Wifi, laptops and cheap internet calls

Am currently in Albany waiting for my train transfer. Completed the working part of my trip earlier this week. Just visited D yesterday.. and now I’m on my way to visit another friend!

This is just one of the things I really like about the USA. Free wifi in hotels and many places… Can you imagine? Even with wireless@SG, hotels in Singapore still charge for internet access? (At least they do when you are there for conferences or meetings.)

USA (and Germany) is just so IT friendly. I could work on my laptop (and watch Heros too :p) on the train to this station. I don’t have to worry about running out of power because there are power sockets in the train. (Using a MacBook helps too because the power consumption is so little… my battery lasts approximately 5 hours.)

Of course, with free wifi, I can also make cheap calls back to PG. Yup, cheap. Not free 🙁 because…

1. PG is always not at home when I call, so we cannot use MSN or skype/sip to talk. (She claims to be working… Well, she’s bringing foreign guests out for dinner, karaoke, night safari etc… I let you decide if that is working)
2. My trial period for pfingo (http://www.pfingo.com/) has expired… All local calls (yes to landlines) were free during the trial period.

So now using pfingo/sip, I make calls at $0.01 per minute… not too bad… and considering I got $15 credit during the free period… Haha… it’s still free 🙂

I can call overseas with this too… looks like I’ll not be using my calling card much from now…

For mac users : the softphone on their website is only available for PC, but because they are using SIP, you can use other free SIP clients on the internet. I’m using SJphone. X-lite seems quite good too, but there is currently a bug using it with Leopard.

Haven’t taken a lot of photos on this trip though… the snow is really beautiful… it’s been so long that I’ve forgotten how beautiful it can be. Hopefully I will get to take some interesting shots.