Now people can call you on your skype phone from the their mobile phone or landline. You pay a rental charge for the number currently 30 euros for twelve months and your up and running. I think this happened on the 10th March I can't believe I have only just seen it!

Countries this is available for:
   France 
   Hong Kong S.A.R., China 
   United Kingdom 
   United States 

Stuart Henshall runs the Skype Journal Blog he seems to have the skinny on everything to do with Skype.

I saw a link on Rob Caron's blog to Eric Sinks article Comments on the pricing of Team System it is a really good read.

I think he is both right and wrong about the size of dev team for which VS Team System will be useful. I totally agree with his 8,000 developer analogy but not with his 5 man team one. Why? Because I work in a seven man team and we developed an enterprise system that our customer has paid £1million (~US $2million) for. Our annual salary bill is £250,000 if by purchasing VS Team System and training the team to use it (more costly than the licence I suspect) we realise a 10% improvement in efficiency then VSTS easily pays for itself inside two years.

There will also be business benefits to our customer in terms of predictability of delivery and confidence in a successful release. As a manager of other developers I want to be able to track everything they have been up to when things go wrong, this is especially important when a new member joins the team. If I have this information I can use it to correct mistakes to get the release out and to explain to the developer what they did wrong. I need end to end control over the development process to make sure no one in the team can get lazy and not be held accountable.

I'm not sure yet if VSTS (sounds like a venereal disease!) will offer this to a dev team like ours but if it does we will gladly pay the price being asked. My main concern and something I am struggling to find information on is how SQL 2005 development will be integrated into the VSTS development process. Currently this is a headache for us as it is totally manual and we use VSS.

They are mostly tech orientated so if you have a Geeky disposition then you will probably enjoy these.

1. Chuck Chat - Ramblings of Technophile - Very funny and lots of gadgets - Daily 20-25 mins
2. .Net Rocks - Show discussing microsoft development tools - Weekly 2hrs
3. Geek News Central - Lots of cool geek stuff - 2 shows a week 40mins
4. A brit abroad - British games programmer in Seattle - random 20 mins
5. Coverville - Music covers only - 2-3 shows a week - 30 mins
6. Slacker Astronomy - Comedic slant on astronomy great show - Weekly - 10 mins

I subscribe to around 40 feeds, when I first started listening to podcasts I was so enthusiastic I didn't care about audio quality. Now I find I am becoming a bit more picky and if the audio quality is very poor I will generally unsubscribe. There are plenty of other shows I listen to regularly like Dawn and Drew and Adam Curry.

Robert Scoble Microsoft Geek Blogger is taking back his life and will not be updating his link blog

I did subscribe but only viewed it occasionaly, I prefer his main blog, so no tears here.

If your a geek then I reccomend you check his blog out.

EDIT 1/4/2005:

Scobles Link Blog just came back to life Aprils Fool?

My brother  and I have decided to setup a community hosting project. We are going to install an SDSL line at his house and offer colocation to anyone who meet a few basic criteria, we are also going to build one server for shared hosting. We are going to place some rigid restrictions on the size and power of the servers to keep the costs down.

For £10 a month and for non-commercial activity we will host any server that meets the following criteria.

• cpu: 1000mhz max
• 1 Hard drive <= 7200 rpm
• Size: XPC Shuttle or smaller
• Noise: Quiet i.e. no 10,000 rpm delta fans!
• Any Os you get complete authority over your server and your own IP address

This is aimed at geek enthusiasts and community sites that are not for profit, basically people who would love to have a 1mbps up connection but can't justify the cost of installing one or using a professional colo facility.

The cheapest I have seen this type of service for is £30 a month in a Uni datacenter in Manchester. If you are interested then drop me an email using the link in the bottom right and side of the site.

If you are into listening to podcasts then you probably have some sort of aggregator to download your favourite podcasts automatically. I use iPodder for the PC which has just been upgraded to version 2.0. This version has lots of new functionality including a resizable user interface. They have also added a download tab so it is easy to track what is currently being downloaded. There is now a clean up function that allows you to delete old shows, and I now realise (thanks to Martijn Venrooy) this can be used on feeds you no longer subscribe to.

When I upgraded I found that some of the dormant feeds I had subscribed to in the old version suddenly sprung into life namely Engadget and G4TV, this meant that after upgrading there was around 50 queued downloads, this might cause a problem for users who have a restriction on the amount of data their ISP allows them to download monthly (this is becoming common in the UK).

There are still a couple of features I would like to see added, there is no search facility in the directory, Chuck over at ChuckChat.com agrees with me that this is essential. I would also like the option to be able to disable downloads for a feed, at the moment if I wish to do this I have to completely remove the feed. If later I want to resubscribe I have to go and find the link. I have emailed the dev team offering a bribe in the form of a $50 donation to be paid when I see these features appear.

I'm confused why they have added the ability to play podcasts automatically after download, if like me you don't like this feature then you can disable it in the preferences menu.

Overall the new version is a real step forward and I would recomend you upgrade soon.