%appdata%/Skype/<username>/main.db

It is important to note that Skype MUST be closed before you can open the database.

Skype presents sixteen tables including Contacts, Messages, Voicemails, Calls and Chats. I am going to concentrate on Messages in this post but the principle is exactly the same for all the other tables.

The Messages table holds a record of all IM messages between you and your contacts and there is one row per message sent or received. Using this table it is possible to query the records for something in a number of interesting ways – by date range, username or even content of message. So, for example, the following query will return all messages that have occurred in the last day that have the word “SMTP” in the body:

SELECT author, datetime(timestamp, ‘unixepoch’), body_xml  
   FROM messages
WHERE timestamp BETWEEN strftime(‘%s’,'now’, ‘-1 days’) AND strftime(‘%s’,'now’)
     AND body_xml LIKE ‘%SMTP%’
ORDER BY timestamp

A few things to note.

Firstly date/times are held as a time stamp, so the current time (2nd October 2009 11:23 BST) is held as 1254478990 so it is necessary to convert to and from this format. To convert a Skype timestamp to something that is human readable use the datetime function as one line one of the SQL statement above. the strftime function converts a date to the timestamp format used so the BETWEEN statement is looking for records between ‘now’ and one day ago.

Secondly, the body of the message is held as XML and so may contain more than just the message itself to take account of formatting etc.

With some clever uses of SQL it is possible to do some very complex searches but the restriction of having to have Skype closed is a bit limiting and I intend to see if there is a way around this.

You can get more information on the SQL statements that SQLite uses here and I would be interested to know how you have used this data or intend to.

(Lead picture: http://www.flickr.com/photos/malthe/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Over the years I have used a number of ways to make Skype calls. I have used the speaker and microphone on my netbook, a VoIPVoice Cyberphone-w handset and a Polycom Communicator.

The laptop only experience is ok but the sound is very tinny. The Cyberphone and the Communicator are both excellent devices but I don’t like holding the handset on long calls, particularly when they are video too and the communicator is really better suited for conference calls and neither are suitable for travelling. So when I saw the Freetalk Everyman USB headset for Skype reviewed recently I thought I would give it a go.

They turned up in a small cardboard box with just a single sheet of instructions. Well I say instructions but actually there were just six pictures with either a large red cross or green tick over each. Fortunately set-up was a doddle – just plug-in and go. Skype recognises the headset and asks if you want to use them to make calls.

The call quality was excellent both for me and the other party who commented on how much better it was than usual. The headset makes use of what Skype calls super wideband audio which is included in v4 and improves call quality even at low bandwidth. Having your ears covered means that there is no distraction from external noise which obviously also makes things better.

You can also use the headset as a normal set of headphones. There is a standard 3.5mm jack which can be plugged into a laptop/iPod etc. and then is plugged into a junction box on the cable when you are using them as a headset. Sound quality is reasonable if a little thin but certainly better than the standard iPod headphones for example.

The design is neat too in that they are designed to fold flat (see picture below) and the mic is bendy so it can be folded out the way when you are not using it. The headset folding mechanism is not dissimilar to that used by Sennheiser in its range of headphones, however, the Freetalk doesn’t come with any case. Given that the headset is going to be chucked into my laptop bag I realised that it needed to have a case of some sort. The solution was to buy this pencil case from WH Smiths. It’s a squeeze but it does provide protection (see images below) and has room for some other bits and pieces too.

So, to summarise, the Freetalk headset is a recommended device, particularly for those on the move who want good quality combined with portability. They are available from the Skype online shop for £18.51.

This is obviously just a personal selection. Over the years I have tried out numerous applications that rival the one that finally made this list. In the end it is just personal preference as much as anything else. You may prefer something else but these are the ones that made me put my hand in my pocket and purchase a subscription

So in the same order that they were listed in the previous article they are:

Carbonite

I have talked about Carbonite on the site a number of times previously and not always in a positive light (here and here). However, they were reviews of the remote access part of the service and not the core offering of cloud backups and here Carbonite excels. This is really a set and forget service whereby you identify which directories you want to backup to the cloud and it just gets on with it. So I am secure in the knowledge that all my music, pictures and important documents are backed-up should disaster ever strike.

£34/year

Remember the Milk

I am a task setter and for years had lists of tasks in the back of my moleskine notebook. Now I have completely moved over to Remember the Milk for this and I love some much about it. Whether I am in my gmail account, on my iPhone or on their website my tasks are always close at hand. Also you can set such a great level of detail against each task should you wish to and of course share them with others. A great time saver.

£15/year

Evernote

Like Remember the Milk, Evernote has had a huge impact on both my working and personal life. While I still take a lot of written notes I am increasingly doing so in Evernote. Similar to Microsoft’s OneNote but with the advantage of being multi-platform so again I am able to access my notes on my desktop, via a browser and on my iPhone. The searching is simple and effective and means that I always have my notes close at hand. It is superb at clipping from the net with the browser plug in meaning storing information for later review is a breeze.

£28/year

Flickr

Having my own website means that I could, in theory, host my pictures on my own webspace but there is a limit to the amount of available space I have and I need to FTP the pictures to the site and then link to them from my blog. Flickr suffers from none of these drawbacks. I am able to upload pictures from pretty much anywhere to my Flickr account and have them immediately available to anyone who might be interested. With the latest changes I am now also able to link the pictures to my Twitter about.

£15/year

Zumodrive

I looked at so many different online storage options before settling on Zumodrive and in the end it was an easy choice – it simply works. The fact that it looks and feels just like another drive in Windows makes it the perfect solution. I just save a file to me z: drive and it is synced to the cloud. I can then access it from the web, another desktop or my iPhone (are you detecting a theme here?).

£22/year for 10gb (charged monthly)

Unfuddle

Unfuddle is the odd one out of the bunch here are it is the only one that I use exclusively for work. The service is designed for development teams and particularly those that are geographically spread. As such it includes source control (subversion and Git), ticket creation, milestones, time tracking and a wiki-like. It has made working with outsourced development teams, as I do, a doddle.

£66/year (10 person team)

Skype

Is there anyone who doesn’t know about Skype? It is the poster child of the new age of internet applications brining voice over IP to the masses. I use it regularly to keep in touch with my best friends who have gone to live in Australia (hopefully only for 18 months…). You can get away with not having to pay for Skype if you only make Skype-to-Skype calls. If you want to call “real” phones then a subscription is required.

£18/year

ScanR

Finally a lesser known service perhaps. I go to quite a few networking events and collect numerous business cards and found entering all the details to be pretty tedious – scanR solves that problem. You take a picture of the card, upload it to the scanR site and it magically converts it into something you can import into Outlook, gmail or other mail reader. It also works with documents and whiteboards but I only use it for the business cards and while it is not perfect it is much better than having to retype!

£15/year.

Oh and to say you having to add it all up it comes to £213!

[image : SMercury98]

The applications below are all ones that I use on a regular basis, used for free first before paying for a premium service of some sort. All the following applications make use of the Internet in some form or another.  They are not all cloud apps in the traditional sense with some being hybrids with local clients and remote storage.

Some of these don’t have desktop equivalents and so you cannot make the comparison but Evernote does in the form of Microsoft’s OneNote. I was a happy OneNote user when it was provided for me by the companies that I worked for, usually as part of the full Office package. When I became self-employed I still wanted similar functionality but not the up-front cost. As it happens OneNote can be purchased stand-alone and is currently showing as £72 on Amazon. Evernote’s premium offering is $45 (about £27) per year. So at that rate after about two and a half years OneNote would have paid for itself.

As ever it is not as simple as that. Evernote offers a number of things that OneNote does not. You can access your notes not just on your desktop but also on the web and on a number of mobile devices – not just those powered by Microsoft’s Windows Mobile. Also as part of the Evernote subscription I am entitled to all updates which I would not be with OneNote.

You can see from the cost comparison above that the recurring revenue model is a good one for businesses over the longer term. If you want to continue to use the software you have to continue to pay and over the years I will no doubt end up paying for more than I would have done had I purchased the software outright.

As I said most of these services offer a free option to allow you to try the software before making the move to the paid premium version. This is a crucial deciding factor on my trialling a service these days. I almost expect to be able to try before I buy and with so many competing services those that do not offer a trial option of some sort are rejected.

So has this changed my buying habits? Yes, without a doubt. I haven’t totalled up the annual amount I am spending on all the services I am now subscribed to but I know instinctively that it is much more than I was spending on one-off purchases of software. Equally I also feel that I am getting much better value for money that I did previously. The rate of change of software is so great that regular updates with significant functionality improvements is the norm these days and this is all built into the price.

I will just list the services I subscribe to here and review them all in a later post.

• Carbonite
• Remember the Milk
• Evernote
• Flickr
• Zumodrive
• Unfuddle
• Skype
• ScanR

Do you subscribe to any of these services? Do you think that the freemium model is a good one? Let us know.

[image : SMercury98]