For the past while I’ve been thinking about extending my ancient X-10 based home automation. It wasn’t clear to me what technology was most appropriate but earlier this week my mind was made up for me. micasaverde announced their Vera home automation server based upon Z-Wave RF technology.
I've not had a chance to try these yet but this evening I stumbled across a couple of Tweets about new apps leveraging the LCD displays on better Polycom IP phones. One lets you load Flickr images to the phones…
Garrett Smith at VoIP Supply’s VoIP Insider blog has an good post today detailing Five 10 Seat VoIP Phone Systems Under $5,000. It’s interesting to survey the capabilities of low-cost systems.
For about a week I had a Skype status display in the sidebar on this blog. The site runs Wordpress and I never have felt that the use of sidebar Widgets caused a problem...until this Skype thingy. Adding that widget…
This post is the second in a series addressing some thoughts about ATAs. The first dealt with cordless phones and can be found here.
I’m not a big fan of analog terminal adapters (a.k.a. ATAs.) If you’re not familiar with them, these are the devices, like the Linksys example pictured below, provided by companies like Vonage et al that convert your plain old telephone into a broadband phone. They bridge the old analog world into the digital realm. I accept that these devices have been the lifeblood of the residential VoIP provider world. That’s only logical since they’re cheap and easy to deploy.
The past couple of days I’ve been playing around with the Gizmo5 client on my desktop. It’s actually pretty slick. I wanted to see if I could pass a wideband call to/from Gizmo5 from my Polycom 650s or Eyebeam. So far no joy. There seems to be a problem completing a call from Gizmo5 to OnSIP via SIP URI. The call rings on the IP650 but cannot be answered. Not certain if its an issue with Polycom firmware or both devices being behind the same NAT and trying to connect directly. I’ll try and work that out when I’m back at home.