End-user perspective on small office tools & technology

Streaming vs Screaming Media: USB 3.0 Tries My Patience

Clarity Monitor-220 Preface: This is a wee bit off topic, but I haven’t ranted in a while, and you may find it worthwhile in the end.

For many months I’ve been toying with the idea of using streaming video as an alternative to some of the training and demonstration activities that haunt me in my working life. Historically, sending staff and gear to some distant location was the primary means of selling the gear, or post-sale, conducting end-user training.

In the past year one of our more experienced sales staff has found that demonstration given by remote means can be very effective. Initially this was merely his response to having limited access to my time, but it’s also become a way for him to get ad hoc demo’s accomplished on very short notice.

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Revisiting Steve Song & The Village Telco

Village-Telco-Logo-200You may recall that some time ago we had Steve Song appear as a guest on a VUC call. At that time he was working for the Shuttleworth Foundation coordinating the Village Telco project.

The Village Telco project developed a low-cost hardware device intended to help deploy telephony to underserved parts of Africa. This device, called a Mesh Potato, is essentially a wifi access point with a built-in analog terminal adapter. Groups of Mesh Potatoes form a wifi mesh network. This supports the sharing of voice & internet resources at extremely low-cost compared to commercial solutions.

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Reality Check: Computer Speakers vs Hi-Fi

Lower East Side Air Overview This morning’s news dump finds me distracted by an Engadget story about Audyssey releasing a new AirPlay-capable powered speaker system called “Lower East Side Air.”

This is the second time such an announcement from this company has caused my brow to wrinkle. The first time the company caught my attention was when Tech Crunch reviewed their Lower East Side Media Speakers.

Going beyond the press release I had a look at the companies’ web site for some greater depth on the Lower East Side Air product. I was surprised to find that there really wasn’t anything more to be had.

 

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An Analog Phone For Our Front Gate: Done Deal!

While I ordered the DoorBell Fone back in August the fact of our extreme Houston summer kept me from completing the installation. The buried wire run out to our gate was broken and there was just no way I was going to bury a new wire in 100+ degree heat. This past weekend I was able to find the time and temperature to complete the installation.

The largest task was to completely replace the wiring from the central closet in our house out to the gate. I replaced the old-skool solid copper pair with a length of Cat-5 cable. Using Cat-5 is a bit of future-proofing. It means that I can change to a POE-powered network device at the gate without replacing the cable again.

For the moment I’m using only one pair from the Cat-5 wiring, connecting the DoorBell Fone remote unit to the controller in the wiring closet. The total cable length is about 80 feet.

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Dave Michels Launches “TalkingPointz”

VoIP blogger and VUC contributor Dave Michels has launched a new online venture in the form of a web site that he’s calling TalkingPointz. Dave and I discussed this new venture while it was still in the just-thinking-about-it phase. The project bears some explanation as it offers something new and possibly quite valuable to the SMB telecom market.

To understand TalkingPointz it helps to know something about Dave’s background. Starting with a Master’s degree in telecommunication Dave has a long history in the area of telecom. When I first encountered Dave he was still at the helm of Buffalo Communications, a VAR based in Boulder CO. Prior to that he held various positions at some significant enterprises, including; Coors, IBM & GE.

To be concise, Dave knows enterprise telecom.

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