the Royal Mail and gear up for semi privatisation over the past 10 years or more). It’s amazing how many people seem upset by the fact that postal workers are trying to assert their rights when the callers feel thy have no rights in their own working situations (whose fault is that?). I’m unsure if that’s a form of jealousy or yet again people feeling that postal workers somehow ‘have it easy’.
Britain has become a very strange place with societal bonds and empathy seemingly stretching only as far as our own immediate environment and situation.
The 
inherent in our proposal.”
that. People hate change.
Up the hill backwards 