Free calling within the US and Canada through 2012 has also been confirmed on the Official Google Voice blog.

It has been reported that Google Voice and Gmail will continue to offer free calls to anywhere in the U.S. and Canada for all of 2012. Previously, Google had only committed to free calls until the end of 2011.

This should make the owners of the Obi110 VoIP Telephone Adapter very happy, as it allows you plug in any standard telephone system and use Google Voice to make free phone calls. The current regular price is $49.99, for which you will at least get a full year of free phone service including long distance, with no computer required (broadband internet access is required). It costs $20 to port your existing number over to Google Voice. The sound quality is reportedly good per reviews.

I replaced traditional telephone service with VoIP over 6 years ago (except for a brief stint with a cheap DSL plan), and I’m quite happy with the technology. Voice quality is great; I’d much rather talk for extended periods on VoIP rather than cell phone.

I’m a pretty regular user of my local library, usually with 3-4 books out each month (with only 1-2 completely read + a few bucks in late fees). I bought a Kindle a few months ago* and was happy to hear that I can now borrow e-books from my library onto it. Overdrive runs the digital media portion of my local library system, and also runs it for many others. Previously, the DRM software restrictions made it impossible to get onto a Kindle. You can run a search for a branch close to you on Overdrive.com.

Unfortunately, so far I haven’t been impressed. The titles are very limited, and usually my city only has one copy of each. I’m still hopeful that a lower cost for distribution means it will this system more popular. Maybe libraries can even get a cut by offering a link to the book for sale. Here are a few stats:

• Lending period: 21 days for me, which is the same as physical books. You can electronically return the book earlier if you like.
• No late fees. The book is automatically removed from your Kindle device when time is up. You’ll get an e-mail warning, but this also means you can’t just keep it an extra day or two to finish up for $.50 in late fees. Poof!
• Maximum checkouts allowed at one time: For me, this is 10. Plenty.

I do like not having to drive to the library, of course. Finally, for more free reading material, I now use Instapaper to transfer all long web articles (like Boomerang) to read on Kindle. Much less eye strain. My most recent clipping? The famous 1979 Businessweek article The Death of Equities.

* By the way, I would definitely go for the $30 savings for “special offers” Kindle version. I would honestly have paid the same price as without ads (but don’t tell Jeff Bezos that). The ads are not intrusive to the reading experience at all, and and the coupons offered regularly save me money. You can view a list of all previously offered discounts here. It seems like every month I either get a Kindle book for $1 or something like $5 off any $10 Amazon purchase.

What happens when a former Apple executive and other top geeks focus their energy on a… thermostat? The Nest Learning Thermostat. I just finished a neat Wired magazine article about this new gadget, which hopes to make saving energy both trendy and hassle-free.

First, it looks like something Apple would make. When the heat is on, it’s red. When the A/C is one, it turns blue. You use it like any other thermostat, turning it up and down whenever, and it’ll even show you how long until you get there. What’s wrong with existing programmable thermostats? For one, they are often so hard to use that half of them aren’t programmed at all. A study actually showed that programmable thermostats used more energy than non-programmable thermostats, which led to the EnergyStar label being pulled for all of them.

How is it better? If you’re being efficient, you get rewarded with a little green leaf icon, nudging you towards more savings. It learns your habits, and uses that to minimize your energy use. If you forget to turn it down on a weekend getaway, it will fix that for you. Or, you can jump online and set it yourself, since it connects via WiFi and stores your energy consumption patterns online. It even has motion detectors built in so it knows if people are around, and it lights up when you approach it. All with just the trickle of power that a normal thermostat gets.

It also costs $249, much more than competing beige thermostats. It’s supposed to pay for itself in two years, so that’s a savings of $10 a month. If it reduces your usage by 20%, that means your current bill should average at least $50 a month.

There was a thought-provoking NYT article about luxuries last week that pointed to a 2006 report by the Pew Research center that surveyed Americans on what they considered “necessities” versus “luxuries”. Some things have become more accepted as a necessity over time:

Other things have stayed “needed” on a constant level, like having a car, TV, or clothes washer. I stewed on this over the weekend, because right now I have all 7 of those things listed above. But as recently as 10 years ago, I only had a computer, broadband internet, and a microwave. No car, no washer/dryer, no air conditioning, no dishwasher.

Are any of these really a need? Even if you live somewhere hot, somewhere in the world there are people living in the same conditions without air conditioning. My wife’s grandmother still used a washboard to clean her clothes up until recently. On top of that, each of our needs or wants can be scaled up or down. You may “need” a car for work, but that car can cost $200,000 or $20,000 or $2,000. A house can cost $1,000,000 or $100,000 or less. Even a TV can cost $2,000 or free (you can’t even give away a tube TV these days). You could run your A/C all day long, or set the thermostat to 83 like my dad does.

It would seem that the real decision is more about priorities. Somewhere in those spending priorities is saving for a rainy day, or saving for retirement. Some people are effectively making the decision that they want to live in a 3,000 sf house instead of a 1,500 sf house than, rather than stop working period 5 years early (or work part-time instead of full-time for 10 years). Is that wrong? I don’t necessarily think so, if that’s their choice. In the end I couldn’t think of any easy answers, but hopefully we start making our choices more consciously rather than just going along with others.