Wednesday, May 30, 2007
SageTV Favorites
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Skype Asterisk Update III
The short version: tenative (I haven't proven it yet) kudos to Bruce Nepple for this post which discusses setting VNC's timeout option. Hopefully this will fix it.
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Editing the Sage menu
Hopefully this will head off any further questions...
Friday, May 25, 2007
MPD interface
It works okay without modification (be sure to edit the "host" entry in both index.php and playlist.php) but I found the text-only interface to be a bit too spread out. So, I replaced the text in his links with graphics, reordered them, changed the link colors, and added a meta refresh to index.php.
The end result is a bit cheesy (I need to find a decent set of graphics to "skin" this with) but it's functional:
Skype and Asterisk Update II
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Skype and Asterisk Update I
- the keypad within the Skype client produces DMTF which can control/respond to Asterisk
- calls via SkypeIn do not
- voice applications running on Unbuntu-based VMs tend to steadily degrade over time (but probably can be fixed)
- the personal version of Chan_Skype is designed so that it only works with one license per machine (i.e., if you want multiple channels, you have to buy the business license which costs 5x more per channel)
- the Chan_Skype people need to work on their versions (currently limited to outdated versions of Ubuntu and Fedora)
In short, I like the product but really hate its shortcomings.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Skype and Asterisk
For now, let me say that there are a number of drawbacks which some may be able to live with, some not. For a $20 license, I don't consider it to be too bad of a product.
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Busy week
Shouts to the Sploitcast crew who let me sit in on a conference call. The call actually went for 4+ hours today and I think that wlc already has it edited back to about an hour. Whether my comments survived or not remains to be seen. It was fun experimenting with TalkShoe and Skype though.
To tell the truth, I mostly lurked in the call. I was actually working on getting a NSLU2 reflashed. Below is a screenshot of the final product (NSLU2 runing MPD which is listening to various streams, including the SlimServer on my desktop).
Monday, May 7, 2007
Life's little lessons
I then attempted to use the card online, at a site that uses PayPal to process customer purchases. My card was denied. In calling AmEx to find out why, I learned the following: the card is only good at sales entities which are direct customers of AmEx. They won't process "third party transactions" such as PayPal. When I asked for my money back, they offered me $15. ($28.95 minus the $3.95 processing fee, minus the $10 refund fee.)
I've decided to keep the card. I'll find somewhere that accepts it (mebbe Starbucks?). However, I'm going to put about $3.95 worth of effort (this post should amount to that) into letting other people know about my experience with AmEx's Gift Card service. I should probably note here that neither their site nor the TOS document that came with the gift card talks about refusing to work with third party services (specifically PayPal). The closest the TOS comes to that is disavowing responsibility if the Merchant declines the card. (In this case, AmEx declined the transaction, not the merchant.)
Bite me, AmEx.