From the monthly archives:

January 2009

Did Obama break 1981 Reagan record for inauguration?

22 January 2009

Straight from the mouths of the old, dying media comes word that — wait for it — Obama did not break 1981 Reagan Nielsen record for inauguration. Wow, you don’t say. Now run around to some friends and ask them if they watched the inauguration, and if so, how. Most — and I mean just [...]

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Personal VOIP/PBX using Asterisk, part 2

19 January 2009

This is part two of my series on how to set up an asterisk server for home use on a Linode VPS — but is applicable to any host that doesn’t have additional hardware telephony devices installed in the server. Please refer to Part 1 for how to set up the dummy timing module. Also, [...]

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IP Telephony Codecs

17 January 2009

My first stumbling block when installing and trying to get Asterisk PBX working were the codecs and mismatching. If both ends of a connection can’t negotiate the same codec, the call won’t complete. I grabbed the recommended asterisk config for gizmo5 and when attempting to place a call to my gizmo call-in number which should [...]

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My Wife opens up her shop in Second Life

15 January 2009

My wife’s been into Second Life quite a lot lately. In fact, her avatar now has it’s own website: www.ellcee-tabak.com. She sews a lot of neat clothes and costumes in real life, and amazingly was able to transfer that skill into the virtual world, and has opened up a store to sell her own [...]

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Personal VOIP/PBX using Asterisk, part 1

11 January 2009

Background Voice over IP is simply placing phone calls over the Internet instead of traditional phone lines. This means the calls are usually cheaper, but not free in many cases since often the telco lines have to get involved at some point to either originate or terminate a call. However, true voip calls are almost [...]

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