Trevin Chow: tools

Callwave continues to impress

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 01:32:30 GMT

My love affair with Callwave hasn’t stopped. This free service continues to impress me.

Not only do I love their SMS voicemail notification feature, but I just installed their Vista Sidebar gadget which is completely and utterly sweet and makes the normally painful tasks of listening to voicemail so easy.

After you install the CallWave Sidebar gadget, it shows up in your sidebar uninstrusively with the # of missed calls in the lower left corner:

...

read full story of "Callwave continues to impress"»

Voicemail mini-revolution

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 02:13:54 GMT

I’m bombarded with information all the time. It comes from email to blogs, and news headlines to stock tickers.

All this information fits neatly into my life and I use tools to help me triage it effectively. My work email gets pushed to my smartphone through Cingular where I can process it in between meetings, or even while I’m standing in line at the grocery store. I use Yahoo webmail for my personal mail so I’m able to access it from any machine, including pocketIE on my smartphone.

With blogs, I use the excellent Google Reader to aggregate all the blogs I follow through RSS. I can flag things for later review and even publicly share specific blog posts through their cool “share” feature.

The exception to all of this is voicemail. Voicemail has such an arcane method for accessing it. I have to press and hold “1″ on my cell phone, and listen to all the prompts including the timestamp of the message. I then chose to save or delete the message using the numeric keypad. I’m a big fan of SMS, but there are lots of people in my life that will never send me an SMS message (hi mom!). Generally, I think voicemail is a pain in the butt because:

Not easy to access
Inefficient when you do access it
No way to easily share
...

read full story of "Voicemail mini-revolution"»

Instant calculations with InstaCalc

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 10:25:21 GMT

Do yourself a favor and check out InstaCalc. It’s a very clever idea on the age old calculator. Not only does it do computations on the fly, but the page loads freaking fast and you can share your calculations with others. It even support charting, like bar and pie charts. Best part is that it supports variables, making ‘complex’ calculations easy to follow.

For example, check out the
...

read full story of "Instant calculations with InstaCalc"»