BAM! It was only a matter of time before google stuck its hand in the phone markets and now, prepare to gawk! Google Voice is giving free calls to the USA and Canada at the moment, got relatives or friends over there? You’re sorted!

But what about everywhere else? Well you have to pay a tiny-weeny amount to call there, which varies on country and if its a mobile or landline. Heres a list of the rates: https://www.google.com/voice/rates

Now because Google loves Ireland (boy does it), here are the Irish rates:

its a mere freakin’ 2 cent to call a landline in Ireland! Even better, it seems Google give you a full free $0.10 to play with when you sign up or start using voice!

Now how do you use Google Voice and avail of this awesomeness? Hop over to gmail.com, login or sign up, once you’re logged in, on the left hand sidebar, there’ll be a section entitled “Chat”, click that mofo, a it will dropdown to reveal the voice option, you’ll have to install a plugin first and restart your browser, after that go back to the Chat option in gmail, click it again, click the Voice button and on the right hand side of the window the dial pad will pad will appear and HEY PRESTO, you’re prank calling businesses in the states for free! I tested it out and rang a GameStop in Torronto, froze and hung up when they actually picked up! So yeah it works! Also if you upgrade, you also get all neat features like sending texts or SMS’s to phones, a voicemail, a custom number so people can ring you and more!

This kind of technology is called VOIP or ‘Voice over Internet Protocol’, its for  transferring voice or audio over the internet, through a gateway and to a phone. For a long time Skype and other companies were doing this, so really its nothing new, but free calls to the USA and Canada is BIG!

Links:

• Gmail
• Google Voice
• Google Voice Rates

Ok, I mean, how is it still working?!?? My friend Kevin’s iPod touch is bing held together with duct-tape and love and its still working, have you ever seen a more destroyed device? Worse still he constantly uses regularly and just simple shrugs off the damage and says “Yeah, I can can’t see or do anything on the bottom half of the screen”.

<facepalm></facepalm>

Look how beautiful, robust, secure, portable and scalable it is.

Hey, what are you guys up to?

We are just enjoying some porn.

So it is being reported that the CAO website is down due to a “cyber attack”. That’s bull, the site is down because thousands and thousands of students are trying to get onto to see if they screwed up their future and the idiot people who run the site didn’t build the server to be able to take that many people, so it crashed. Its not a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack people, the CAO web people didn’t think their server and hosting through. Looks like of you want your results right now, you’ll have to fork out €1.50 for a paper…

In other news newspaper sales are expected to be at an all time high today…

So I’m beginning to write this post on the bus on its way to the Glucksman gallery (http://www.glucksman.org). Its pouring rain outside and I know nothing about this this exhibit bar its name “Mixtapes” and I’m getting a free poster (I have Twitter to thank for that one). Now I’ve never properly gone to an art exhibit, well that said when I was young I think my mom took me to ones once or twice, but I used to use the exhibit pieces as climbing obstacles, which promptly ended my artistic and cultural up bringing.

So I swing upon the big glass door of the Glucksman and trek up the stairs. I meet with the dude at the desk and he tells me the sceal with it. The ‘Mixtapes’ exhibit is contemporary art which focuses on the age old relationship between music and art presenting us with a new, colourful and thought provoking angles to said relationship. Now this contemporary art is not the kind where some punter puts a chewing gum wrapper on a stand with a net over it and says it represents oppression of free speech in botts-god-knows-where! Hard to believe I’ve heard of cases like this. If art isn’t your thing, which admittedly it isn’t my thing either (bar the styling of Salvador Dali), you will still find this exhibit awesome still!

To go through the exhibit piece-by-piece and attempt to forge stereotypical stuck-up-snooty-art-critic comments doesn’t do this exhibit justice. We have to admit that words can never fully convey art and this exhibit does a pretty damn good job of proving this point. I will however say my favourite 2 pieces are the “We Built This City (Don’t You Remember?)(2010) an installation by Dennis McNulty which consists of 8 ‘big f**k off’ mirrors, structured to resemble a bass bin, one of these ‘big f**k off’ mirrors has a projection of video of 2 Dublin bands playing. I think the surrealism of this piece is what caught my attention. Second is the “Dancehall Danceoff” by Sarah Doyle, which is actually really cool and it involves YouTube, basically what this artist did was get videos of girls dancing on YouTube and watercolour painted them and created an animation of them dancing. I like it more for the concept of involving the Internet.

So really if art is your thing, if art isn’t your thing, if you are passing the Glucksman or you are, in my case anyway, avoiding Latin, check out the ‘Mixtapes’ exhibit, its free entry, but a fiver donation never went astray, plus you’ll also find out about upcoming events like gigs and exhibits.

Wild Internet user fled….

http://coord.info/GC2CHGH

Posted by Spark_ie

Meet up in the Flying Enterprise Bar, Barrick Street for a few pints and a bit of chat. Afterwards we can go for a walk around Cork City, and pick up a few of the city caches (If you wish!)

Meeting from 8:30pm
Parking is available on the street outside the pub, and along the riverside. Taxis etc are also available.
More info to follow in due course.

Can finally find that freakin’ St.Finbarrs cache….

Snapped this on my iPhone 3GS when I was out geocaching and edited it in the Camera+ app (which is currently removed from the appstore) :S

No freaking clue what type of bug this is!

So the pasta and Italian food company, Roma, sent me their new Roma Pizza and Pasta Flour to try out. Roma pretty much did an anti-St.Patrick and brought pasta to the masses in Ireland in the 1950′s under the name Dublin Macaroni Company. Right history lesson over, lets get to the flour!

So I’m sitting here with a bag of flour infront of me. Doesn’t look special, kinda heavy, if I throw a stick it doesn’t fetch it, so whats the big deal? Imagine your kitchen as a blackboard and the Roma Pizza and Pasta Flour as the chalk, you can create so much with the flour within the kitchen! I decided to make pizza, doesn’t sound too adventurous does it? Im the guy who two weeks ago tried to bake a rasher for an hour, so yeah, making pizza was kinda a big deal!

Looking for Inspiration and the ingredients

The packaging fairly idiot proof, theres instructions on how to make pizza dough and pasta on the back and all…. I’ve just been informed the correct term is recipe, who knew? They also have a handy collection of these “recipes” on their website!

So I start off following the recipe for pizza dough on the back of the packaging. Now the recipe was really easy to follow, nothing major. When I was making it, it was just, simple. When I had made the dough, it was the right mixture of strong and yet easy to shape, not breaking apart. kneading it and rolling it was like beating up a cloud, so soft and easy to shift. After it finished rising for around an hour, a little confusing to what knocking it back was, I lay it on a baking tray, rolled it around, BAM, added some Puree, BAM, added some cheese, BAM, added some ham, I felt pretty badass. I shoved my first ever homemade pizza into the oven preheated at 200°C and kicked backed.

Suffice to say I had no idea what I was doing

15-20 minutes later I came back and took out, probably the greatest thing I’ve made since pancakes, outta the oven. Despite my novice chef ‘skillz’, and that my pizza looked more like something out of a Salvador Dali painting, it tasted pretty epic, like eating candy floss, dreams and magic…. so basically like eating a unicorn or something.

You can cook the dough to a soft or crispy base, with varying levels of thickness dependent on how you like your pizza. The base stays strong and won’t fall apart on you. The Roma Flour based base really amplifies all the toppings that sit atop it. In addition to smelling nice (sounds weird), it is also really filling.

Before and after the oven…

Pizza is just one of the many things you can create with flour! You can find Roma Pizza and Pasta Flour in all good supermarkets, if not, send an angry letter to the manager of that supermarket demanding it or he’ll never see his dog again.

Coincidence?