Earlier this month, I was looking at the V-Tech i5871. I was amazed about the fact that this was a home phone center where all its handsets have a colour display. Add to that downloadable jingles and backgrounds apparently. I remember going over it and looking for any USB slots, which I (vividly and much to my disappointment) remember not seeing. Anyways, it appears that the device provides linkup via USB. Besides wondering what the ‘motherstation’ might be running (OS-wise), I bet it wouldn’t be too hard to make a Linux-based system that supports exactly the same as the above mentioned phone system.
Over at Burningbird a post about algorithms, which is too long to summarize in a couple of lines. Shelley discusses how one can dissect a simple calculation in a decimal system. If you’ve calculated in other systems (binary, hexadecimal or octal), you will be aware of the fact that our holy decimal system is based on the number of our fingers. The world would have been a different world, if we had only two fingers (link to math. question how CPUs add numbers).