Goosync syncs your cellphone with Google Calendar

Goosync has made me the happiest man in the world today. The happiest! Really! How happy am I? Well, for the first time in my life, I've put an image at the centre of my blogpost! That's how happy I am.

The DREAM of synchronizing my cellphone with Google Calendar has almost been forgotten until today. I tried various ways of doing it, using the iCal specification, using various MAPI hacks with Outlook, sharing here and sharing there, and all of these either don't work or work with so much resource overhead, or have serious deficiencies.

FORGET ALL THAT NOW!

GOOSYNC ENABLES YOU TO SYNC YOUR CELLPHONE OVER THE AIR WITH GOOGLE CALENDAR!

Here's how it does it.

1. Register at Goosync.
2. Enter the normal crap, and then, they will want your google password. If you're afraid, do this.... make another google account (new google account), just for this, empty of everything, and share this new google account calendar with your normal google account or google hosted account. Then share your google hosted or normal google account with this new google account's calendar. So now it reads and writes both ways. This way, you'll protect your normal google account and any hacker who gets the new google account password is only limited to seeing your calendar, so that limits the damage. [Edit: Shared events don't seem to update anymore. Also, you can use your google hosted account by entering myname@domain.com at the username under Google Credentials.]
   
3. Goosync will send you a SMS message with autoconfiguration code. Enter the password Goosync gives you and Accept the changes it contains.
4. Then go to your cellphone's remote sync function, and run the goosync code, and you're synched both ways via GPRS, 3G GPRS or any damn internet connection your phone has.
   

Now this fulfils my dream in more ways than I anticipated. Now I can sync without my computer. I don't need the cable and all the problems which come with USB synchronization.

Now, Google, please go buy Goosync. They've earned it. Just 5 million bucks. They've made me happier than you have. Goosync, I love you. I love you. I love you.

TVUplayer - Peer to peer streaming playback

Imagine a video player, with the capability to suck streaming video from your peers, connected to all the broadcasters of the world. Broadcasters will not need to have huge fat connections as feeds will, after the initial seed is planted in a peer, be fed peer to peer without needing any more service from the broadcaster itself. Stuff of nerd utopia?

Well, this is now reality. TVUnetworks is offering such a player, in beta, for free. How he handles the legality, I don't know. It seems to be legal. He is open to the world, even his address is available. The World Cup was rebroadcasted to tens of thousands using this technology.

What does this mean? The quality is excellent, with a 100kB/s total feed from 15 peers, we have better than Starhub SD quality. Do cable operators have to move up to HD totally just to escape TVUnetworks and its brethen? Even then, there is no theoretical limit to the delivery capability of peer-to-peer streaming. Even 6Mbit/s HD can be delivered now if the upstream datarate in a region is good. With Docsis 3 bonding, wow, we'll have even less limits.

What is sure, is that Slingbox is dead. TVUplayer does not need any configuration, any hardware, etc. Any broadcaster wanting to go it alone, like Mediacorp's Mobtv.sg better review their business plan, perhaps to work with TUVnetworks, solving all their bandwidth issues.

Incredible stuff. I'll keep you guys posted. Now for HBO on TVUplayer.

Time has come for Phones to kick Point and Shoot butt

I always chose phones based on functionality, and my present phone is a Nokia Communicator 9500.

It's the last of the line though. My new phones will be based on megapixel count. The time has come that a good 3.2 megapixel autofocus handphone with a Xenon flash will kick Point and Shoot butt - the Sony Ericsoon K800i - which even comes with an image stabilizer (whether it's digital or optical remains to be seen, but .... ain't that important to me).