Paul Hinks' Blog

Many years ago I worked for a company called GrandCentral, which was the most dysfunctional organization I have ever encountered, and believe me that’s a pretty tough list to top. Anyhow, through a series of transformations, that company is now a part of Google and its services are called Google Voice. It’s currently in beta, and you have to apply for an account, kind of like you did for gmail in the early days. I recently got myself an account and I’ve been playing with it to see what it offers.
Which is actually quite a lot. You get a (free) telephone number of your choosing, in one of several area codes (I got a 415 number with no problem). Calls to that number can be forwarded to various other numbers of your choosing, and different callers can be forwarded to different phones or sent straight to voice mail. When you get a voice mail, you get an email notifying you of the fact along with a transcript of the message. I tested leaving myself a message and the transcription seems to work pretty well – when it did mess up it was obvious enough what the meaning was that it wasn’t a problem. Overall I’m very impressed. I’m wondering what it will be like when anybody can sign up – there can’t be an unlimited supply of phone numbers, and what’s to stop people signing up for multiple accounts with different phone numbers (in different areas, for example, to maintain a virtual presence in different area codes). It would presumably be simple to prevent people chaining GC accounts (redirecting calls from one account to another) but with an intermediary voip provider those restrictions would be simple to circumvent. I’m also wondering about phone number portability – say I want to move my phone number onto GV, or off of it when it’s become my established contact number. Lots of questions, but overall it’s a good service and I predict another success for google.

I just had to do this, and it’s a little tricker than I thought it would be. It is certainly possible, though, and the results were very good.
Firstly, the tape deck. You want to get as good a one as possible. I tried first with an old walkman type thing we had lying around and it was a mess. I managed to borrow a Tascam 122 which is professional quality deck and the difference was incredible. The good news is that the retail price of such a desk is about $250, presumably because tapes are disappearing faster than campaign pledges. If I have to do this again I’m going to buy one.
Connect the line out from the deck into the line in on your mac. You will then need to go to the sound tab in system preferences and select Line In as the default input device. Don’t close this window, you’re going to need to adjust the input volume from it.
In garage band, create a new song with a bpm of 40 – this gives you the longest import time. Delete the default track it creates for you and create a new track of type “Real Instrument”. This should default to input source built-in. Set monitor to on so you can hear the tape as it plays. At this point you will see three volume controls in GarageBand – one on the track mixer, a master one and a recording level control. Set the mixer and master controls to 0 db. If you tab to bring the system preferences box over GarageBand you will notice that changing the input level of the line in device also moves the recording level slider in GarageBand. Since the preferences tab is easier to use we’re going to use that to set the input volume.
On the tape deck, set output volume to somewhere around 30% and start playing the tape. Adjust the input volume so that the level maxes out at around 80%. I found it much easier to use headphones when adjusting the levels. Then rewind and cue the tape, and press record in GarageBand to start importing the tape. When the tape is finished you have several options as far as creating an MP3. You can import an entire tape into one song, and export each track by using the cycle region control to mark the individual tracks, or you can import each song individually. I was quite happy to treat the entire tape as a gapless album, so I kept it as a single MP3 file. I’m very pleased with he results.
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I’ve said before that I’m not really a fan of Google, but it seems to me that a lot of the reaction to their Chrome OS announcement has been overly negative. Much of it centres on the supposed limitations of the OS, especially with regard to running large complex apps. I think this is missing the point. The OS seems to be aimed at the netbook segment of the market – hardly the first choice to run large complex apps anyway. Netbook users want a quick way to access data stored on other machines, across the internet, and dare I use such a cliched term, in the cloud. It seems that the day of the Network Computer (which I was involved in over a decade ago) may yet be dawning. Back then the idea of remote data and applications was a little too revolutionary but now people are used to it. And anyhow – assuming Google base Chrome OS on linux and give it a good UI (the missing piece in all Linux distros to date – cf with what Apple did to BSD with OSX) then that alone may garner it sufficient support in the technical community to make it a success. And with that kind of basis, and a decent effort at a Windows emulator like Wine, it could be at least the start of a credible alternative to the Redmond offering. I’m not denying it’s a tough market to try and break into, but I really wouldn’t write Google’s efforts off at this early stage. The world is changing and Google are as likely as anyone to find a way to take advantage of those changes.
Here’s a prediction – the last remains of Microsoft will be the Exchange server. When their OS monopoly is a dim memory and their applications are treated a legacy apps, the Exchange server will still be serving corporate mail and calendars across the world. I’d say that the clients displaying said mail and calenders will be predominantly non-MS, but the server will still be there.