Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Tom Evslin has this interesting observation about the quality of voice in the traditional phone:

The bandwidth of the telephone connection between our homes and the telephone network hasn’t changed in my long lifetime. Although some noise has been eliminated in long distance calls (sometime and if we’re not on a cellphone), voices on the phone still sound like they did sixty-five years ago. We’ve trained ourselves to accept the clipped quality of a telephone voice with its lack of emotional overtones.
You wouldn’t dream of listening to music over the phone. You expect and get much better sound quality from almost any radio and on TV. Movies have Dolby sound. But the telephone is still the telephone.

He suggests that VoIP (think: Skype) is changing that.

While trying to investigate a bit into the rumor of Google buying Skype, I ran across this rather lengthy post. In there, I stumbled upon a thought which is simple and rather obvious, but which I haven’t had yet:

Google isn’t a search engine company; it brokers connections between people and corporations for profit.[...] Search is just one, albeit dominant.

Continuing my Skype saga…

I’ve finally fixed the headset at the office. Again, it turned out I had two sound cards - it’s just one of them was disabled completely. Instead of trying to please the SoundBlaster Live! I turned that other one on, and it worked like a charm. Damn Creative. Every time I try to use - I have a problem.

So, anyway, with all the headphones and microphones working, I decided to go further along and buy some SkypeOut minutes. SkypeOut minutes allow one to call from Skype (read: computer) to any regular or mobile phone. Anywhere. Dirt cheap.

I used my PayPal account to buy a 10.00 EUR credit. It worked like a charm. I made a couple of test calls around. The quality is OK. The additional benefit is the anonimity. The calls are not signed with any number, so if you want to call anyone anonymously - here is your option.

That’s it for now. Soon, I’ll tell you about things that I think suck in Skype.

This is yet another post that mentions Skype. As you probably know by now after reading this and that posts, I am really enjoying Skype.

In order to expand the joy, I decided to follow my brother, and buy headphones with microphone to use voice features of this application.

You might think that I am one of those “whatever my brother gets, I’ll get two” types, but I am not. I really have two very separate computers - my home workstation and my office workstation - that I need to equip with whatever software and hardware I use. So, I bought two headsets. Those are A4Tech HS-7 if you are interested.

8 CYP a piece. Fit my head nicely. Micrphone is attached via a wire that you can bend any way you like. There is also volume control and microphone on/off switch right on the wire. Comfy.

I haven’t tested the sound yet.

Let me do a little side note, before I start - Mom, you should really read this post!

Now, just a couple of days ago I wrote that I decided to try Skype. I downloaded it and installed on my computer. There were few nice things about it that I noticed immediately, but there are so many more that need a second look!

Here we go…

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