How To Setup Google Voice as a Landline with the OBi100 VoIP Telephone Adapter

As a Virtual Employee, I spend most of my workweek on the phone in my personal home office. I have a cell phone, but it's not very cost effective to use valuable wireless minutes on long conference calls.  So I set out to find a better, less expensive way, to add a dedicated phone line to my home office.  It didn't take me long to me to find the OBi100 VoIP Telephone Adapter by Obihai Technologies Inc.


The OBi100 is first (maybe the only) Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) ATA device to support Google Voice without the need of a PC.  This means you can plug this little device into your home network and attach any landline phone you have available and start making calls using your Google Voice account in minutes.  The best part of all this is the cost.  The OBi100 only cost around $39 on Amazon.com. No, that is not per month.  Since Google Voice currently is free and allows you to make and receive unlimited calls in the US and Canada, all you need to buy is the OBi100 for $39.

My 5 Favorite Games For The Apple iPad

It is hard to believe the Apple iPad is almost a year old.  I personally didn't run out and buy mine on day one, but I did buy it very soon after release.  At the time, I was using an ASUS Eee PC 1000HE netbook for my personal mobile computing and it was alright for doing basic web browsing and checking emails.  I purchased the iPad to replace the netbook, but I never realized how much I would use my iPad for gaming!  Like other gaming platform such as Nintendo Wii or Xbox 360, not every game is good or makes best use of the specific platform's strengths.  The iPad is a very unique gaming platform.  The large 9.7 inch touch-screen makes for an excellent game board or immersive first-person shooter (FPS). You can even interact with some games just by tilting and moving the iPad around.  It is truly a unique and engaging platform for gaming. After almost a year gaming fun on my iPad I present to you a modest list of my top 5 games that exemplify gaming on the Apple iPad.

Scanning Documents To The Cloud with OfficeDrop

I work with Enterprise Content Management (or ECM) systems for a living and have an extensive background in Imaging or Document Capture.  But yet, at home I struggle to find a good way to capture important documents and keep them intelligently organized.  I have a rather nice Fujitsu fi-5120c desktop scanner, but it rarely gets used.  I tried a number of consumer-focused scanning tools in the past but none of them seemed very inspired.  I usually find that they are just too cumbersome to configure and use, even for me.  So I gave up trying for a while while and my scanner sat on the desk collecting dust.


A few months ago, while I was getting organized for tax time, I decided to fire-up the internet search engine and look again.  This time I trained my focus on a "cloud" based scanning solution.  I wanted to see who in the industry was trying to leverage online storage infrastructure to store scanned documents.  Well, I found one service in particular that seemed to be doing just that and they have a nice desktop scanning tool as well.  The service is called OfficeDrop.

Make dialing conference calls on a Blackberry easier with this simple trick

I am a Virtual Employee and that means I spend a lot of time on the phone in conference calls.  I often dial into those calls on my company-issued Blackberry Curve.  Dialing conference calls on a Blackberry can be annoying because once you call the conference call number you also have to enter some sort of passcode.  I usually forget the passcode and have to go look it up.  But when you are on-the-go that can be hard to do in the amount of time the conference call allows you to enter the number.  I found a simple little trick that makes dialing conference calls on a Blackberry much easier.