I’m quite notorious for passing on new technology stuff to my friend, Liz, but today, she returned the favor and sent me a link to slydial.  Have you ever wanted to leave someone a voicemail but it’s late at night and you are afraid of waking them up or you just don’t want to avoid an awkward conversation?  Well, here’s your answer!  Basically you call this number 267-SLYDIAL, and then at the prompt, enter the person’s phone number and it takes you directly to their voicemail.  It might be a bit tricky for some people whose phones aren’t sophisticated to allow you to search your contacts while you are on a call, but other than that, it’s fairly straightforward.  So… the next time you find yourself getting a voicemail but are wondering why your phone didn’t ring, don’t be surprised.

Update: Allison and I did some testing yesterday and we discovered that this did work, although we’ve had some reports it did ring once on some phones.  You can call from any phone (landline or mobile) but this only works calling TO mobile phones.

Considering I use multiple IM clients for personal and work purposes, I was looking into an app that would allow me to combine them into one rather than having at least 4 separate ones taking up my screen. At first I used Trillian (because it was the only one available a few years ago) which did work well. It allowed me to combine my AIM, Yahoo, and MSN accounts. But now with Facebook and MySpace having their own chat services, I needed something new to integrate those (since Trillian Astra is still not available to everyone). I tried Pidgin and it was alright. Some basic features had to be installed as plugins (which wasn’t as simple as I would have hoped). So then I tried Digsby and I thought it was great. No more do I have to try to chat with my friends on Facebook in that small tiny window only when I am actually looking at the website. The client allows you to see also which friends are from what service by putting a little icon for facebook, AIM, etc . overlapping their profile icon. Also, you just have to mouseover the person’s name to see additional profile info rather than having to right clickand choose a separate option. I have yet to try adding plugins so I will have to do an update later on that.

But for now, I recommend downloading Digsby and see for yourself all of its benefits:

http://www.digsby.com/

I think it’s pretty common that most people think if they want to learn a new language they either have to sign up for classes or purchase a copy of Rosetta Stone.  Both of those options could be rather expensive.  Well, there’s an alternative that I think is much more convenient and best of all, free.  If you have iTunes, you can actually download a variety of languages in the form of podcasts from your traditional Spanish, French, and German to others such as Swedish, Dutch, and Tagalog (Filipino).  Depending on the source, the lessons might be broken down by just common phrases you might need for an upcoming trip or more like a traditional class setting.  One cool thing too is that you can load these podcasts into your ipod to take with you and listen to in the car or on the train/bus on the way to work or while at work.  (Although, some people may find it wierd when you try to pronounce certain things in different languages and have no idea why you are.)  While yes, since they are only audio based, you miss out on learning how to read and write the different languages, I think this a step in the right direction.

If you have Firefox 3 or IE7, you can apparently replace in the address bar the url with one line of javascript to make the current webpage you are viewing editable!  Crazy, I know, but it works!  You can highlight, delete, type new text, etc.  This might become a very handy tool, especially for some of my co-workers who are not as tech savvy at editing mockups or correctly communicating their wanted revisions to currently live pages.

Try it for yourself:

javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0

Unfortunately, you can’t save the changes (unless you screenshot it) but it’s cool and scary nevertheless.

This is the original blog post from where this information came from:

http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/cut-and-paste-one-line-of-code-to-make-any-website-editable/