technology

Magic Jack, End Points & Cheap Minutes

There has been a little rumble of late in the blogosphere about Magic Jack. Ike Elliot had an good overview of the service here. And a little more here.

I first heard of Magic Jack literally a couple of years ago when visiting Durham, NC. It was the topic of conversation on an ABC radio talk show. The host was raving about cheap long distance calls using his PC, and paying $40/year for unlimited calling.

Ho hum. Cheap minutes. I don’t generally get worked up about such things.

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SlimServer on FreeNAS Soon To Be Revisited

I see that the newer Squeeze Center, which is actually Slim Server v7, is available as a FreeNAS module. This means that it might be a good time to upgrade my T5700 based music server.

I haven’t actually been using this server for a few months. A while back I decided to try a “room correction” plugin from Inguz for Slim Server. This does some DSP transformations on the music stream on-the-fly, basically effecting some equalization. This plugin required more CPU power than a lowly T5700 could provide, so I’ve been using and old P4-2.8 as my music server these past months.

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Power Corrupts, For Now

 

It’s been four days since I got the Siemens S685IP phone system installed and working. All appeared fine at first. I thought myself clever for a DIY conversion to US power supplies. And, well, one of the three handsets is functioning perfectly. The other two drained their batteries and will not charge them.

At first I thought it may just be a matter of some flaky rechargeable batteries. So I went to my local Radio Shack, which is more convenient than Fry’s, and bought some AAA size NiMH rechargeables to replace those provided by the manufacturer. No joy. A day later they’re discharged and the phones won’t charge them for some reason.

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