My DigitalZone

As I wrote in this post, I signed up for Skype’s monthly subscription service last spring. At first, I was just curious about it and didn’t expect much. Now I can say Skype is really valuable for anyone who often calls internationally.

Skype to Go Number
I found Skype to Go Number especially useful. “Skype to Go Number” comes with monthly subscription. What you get is a local number you can call from your cell phone or any other landlines. The following shows how you can set it up once you signed up for monthly subscription.

• From your computer’s Skype program, choose “Skype” then “Account.”
• Click on “Skype to Go Number.”
• If I remember correctly, then you’ll see a list of available numbers. You pick the area code and the number you want. I picked the number with the same area code as my cell phone’s.
• Then, you need to register/save the phone numbers you want to use to call Skype to Go number. I have 2 phone numbers registered: one is my cell and the other is my office phone.
• If you have international phone numbers you call often, you can register them as speed dial contacts from within the Skype software. (You don’t have to have speed dial contacts but you know it’s not fun to dial 16 numbers every time you want to make a call.)
• With Skype to Go Number and the saved speed dial contacts, the rest is very very easy.

You call your own Skype to Go Number from your registered phone and follow the direction. Basically, it’s pressing 1 for calling one of the speed dial number or 2 for calling any other international number. You don’t need to remember each of the speed dial number, it will be read out to you…. “Press 1 if you want to call Jane….”, etc. This is what I call a no hassle international call. I can use my cell phone or office phone to make a call, not from my home PC where I installed Skype software.

My LG enV3, which I got about 2 months ago, has a problem saving pictures. After I take a picture, I can save it on the phone only for a little while. The picture I saved shows up in “My Pictures” right after I took it. If I check it, say after 5 min., the pic won’t show most of the time, with a red question mark placed over some logo.

So, basically I couldn’t save any pics, or that’s what I thought. I deleted pics I’d taken. Then, I realized that photos show up in My Pictures sometimes…..

Browsing the photos seems to cause some problems also. The phone freezes from time to time when I browse pictures.

I’ve found out that these are common problems with enV3 that Verizon has a fix. So, I need to bring my phone to the Verizon store to get it fixed. (I think they’ll do a firmware upgrade.)

Related Post
LG enV3 Music Syncing Problem

My computer mouse, which is actually a trackball, got damaged with a electrostatic discharge. I knew I was carrying static because I felt a little shock every time I touched a door knob.

Yesterday, I changed into my sweater, a warm fluffy one made of light synthetic material, and touched my mouse. The zap I felt was bigger than usual, and I immediately noticed that my mouse’s left button stopped working. I unplugged the mouse, rebooted my laptop…. nothing worked. So, I used Control Panel to switch the function of left and right mouse button.

I used it that way for about a day then realized that it wasn’t a practical solution because I basically lost the functionality of right-mouse click. So, I dug into my misc. computer box, took out an old mouse and started to use it.

I’m glad only the mouse got damaged, not the computer itself. Now, I’m careful when I use my mouse and computer. When I remember, I touch some metal surface to discharge the statics before sitting in front of the computer.

Have you ever considered disabling the AutoSave feature of WordPress? WordPress is great software for blogging and other things. It is very user-friendly and intuitive to use. One thing I didn’t like is its Autosave feature. When auto save kicks in while writing a post, it slows down my writing/editing.

Furthermore, every time autosave kicks in it inserts a new row in the data base. I first noticed it when WordPress told me that “there is a post with a later time stamp, do you like to revert back to it?” Then, it showed me various versions of the same post saved at a different time. At first, I thought it was a cool feature because I didn’t have to lose a lot when my laptop freezes.

Almost ten times more rows than the number of posts
So, I took a look at the database itself. In the database, wp_post table is where all the posts are saved. In my other blog, I only have 121 posts. The number of rows for wp_post is, however, a whopping 1,402 rows! That’s almost ten times more than the number of posts. That’s a lot of waste of disk space, and I’m sure it will slow down the web site access as the table is much bigger than it needs to be.

The wp_post table has a column called post_status and it has either “publish” or “inherit”. I thought about deleting all the rows with marked with “inherit” but reconsidered as there may be some issues unknown to me.

Disabling Autosave
Basically, there are two ways to disable autosave. You either have to edit the configuration file or use a plugin. Both are not difficult. Here’s how.

• Editing wp-config
  Back up to the current version of wp-config.php with a different name so you can revert back if you don’t like what it does. Then, add the following line anywhere in between the php opening (< ? php )and ending (? > ).
  
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS',false);

• Using a plugin
  This is what I want to try first because I haven’t used too many plugins that made my site slow. There are different ones available but I think I like this one.

  I’ll let you know how I like this plugin.

Venture Beat cited an article published today @Business Week that twitter is profitable. I know what twitter is. Actually, I have an account there but I haven’t used it much. I didn’t see too much action there, well, because I didn’t use it much.

Now I’m thinking. I haven’t really kept up with all of those. It’s probably about time for me to start using some. The social media, some of which started as media for small circles, has grown so much virally. We hear about twitter and facebook almost every day on TV.

I’ll probably explore other social media also, such as Digg and Delicious.