Matt Junk's Blog

Google Voice is a service that allows you to have a single number that calls multiple phone numbers at the same time.  In addition, it provides voicemail with voice to text functionality.  This allows your voicemails to sent in text in the form of SMS.  This is very handy for a quick review of you're missed messages.  Like any voice message recognizition it isn't always prefect, but it is pretty good.

Now for some pros and cons.

First the pros. Google Voice is free of charge for US telephone numbers.  In addition, you can have Google call you and connect you to any long distance US telephone number to avoid long distance charges. In addition, the international calling is cheap.

Now for the cons.  If you want to change your number, Google charges you $10 per number change.  It is a one time rate.  Another big disadvantage is the phone numbers at this time are US only. So it doesn't work well for International users.  Another problem is it is invite only.

Overall, it is a great service and a lot of the best features are totally free.  I think it is great and I recommend anyone tries it if they can.  That is my review of Google Voice.  Please feel free to leave comments if you want.

Also, feel free to leave me a voicemail using the button below using Google Voice below:

- Matt

Below is a video that shows off the new Project Natal for the XBox 360.  This new technology will allow you to use your full body to control a game.  The release date is unknown at this time.  This gaming technology is similar to the Wii without the need for a physical controller.  In addition, there is also voice recognition. I would love to give it a try and I look forward to seeing this technology in action.  Anyways, enjoy the video and let me know if you have any comments or questions.

If you go to a lot of department or electronic stores you can spend up to $45 or more for a HDMI cable to hook up your audio video equipment.  Recently, someone from digg broke a story with a cheap HDMI cable that is $3.19 shipped. To order one go to this link to order one.  Considering that the signal that goes through HDMI is digital it is all or nothing.  So as long as the cable works it works perfectly.  Be careful when you buy a new TV at a big box store and get pushed into buying expensive cables at a monster price.

Anyways, as always shop around and as usual look online (you'll probably get a better deal).  Feel free to leave comments or questions.

The World Community Grid is a distributed project to help humanity.  Unlike a lot of other distributed projects it has multiple projects.  Below is a list of the current active projects:

1. Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy - The purpose of this project is to help study protein interactions and hopefully lead to a cure for muscular dystrophy.  According to the World Community Grid website there are over 200 types of muscular dystrophy and currently no cure.

2. Influenza Antiviral Drug Search - The purpose of this project is to find new drugs that can treat the flu.  In particular, this project will help find drugs that can treat drug resistant strains of the flu.  This research will take time, but they hope will help with future seasonal flu outbreaks, epidemics and even pandemics.

3. Help Fight Childhood Cancer - This project's purpose is to find a way to block three proteins associated with neuroblastoma.  Neuroblastoma is the most common type of solid tumors in children.  What I think gives this project such great hope is that they have all ready identified the proteins that need to be blocked.  They just need to find a way to block them.

4. The Clean Energy Project - This project is one of the more unique distribution projects I have seen.  The purpose of this project is to determine new chemical formulas that can be used to produce the next generation of solar panels that are made from organic materials.  It will calculate what are the best compounds for producing inexpensive solar panels and those that have the best electrical properties.

5. Nutritious Rice for the World - This project's goal is to find the best way to breed varieties of rice to find the ones that have the best yield and disease resistance, and provide nutrients. The hopes of this project is to help end world hunger.

6. Help Conquer Cancer - This project's purpose is to help improve the results of protein X-ray crystallography, which are used to study cancer.  This will help with the understanding of cancer initiation, progression and treatment.  Hopefully, this project will help lead to a cure for cancer.

7. Discovering Dengue Drugs - This project will help find drugs for the treatment of dengue, hepatitis C, West Nile, and Yellow fever viruses.  At this moment in time there is no drug to treat these diseases.  Hopefully, through the help of this project we can find treatment and perhaps a cure.

8. Human Proteome Folding - Phase 2 - This project will help find proteins which can be provided to people who lack them for the treatment of diseases.  Some types of proteins that have all ready been developed include insulin and human growth hormone.  This project will continue the work of the first phase and hopes to have higher resolution.

9. FightAIDS@Home - The purpose of this project is to help find drugs that can be used to treat the HIV. The goal of of this project is to hopefully cure HIV and AIDS.

As you can see there are a lot of different causes that the World Community Grid can help with. For information on my current progress helping the project, please look at the right hand column. If your interested in helping with this project, please go to http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave a message on my comment section.

The Internet Archive is an online library that has a web archive, video, books, audio, software, and educational materials.  The Internet Archive can be found at http://www.archive.org  The Internet Archive has petabytes of information (1 Petabyte = 1024 Terabytes)  Below is 10 interesting things to be found on the Internet Archive.

1. The Live Music Archive is an archive of full concerts for thousands of bands.  These bands are for non-commercial use and only contains trade-friendly artists.  To be honest, there are not a lot of bands that I have heard of, but some of the more common ones I have ran across include 311, Blues Traveler, and John Mayer. The artist they do have include great music in lossy and lossless formats.

2. The Wayback Machine is an archive of a large portion of the Internet.  For example, it allows you to see what Google looked like back in 1998 or Yahoo in 2001.  It is generally pretty slow and doesn't have every site (of course), but it is a great tool for historical purposes.  It is also great if you find a broken link on the web.

3. Video Game Speed Runs are complete playthroughs of classic video games as fast as possible.  Some of my favorites are the original Super Mario Brothers or Sonic the Hedgehog.  This video files are huge (some of them are bigger than a Gigabyte).  Most of the files can be downloaded or viewed in a web browser.  These speed runs are a great way to past time.

4. Text Archive allows you to read entire books that are in the public domain or other free license.  A neat feature of this archive is that you can actually look at a full scan of the actual book not just the text like Project Gutenberg.  One of my favorite set of books is the Popular Science Monthly (now known as just Popular Science).  They have almost the first 92 issues.

5. Old Time Radio includes old time radio programs such as Gunsmoke, Dragnet, Winston Churchill speeches, and more.  These works are great for entertainment and historical purposes.

6. Classic TV includes great shows like Beverly Hillbillies, Dragnet, and the Lucy Show.  They are full length shows that have fallen into the public domain and are available for download and are DRM free.  Most of these are also viewable in the web browser.

7. The educational section on Internet Archive allows people to watch classes online from great colleges such as MIT in subjects such as mathematics, computer programming, and physics.  Watching these shows, of course, don't give you any college credit or anything but are great for educational purposes.

8. September 11 Television Archive is one of the most unique things on the Internet Archive.  It allows you to view news from September 11th - September 13th, 2001 from ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN, FOX and NBC.  This is so important for historical purposes and will be so important for future generations.

9. Film Chest Vintage Cartoons allows you to view classic cartoons such as Popeye, Bugs Bunny, and Superman.  These are full animations and enjoy to watch. These are the same cartoons you find on $1 DVDs at Walmart.

10. Computer Chronicles is an almost complete archive of the weekly TV show.  The show aired from 1983 to 2002.  This show allows you to take a look at computer technology over that time period and is fun to watch for computer history purposes.

As you can see the Internet Archive has a lot to offer.  These are just a few examples.  If you have any thoughts or ideas, please leave me a comment.