Delivery Status: Quickly Track Packages
Whenever I’m expecting a package, I always get tired of loading various web sites just to check the status of my delivery. The Delivery Status widget by Mike Piontek is designed to solve this problem by doing all the work for you. The widget keeps the updated tracking information for any trackable package on your dashboard for easy access. All you have to do is fill out the information on the back of the widget (which includes an option as to how often you want updates) and the rest is taken care of for you (including Growl notifications). You can even open a second copy, allowing you to track multiple packages.
The widget is very well designed, utilizing different logos and colors on the front to match various courier services. It allows tracking of packages from Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Canada Post, DHL, FedEx, Google Checkout, Nintendo, Purolator, TNT, UPS, and USPS.
If you click the logo of the courier service it links you to the website with all the transit details (if available). You can also change the size of the widget and can even reduce it to just a logo to save space on your Dashboard. I highly recommend this widget to anyone who likes to keep tabs on where their packages are at all times. While the Delivery Status widget is freeware, Mike asks that you make a donation if you find the widget useful. You can grab the Delivery Status widget here.
John sums up telepresence from a network perspective, “Telepresence is an interactive real- time application, which means it is delay sensitive, loss sensitive and jitter sensitive. This sounds familiar: it is just like VoIP, with the one difference being that it has huge bandwidth requirements.” It’s that last part that makes things more difficult. No form of QoS can allocate bandwidth that doesn’t exist and it doesn’t have provisions to force the application to downscale the experience based on realtime metrics. …