Google

I recently went down the rabbit hole of figuring out if I am using the right solution for offsite storage of my photo library. I've been using iCloud Photos for over a year and am not totally happy with the solution. I decided to try out both Amazon Prime Photos and Google Photos. My home Internet connection has a 5Mb/s upload speed which feels pathetically slow. I wanted to test each solution with a good chunk of my photo library uploaded which made this a time-consuming experience. Here's what I came up with after about two weeks of futzing. ...

Google just announced today (or yesterday?) that you can now have Google Voice's voicemail replace your cell phone's voicemail. http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/google-voice-with-your-existing-number.html What this means is you can now have all of your voicemails handled by one service provider. This feature only works with cell phones (most US carriers supported) but not landlines, VoIP or SIP phones yet. I switched my iPhone voicemail over to Google Voice today for a trial period. I'll see if I like it and report back. My first attempt wasn't perfect - it took nearly four additional rings after I ignored a test call for Google Voice to pick up. A total of eight rings is way too much for most callers to wait to leave a message. ...

So I've spent a few days going over Google App Engine for Java. So far, I have to say, I'm impressed. Google has created a really cool service that lets anyone write a Java web application and host it on their multitude of servers. This is all for free, I might add. You have to be aware of a number of limitations including no threading and you're limited to their data store for persistence. Once you get over that, you'll see the advantage of it: ...