Free Land line numbers for UK & US

Just wanted to share some links. I am sure many of you already know about this, but I was trying to setup a free SIP based land line no's. (Skype and many other services give it for money)

http://sipgate.co.uk - for UK or Germany's land line no's

and

a combo of http://www.freeworlddialup.com/ - for SIP forwarding
& http://www.ipkall.com/ - for US land line no

for sipgate there is already a pre-configured X-lite(software for voip calls) available, for IPkall you need to download "X-Lite" and do the setting as mentioned on their website.

both of these work nicely, and people can call from Ufone-Pakistan for Rs.1 or something. Its quiet useful.

"The Black Swan" an interesting book by Naseem Taib

Usually I am not too fond of reading mathematics & probability books for fun, but someone strongly recommended this book, so I borrowed it from library and started reading with a condition that If I get bored during the first 5 pages its going out of the window.

But my O my how wrong was I. This book is simply amazing. It shattered some of my everyday concepts on many levels. Its written with a reason to predict unpredictable events in stock markets around the world, and about highly improbable events e.g not having very un-common events like 9/11 or war in Lebanon is actually more uncommon than having ones (means that unprobable events are bound to happen, world can not be happy place for too long, the probability of things going right for too long is very low); and the influences these highly improbable and unpredictable events create are massive. But since we often bring our intuition from Mediocristan for the events of Extremistan, leading us to error. The result is a tendency to be blind-sided by the unexpected.

kool… :) rite?

LinuxBIOS (Faster boot time for linux)

If someone wants to get freaky with their Linux boxes try this open Bios thing (LinuxBIOS, http://linuxbios.org/ ). It replaces the native Mobo bios with a trimmed down Linux version (with no support for DOS). Grub gets loaded into BIOSäs rom, reduces boot time and support parallel hardware initializations i.e. faster boot time for Linux.

When booted you just see two panes for Linux hardware initializations, (no Intel inside screen or press F2 or F12 etc..) I have tried it on dell optiplex gx620 (Intel 915 mobo) without any problems.

Though, there is no apparent reason to do this, and probably it has potential to fry the motherboard, but its cool :)