Graves On SOHO Technology

Here’s  a nice little tidbit for you. One of the more annoying tings about setting up a Gigaset cordless SIP/DECT phone is the sluggishness of the web interface. In the first draft of my A580 review I made specific mention of this, but it was dropped in a later revision. I curse those editors! A few people have since commented about this as well.

There’s been a long running thread about the Gigaset line over at Broadband Reports VoIP Tech Chat forum. “Jan1973″ recently posted advising that browsers other than IE or Firefox don’t exhibit this problem at all. That suggests that the matter truly isn’t the Gigaset web server, but rather how the browsers are rendering the pages. “Jan1973″ further suggests using k-meleon, which is  free download from SourceForge.

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You’ve caught me in an especially curmudgeonly state of mind. But you’re just going to have to deal with it. Consider yourself warned!

A couple of weeks ago a plain brown box arrived in the mail. It contained a sample of Skype’s new FREETALK® Everyman Superwideband headset. At the time this product was announced I couldn’t help by wonder why a new headset could be such a big deal? I mean, really now, I have a box full of headsets collected over the years. How could a low-end headset, no matter how special, merit such fanfare?

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Matt Riddell has a nice interview with Digium’s John Todd over at Venture VoIP. It covers some interesting ground, including an outline of John’s typical week and how he came to be involved with Digium. Not too be too gushy, but from where I stand John is doing an exemplary job handling community relations for Digium.

I was also happy to see a reference to the VoIP Users Conference. We truly appreciate John’s regular involvement in our little group. It’s the kind of experience he brings to the conversation, and the willingness to share it, that helps us draw people in to the group every week.

John is however, extraordinarily committed to a narrowband existence. Perhaps one day he’ll see the light…

On the surface this might seem a wee bit off topic, but bear with me as I will get there eventually. My thanks for Crunch Gear’s John Biggs for pointing out this You Tube clip documenting the making of the song “Money” by Pink Floyd. I’m a fan of the band and have also followed their individual solo careers in more recent years.

Further, I’m a big fan of Alan Parsons, who engineered a number of the bands recordings. Alan appears in the clip as well. He’s a master recording engineer which is something that I especially admire, having spent a portion of my youth in such endeavors myself.

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As I travel I often fill my down time listing to various podcasts. The IT Conversations series have been a great source of inspiration and education. Today they posted a podcast of  Jonathan Christensen, General Manager, Audio & Video at Skype. He was speaking at the 2009 Emerging Communications Conference on March 3, 2009. In his keynote presentation, called Codec Evolution and Industry Proposal, he announced their new, in-house developed SILK codec and the fact that it was being licensed to third parties for free.

This is definitely worth a listen, and good study for me as I set about preparing for my Astricon 2009 presentation about HDVoice.

Oh yeah. One last thing. I listened to the podcast using the new Skype FreeTalk Everyman Superwideband Headset. More on that later.

I promise that after this week I won’t focus so much on the Mifi and this Sprint 3G service. From an early Wednesday morning perspective here’s what I’m seeing for performance.

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