Mobile

When I travel out of the country, I usually test out new VoIP services both for calling back to the states and receiving calls while I am traveling. I consistently find that while the rates for VoIP services are very attractive, the user experience and flexibility is often lacking when I traveling, particularly with limited network connectivity. Depending on the length of my stay, I purchase a prepaid SIM to use in a spare unlocked mobile phone so that I can make and receive local calls at local rates....

John Gruber’s Daring Fireball pointed me to Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox column Stop Password Masking, which resulted in a thoughtful and interesting thread of conversations and a few experimental solutions. Password masking refers to the practice of displaying an alternate character, usually a star or a bullet in place of the actual characters typed into a password field. The idea is that this prevents another party from viewing the password while it is entered....

TripIt is a free service that simplifies organizing travel plans. The service has done an excellent job of making it painless to aggregate the collection of email receipts that you receive from airlines, hotels, car rental companies and travel agencies into one master itinerary. In order to use TripIt, you simply forward any email receipts to plans@tripit.com. The service extracts the reservation information from the message and assembles an attractive and very functional master itinerary from all the disparate documents....