I no longer recommend using Asterisk’s Google Voice support — try these methods instead!

January 26, 2012 at 5:46 pm · Filed under Asterisk, AsteriskNOW, Editorial, Elastix, FreePBX, FreeSwitch, Obihai, Opinion, PBX in a Flash, Trixbox, VoIP, YATE ·Tagged , , ,

Not that anyone probably cares what I think, but anyone who regularly reads this blog (or any of the other VoIP-related that cover F—PBX and Asterisk) may have noticed that Asterisk’s support for Google Voice has become less and less reliable over time, particularly for incoming calls. You have to do all sorts of “tricks” to make it work, and these usually involve adding delays that don’t always fix the problem, inconvenience your callers, and possibly cause more hangups as people get tired of waiting for you to answer the phone.

Therefore, I suggest you stop using Asterisk’s Google Voice support completely. Assuming that you feel you must keep using Asterisk, then I suggest trying one or more of the following:

  1. Use an Obihai VoiP device as a gateway between Asterisk and Google Voice.  This works best if you only have one Google Voice account (unless you have more than one Obihai device).
  2. Install a minimal FreeSWITCH installation on your Asterisk server, and use FreeSWITCH as a bridge between Asterisk and Google Voice.  FreeSWITCH has far superior Google Voice support — the difference is like night and day.  Calls complete much faster in both directions!  This also lets you use multiple Google Voice accounts.
  3. Use Bill Simon’s Google Voice-SIP gateway to handle your Google Voice calls. Some people may not want to rely on an external service for this, while others may very much appreciate having the option. I mention it for those in the latter group.
  4. Use SipBri, IF you can actually create an account (it appears they don’t always allow new accounts to be created). See How to set up a SipBri account to make and receive Google Voice calls from an ATA or SIP device (or to use as a F***PBX trunk) and Link: SipBri: How to make Google Voice calls from any ATA. Again, this is just another option you could explore.
  5. You could also try setting up a gateway using YATE instead of FreeSWITCH, similar to #2.  YATE is what powers Bill Simon’s gateway (mentioned in #3), but so far I’ve not found anyone that’s published instructions for “doing it yourself” (but see Bill’s comment under this article).

At this point, any of those would likely produce better results than using Asterisk’s Google Voice support.  Maybe , some day, the Asterisk folks will wake up and try to figure out what all those other folks are doing that they aren’t, but for now, fixing Google Voice support seems to be a rather low priority for the folks at Digium.  Which means they probably never should have rolled it out in the first place, because once you add a feature people sort of expect you to keep it up to date, and not let it languish into a state of “barely working, if it works at all”.

EVERYTHING in this article is my personal opinion.  Nothing here should be taken as a statement of fact.

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Why do people join fundamentalist religions? And why do they stay in them?

January 21, 2012 at 4:01 pm · Filed under Editorial, issues, Opinion ·Tagged , ,

Nag Hammadi texts

Image via Wikipedia

There are really three main reasons (and one minor one) that people become members of fundamentalist religions:

  1. They were born or adopted into a family where other members are adherents.
  2. They were scared into the religion (the “if you don’t join us you could spend eternity in a lake of fire” inducement).
  3. They were brought into it by people who pretended to love and care about them.  I will explain why I say pretended in a moment, but note that in most cases the people attempting to show love believe it to be genuine (nobody wants to think of themselves as a phony, after all).
  4. (The minority reason): A relative handful of people experience a genuine spiritual encounter of some kind (or at least they perceive it to be such), but often misinterpret it as a directive to affiliate with a particular religious group.

The main reasons people don’t leave such groups:

  1. They fear that their family would disown or shun them (this is often not an unfounded fear).
  2. They fear that if they leave they will be “lost” (again, the fear of the “lake of fire”, etc.)
  3. Their only friends are other members of that group, and they fear that if they left they would have few or no remaining friends.
  4. They fear the loss of the love and acceptance they once knew when they entered the religion.
  5. A small percentage may find an outlet in the church for their talents and creative energies (I don’t want to be mean, but a lot of mediocre singers have a captive audience every week at a small church somewhere).
  6. In extreme cases they may feel that they will be directly “punished” (by either deity or others) for leaving.

The main reasons people want to leave after they have been in the group for a while:

  1. They start to see hypocrisy in the group (they are told to live a certain way, but see that other members of the group live differently and often suffer no repercussions).
  2. They find that the love and acceptance they were initially shown was conditional, often upon them agreeing with the group and/or behaving a certain way.
  3. They may be asked to take an oath or make an affirmation that they are not comfortable with or do not agree with.  They may even be told that if they don’t follow through with this, they should leave the group.
  4. They may be asked to help bring others, such as friends and family, into the group.  At that point, they may realize that most of those people already have much happier and more fulfilling lives, and it would actually be doing them a disservice to induce them into the religion.  Or they may realize that they, themselves, are not truly happy and that the religion has not met their expectations, so how could they justify inducing others to join?  Yet they are continually pressured to “witness” to others.
  5. In some groups, they may see that the group actively practices hate or disdain toward certain groups.  This may even include other groups of the same faith with which they have minor doctrinal differences.
  6. They may discover that their religious leaders have lied to them or deceived them, or withheld important information from them (for example, many “Christian” churches don’t even mention the existence of the Nag Hammadi library to their members).
  7. They may discover that their religious leaders are living a lifestyle that the “lay” people would be condemned for.  This is not just the common example of church leaders engaging in the very sexual practices that they preach against, but also church officials that live a life of relative luxury compared to those who are asked to contribute to their lifestyle.
  8. They may be asked to not only “tithe” a certain percentage of their income, but to give above and beyond that.  However, they may never know for certain that the money is being used for the reason it is being solicited, or for any good purpose.
  9. The group may ask them to participate in projects or rituals that seem (and often are) meaningless  In some cases these may be projects that ostensibly provide assistance to others, but there is no way to tell whether that assistance is reaching those who actually need it.
  10. They may start to research the history of their religion, or information on their religion’s beliefs or other information their religion from a “neutral” source (such as the Internet) and discover some disturbing facts or contradictions that don’t sit well with them.
  11. They may get tired of being told what they may and may not read, what they may and may not watch, and to some degree, what they may and may not think.
  12. They may find that they simply don’t like being coerced into attending religious functions at times they’d prefer to be doing something else, especially things that might make them feel happier and more fulfilled as persons.  Many people simply do not care for the traditional church service — there is absolutely nothing about it that appeals to them, except perhaps for the socializing that takes place before and after.
  13. They may find that in trying to raise their children in a manner approved by the church, other members of their family and others with whom they are forced to associate (not of their religion) may see them as cruel or abusive (or just crazy) parents.  In some cases that perception may be justified and in other cases it is not, but if a parent truly cares about their children, the perception that they are a horrible parent (by those not of their faith) may start to wear on them.  For example, many people would consider it emotionally abusive (with considerable justification) to instill a fear of a possible eternity in a lake of fire into a small child, yet many fundamentalist preachers have no problem doing this.
  14. A religious leader does something that truly offends them personally, such as the aforementioned scaring their children (to the point that the children are having nightmares), or telling them that a recently deceased relative is now spending an eternity in hell, or speaking against a beloved sibling or other family member who may happen to be gay, or may simply be a member of another faith or have no professed faith.
  15. In some cases they may discover that the leaders of the religious group have been abusing children (their own or someone else’s).  Any parent with half a brain and the smallest bit of conscience would get their family out of that group immediately and contact the appropriate authorities (and by authorities I do not mean other members of that religion, who may try to cover for the offender)!
  16. They may become troubled by the practice of taking scripture verses out of context (random verses from random places in the text) to basically form a doctrine out of thin air.  For example, most verses used to support tithing, if read in context, do not in any way indicate that believers are required to give a certain percentage of their income to a religious institution.  However, by taking individual verses out of context and stringing them together in a “creative” manner, preachers make the case for in effect stealing income from their followers under false pretenses.  This same practice is applied to create many other doctrines out of thin air (often relying on known mis-translations of certain verses).
  17. They may at some point become frustrated enough to earnestly pray that they be shown the absolute truth about their religion and those who practice it.  I just warn you, don’t pray for this if you really don’t want to know, because chances are you are not going to get the answers you expect.

My point is this:  I have found that most of the people you meet that are part of a religion, and that have been in it for a while are there because of inertia or fear.  Some relative newcomers are there because they feel that they are loved and accepted, but the problem with that is that in most cases the “love” and acceptance is extremely conditional.  If they are willing to adopt the teachings and opinions of the religious leaders and other members of that faith, then they may continue to experience a degree of love an acceptance, but they will never feel truly free to express any “variant” beliefs, or to say that they think the religion just might be wrong on some points.  On the other hand, someone who is more of a “free thinker” will usually find the “love and acceptance” gradually withdrawn, and if they become too “troublesome” they may be asked to leave the group.  I’ve seen people asked to leave a church simply because they disagreed on a minor point of doctrine (note that in some groups, there is no such thing as a minor point of doctrine.  There are even stories that churches have split over matters as insignificant as what color to paint the bathrooms!).

Unfortunately, people who are living in a constant state of fear will not be willing to accept the truth.  In fact, they won’t even want to hear any truth that contradicts what they have been taught.  When you try to show them the truth about their religion, they will react pretty much the same way you react when they hand you a tract about their religion (by the way, they use tracts because they are afraid to engage in actual conversation about what they believe — this is why, if they are going to hand you a tract, they usually do so at the last possible second before they end an encounter with you — they have been told by their religious leaders that they must “witness” to others, but realize that there is no way they can defend their beliefs in an honest discussion, so by passing a tract at the last second it lets them feel like they have at least “planted a seed” and done their duty, even if you throw the tract away the moment they leave.  In most cases the only way they will ever try to personally “witness” to anyone is if there are two or more of them, and only one of their intended targets present).

One of the reasons I have a link to Those Lazy Old Blokes of 1611 on my blog pages is to show that the fear that is pushed among “Christian” fundamentalists is founded on deliberate lies (in this case, a deliberately confused translation). But the people who most need to hear this information are often those most paralyzed by fear. They’ve been taught that they might go to hell for even entertaining a non-approved belief.  They are told not to read non-church-sanctioned books (the ones available at retail price in the church bookstore).  In many fundamentalist churches, they teach that going to the movies is “sinful.”  In other words, they like to tightly control what their followers read, see, and think, although that’s becoming a lot more difficult in this day of modern communications and the World Wide Web, and search engines that can bring you a multitude of views on just about any topic with just a few keystrokes.

I once (very briefly) went to a church where a preacher brought in an evangelist that basically destroyed the church. One of the things this evangelist taught was that if you spoke out against a preacher or an evangelist in any way, you were “touching god’s anointed” and therefore god might strike you dead (I use the small “g” because as I have pointed out in previous articles, I believe that the “god” of the old testament was an evil impostor, not the true God that most people think of as the creator of the universe, etc. As far as I am concerned, the “god” of the old testament was almost certainly a lesser “god” that might indeed destroy people on a whim, and often did if the old testament is to be believed, but it appears he’s departed the planet, or may not even be among the living by this point in time.  I’m not asking that you believe that, but that’s why I don’t use the capitalized “g” when referring to that “god”). Unfortunately, after the evangelist left, the preacher started teaching the same nutso stuff that the evangelist had taught, and therefore more and more people felt compelled (probably for the sake of their own sanity) to leave the church. The preacher then started accusing the other churches of “sheep stealing”, and then started accusing the “sheep” of stealing themselves!  This caused even more people to both speak out against the preacher (basically saying he’d flipped his lid) and to leave the church.  No deity (or entity pretending to be a deity) struck anyone dead in that case, but among those few who remained in that church the fear was palpable.  It’s amazing what people will endure because they are simply too fearful to question even the craziest teachings.

The reason I am bringing this stuff up now is twofold.  First, it appears that unless by some miracle Ron Paul becomes the Republican presidential candidate, the next U.S. presidential election will be a contest between a religious fundamentalist (or at least someone who panders to the fundamentalists) and a guy who has so far not kept most of his most important campaign promises, and has been a disappointment to many of those who voted for him.  I just want you who have never been part of a religious fundamentalist group to understand a bit of what makes those folks tick, so you can understand that they are often living in their own little world, and that you would not like it much if they had the force of government behind them to impose their beliefs on you or I.

And second, there are those who believe that 2012 is going to be a year that something big happens, that will cause humanity as a whole to become a more enlightened race, but that cannot happen as long as we are living under a fear paradigm.  Our religious leaders, our news media, our politicians, etc. at times seem to be pushing an agenda of fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear 24 hours a day.  What I found is that the two things that have most REDUCED my level of fear are leaving organized religion, and NOT watching major media newscasts.  Both of those entities seem to be trying to make people afraid, and the world looks a whole lot brighter when you don’t listen to them.  I’m not saying you should avoid the news altogether, but just be more selective and avoid sources that are constantly harping on the negative.  And, this might be a good year to just consider whether you want to continue to be part of your current religion, if you are still clinging to one.  Does it really serve you, or are you just serving it with no return, not even happiness?  Do you leave a house of worship feeling fearful, unsettled, or unfulfilled? Remember that you can (and many do) pray or meditate without being a part of any organized religion.  The dirty little secret of the churches is that you don’t need them — you can achieve spiritual growth, if that is your desire, without involving them at all. Even Jesus did not come to start churches (he preached against organized religion, when he said anything about it at all).

(P.S. I mentioned Ron Paul above only because, as far as I know, he is not a religious fundamentalist nor is he beholden to them).

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Very disturbing news today, but is everything as it seems on the surface?

January 19, 2012 at 6:37 pm · Filed under Editorial, government, Internet, issues, Legislation, Opinion, Security

After yesterday’s campaign to stop SOPA/PIPA, several Senators appeared to change their positions.

Then today, the news came through that various governments around the world participated in a concerted action to shut down a file sharing site called Megaupload (which lead Stop the Cap to ask, We Need SOPA Why?).

Then, almost within minutes of that news hitting the wires, there was news that the group “Anonymous” had attacked several prominent sites. I’m not going to name the sites but many of them are run by organizations that promote the interests of so-called “intellectual property” holders, and others are government sites. I don’t know who has accurate information on this at the moment, so I’m not going to repeat what others are claiming.

Thing is, I am getting just a little bit of that same sinking feeling I got on 9/11 when I saw World Trade Center building 7 fall on TV. The sequence of events just seems a little too clean, as if it were scripted this way. I won’t say much more than that just now, but anyone who is wondering where I’m going with this might want to read the Wikipedia entry on “false flag.” And then just keep in mind that even if the corporate media is quick to report that “Anonymous” is behind these attacks, they just might not be, particularly since probably anyone could claim to be a member of “Anonymous” – maybe even someone who is working for a Hollywood studio, or for that matter, some three-letter government agency.

Now, granted, maybe this is just my mind going into paranoia mode. I don’t know much about Megaupload or “Anonymous”, but I do believe that when things seem to happen in just a little too convenient of a sequence, it’s often because someone is pulling the strings. People of my generation should never forget how many young men were maimed or killed in an unpopular war that was mostly based on a lie (I’m talking about the Vietnam war, and the Gulf of Tonkin incident). Buffalo Springfield famously sang “paranoia runs deep; into your life it will creep.” But is it really paranoia if your worst fears turn out to be true?

Maybe I’m all wet and “Anonymous” really IS behind these attacks, but keep in mind that with a group like that, there is the question of who really speaks for them. Most of us, you and I (and probably most lawmakers and government officials) tend to accept that if someone is causing mayhem and they claim to be part of some group, they really are part of that group. But how can we know for sure? This might be a really good time to question that assumption. And that’s all I’m going to say (and please understand, I have NO inside knowledge; I wouldn’t know how to get in touch with “Anonymous” if my life depended on it, nor would I particularly care to).

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Link: Believe It Or Not: 7 Facts You’re Not Supposed To Know About Religion

January 19, 2012 at 1:05 am · Filed under Editorial, issues

Just a pointer to an article I enjoyed reading:

Believe It Or Not: 7 Facts You’re Not Supposed To Know About Religion

The interesting thing about this one is that it doesn’t focus on any one religion. It’s a rather quick read and you might actually enjoy it!

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Why do Western Digital hard drive power supplies leak so much AC voltage?

January 16, 2012 at 2:54 pm · Filed under electronics, hardware ·Tagged , , , , ,

We recently changed out a case on a computer power supply.  The new case is metal whereas the old one was plastic, and as I was plugging in a USB cable from a USB hub I got a shock.  Not only that, when I accidentally touched it to the bottom of the computer’s case, the computer power supply completely shut down and would not restart until I physically removed the power cord and plugged it back in.  Since this hub had worked just fine with the old case, it led me to wonder what the issue was.  I put a voltmeter on the shell of the USB cable and measured about 50 volts AC to ground!

To make a long story short, I have four external USB drives plugged into that hub and they are all Western Digital. Every single external hard drive had AC voltage on its USB cable shell (when disconnected from the hub), whereas no other devices had more than a volt or two.

That led me to disconnect the power supplies from each of the hard drives, at which point I made a, um, shocking discovery!

I measured the voltage from the power supply DC plugs to ground.  For this test I plugged them into an outlet on a totally different circuit from the one I plug my computers into, since a friend has suggested that the outlets might be miswired (hot and neutral reversed).  I tested for that possibility and that was not the case, but it was still easier to take them out to the kitchen for this test.  I photographed the results for three of them but a fourth gave similar results.  I’m sorry that the pictures are a bit blurry but if I’d used flash it would have washed out the LED display so the exposure times were a bit longer than I would have liked, given that my hand isn’t all that steady.

Western Digita Power Supply #1 - 44 volts leakage

Western Digita Power Supply #2 - 57 volts leakage

Western Digita Power Supply #3 - 44 volts leakage

EDIT: For a few hours after I first posted this, I had image #1 duplicated as #3. Sorry about that.

A few observations I noted while testing the voltage:

It didn’t matter which way the AC plug was inserted into the socket – the voltage was the same or very nearly the same (within a couple of volts) either way.

It didn’t matter whether I measured to the center or the shell of the DC plug – the voltage was exactly the same either way (this makes me think the leakage might be through a capacitor or capacitors, since otherwise there would be a DC short).

Whatever voltage I measured at the power supply found its way to the USB plug shell once the power supply was connected to the hard drive.

I measured this on FOUR different power supplies, all ones that came with Western Digital hard drives of various sizes. On three I got the 44 volt reading and on one I got 57 volts.

If it were just one or two power supplies doing this, I’d suspect a flaw in that power supply. But since every single one of them is doing it, I have to think it is something inherent in the design of the switching power supplies used with external hard drives. For some reason this never caused any problem with my old computer or case but this new one (new case) can get really strange if you connect or disconnect the USB hub while it is running and the power cable is connected. I just hate the fact that there is this much stray AC but it must be a problem specific to the hard drive power supplies so I don’t think there is anything I can do about it.

I don’t know of any way to correct this problem, or even if it really is a problem. But I REALLY don’t like it!

By the way, I don’t mean to impugn Western Digital specifically, it’s just that right now all four of the external drives connected to this particular computer are WD’s.  I do NOT know whether or not this problem affects power supplies that come with other makes of hard drives (if anyone wants to test yours and post the results in a comment, I’d appreciate it, but please don’t unless you have worked with electricity enough to know how to do the test safely, since I will not be responsible if you fry yourself or your equipment because you didn’t know how to do the test!).

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Google getting more obnoxious about demanding personal information, under guise of security?

January 16, 2012 at 2:00 am · Filed under Google+, Internet, issues, privacy ·Tagged , ,

I was trying to help someone set up a service the other day and they wanted an e-mail address. Since he didn’t really want to receive spam from them, he decided to provide an alternate Gmail account that he rarely uses. When he attempted to log into that Gmail account to get the validation message, he was greeted by this:

Google "Verify your account" page

The only problem was that he did not want Google to have his telephone number!  And to be honest, I don’t blame him.  So, I advised him to get a new e-mail account at GMX, which is pretty much what Gmail used to be back in the days when Google wasn’t quite as evil.

The thing is, Google could claim that there has been “unusual activity” on anyone’s account, including yours or mine.  And then you have the choice of either giving them a phone number, which is something you just may not want to do, or losing access to a Gmail address that (in some cases) you’ve had for years.  And if you have any other Google services tied to that account (such as Google Voice), you may lose access to those as well.

This really sucks, but it’s another example of Google just not giving a damn about their users.  They are apparently too big to care anymore.  I figured that out about the time they insisted that only “real” names could be used on their Google+ service, despite knowing that many people are known by an online persona other than the name on their birth certificate.  I was basically booted off Google+ for using “Michigan Telephone”, so now I just don’t use Google+ (in case you are wondering, I don’t use Facebook either, and I don’t understand why anyone would!).

I know that if you use the Internet at all, it’s hard to NOT use Google, but wherever possible, I recommend that you consider alternatives.  Remember the old saying about not putting all your eggs in one basket!

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DynDNS (mostly) discontinues free DNS service

January 15, 2012 at 2:28 pm · Filed under Dyndns, Internet, networking, No-IP

Dynamic DNS service selections in DD-WRTOver the years, many people have used DynDNS as a way to get a free domain name that will “track” their actual IP address, even if their ISP changes it.  Apparently that free ride has all but come to an end.  If you read the instructions that How-To Geek posted in their article How To Easily Access Your Home Network From Anywhere With DDNS, you will note that when you go to the DynDNS site now, it looks nothing like it did then, and the totally free option seems to have disappeared.

Apparently if you have an existing DynDNS account you can keep it as long as you don’t let it expire, but if you do let it expire or if you are trying to set up a new DynDNS account for yourself or someone else, the free option is no longer shown. It appears that now the only way to get a free DynDNS account is to sign up for a 14-day DynDNS Pro Free Trial and then cancel it before the free trial period is up. Then, “You may keep one hostname free of charge for trying the Pro Trial.” The problem with this is that you have to provide a major credit card to sign up for the trial. This will be a show stopper for many users (it definitely takes DynDNS off my list of recommended services).

I had recommended using DynDNS in my article, Using DynDNS to solve the problem of keeping a firewall open to remote users at changeable IP addresses. Now I sort of wish I had recommended someone else.

Some home routers support several Dynamic DNS services, and one of the most popular is No-IP. My guess is that they will be the main beneficiary of the decision by DynDNS to make their free service less accessible. I think they have been around nearly as long as DynDNS (if not longer) and I’ve not heard anything negative about them, so I now recommend you check out No-IP in preference to DynDNS, unless you enjoy having to give up your credit card information and then having to remember to cancel a “free trial” within an allotted timeframe.

To those router manufacturers that only offer DynDNS as a DDNS option, please consider adding No-IP (and maybe a few others) as a DDNS option in your next firmware upgrade.  Those that have replaced their router’s firmware with DD-WRT have the option to use DynDNS.org, freedns.afraid.org, ZoneEdit.com, No-IP.com, 3322.org, easyDNS.com, TZO.com, and DynSIP.org (or you can use another “custom” service). I do not know if all of those have a free service offering but I believe that most of them do. So, commercial router manufacturers could offer options other than DynDNS, and I hope they’ll consider doing so.

 

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PC Magazine review of Obihai OBi110 slightly misses the mark

January 14, 2012 at 2:14 pm · Filed under Editorial, Google Voice, Obihai, Opinion, Review, VoIP ·Tagged , , ,

EDIT (January 18, 2012): I see that this review has been revised to remove the incorrect information I pointed out below. Also, on January 15, Jill Duffy (the author of the article) e-mailed me to say that she was working with a contact at Obihai regarding a few of these points. She also thanked me for my letter.

In my lifetime one thing I have learned is that traditional dead-tree media are often some of the LEAST reliable places to go for information.  Even if they post some of their content online, they still seem to have a real issue with accuracy in their reporting.  I don’t care if it’s the local Daily Fishwrap or a national glossy magazine, they all seem to have a real problem with getting their facts straight.

The recent PC Magazine review of the Obihai OBi110 was no exception.  Besides the fact that they made it sound like the device was much more difficult to configure than it actually is, the article contained a couple of factual errors.  So, in response I fired off a message to Jill Duffy, the author of the article, and I wanted to share that with you.  This is what I wrote:

Date: January 14, 2012 1:46:51 PM EST
To: Jill Duffy (e-mail address available here)
Subject: Your OBi110 review contains a couple of factual errors

As one of the first people to review the OBi110 () and a long time user of both the OBi110 and the OBi100, I just wanted to let you know that your review contains a couple of errors

You wrote:

Your OBi110 is still not really ready to use, because there’s no service for it yet. Without a service, you can only call other OBi device owners, but only after you and the other person mutually agree to be in a “circle of trust,” basically, agreeing to allow calls between you (so that a random OBi user can never call you unsolicited).

Actually, that’s not true.  If you know another user’s OBi device number, you can call them from ANY other OBi device, even one that’s not yet been registered with the OBiTALK server.  This capability is available right out of the box, so to speak.  The “Circle of Trust” is used for a completely different reason —  to allows others to place calls through any service you may have connected to your OBi device.  This is primarily useful within families.  For example, say you have an OBi110 at home and a sibling that has moved to some other country.  If you gave that person an OBi110 (or OBi100) and put them into your “Circle of Trust”, they could place outgoing calls via the landline connected to your OBi110 (or any other service you have configured on that device, including Google Voice), thus potentially saving hundreds or thousands of dollars in international phone charges.

With a little tweaking of your OBi110′s dial plan, it would also be possible to send incoming calls to their OBi device, so someone could call a local number and the call would be forwarded through the OBiTALK network to the distant device.

You wrote:

Making calls with OBi is similar to making calls with Google Voice. Rather than directly dialing a number, you call your own OBi number from the phone, reach an automated voice answering service, and then follow a few prompts that allow you to dial out. It’s a little confusing at first, but once you use it a few times, it makes more sense.

I’m sorry to say that you REALLY missed it on that one.  Assuming you have configured your OBi110 correctly (using the OBiTALK portal), you are able to connect a traditional telephone set to the device’s PHONE port and place and receive calls via Google Voice.  I’ve helped set up at least half a dozen of these devices (probably more, but who’s counting) and in no case have we EVER had to use the process you described.  It’s as simple as picking up the phone and dialing the call, or someone calling you on your Google Voice number, and you pick up the phone and answer it!

Finally, as just a general comment, when I first got my original OBi110, configuration was still a little bit difficult, but since then they have greatly improved the OBiTALK portal and now I can get a new device working with Google Voice in about two or three minutes — it’s so simple a child could do it (particularly once they had done it a time or two).  It’s actually more difficult to configure the Google Voice service itself than it is the OBi110.  I will concede that the documentation that comes with the unit could stand improvement — in particular, they could probably include a “Quick Start Guide” to setting up the unit with Google Voice — but keep in mind that it was only about a month ago that Google Voice announced that their free service would continue through the year 2012.  Now that we know that the service will continue through at least the end of 2012, they may have more motivation to write some better documentation.

I still don’t know how you managed to set up your device and missed the simplicity of just hooking up a phone to place and receive calls, but may I humbly suggest you take a look at my series of reviews, particularly the one I linked in the first paragraph.  I do suggest using the OBiTALK portal to configure your device, and if you set that up for Google Voice, you should find that it “just works.”  And it’s FREE!  What more could you want?

(Disclaimer: I am not and have never been employed by Obihai, but about a year ago they did give me a free Obi110 and later an OBi100 for review purposes.  Best freebies I’ve ever received!)

===

That’s the e-mail I sent.  I don’t know if I will ever receive a response or if the author will ever amend her article, but at least I tried to set the record straight! EDIT: As noted at the top of this article, it appears that the incorrect information has been removed, and the author did respond to my e-mail.

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Interesting thread on integrating Speech to Text with Asterisk and PBX in a Flash

January 13, 2012 at 6:57 am · Filed under Asterisk, PBX in a Flash, software, VoIP ·Tagged , , ,

An old microphone

Image via Wikipedia

I just wanted to call your attention to this thread on the PBX in a Flash forum:

Exploring Speech to Text

This thread explores the possibility of adding a simple speech to text demo, and also discusses the possibility of transcribing e-mails to text.  It uses Google’s speech recognition service, and it is free to use.  I doubt you would be free to use it in any commercial application, but for those that just like to tinker with new capabilities for your Asterisk server, you might find this interesting.

I haven’t personally tried it yet, but I will say that if you are using some F—PBX based distro other than PBX in a Flash, you may need to remove the calls to the Flite speech synthesizer (or install Flite support).  I hate Flite (I think the voice quality sucks harder than a black hole — okay, maybe I exaggerate a little, but Cepstral voice synthesis is much better than Flite — unfortunately Cepstral is not free) so I’m not going to tell you how to install it.  Flite’s only used in the demo in the first post so if you are trying to do something else (such as attempt voicemail transcription, as discussed in the thread) you probably don’t need it anyway.

What would be nice would be the ability to dial a code, record a short message, and then have a transcription e-mailed to the address you use for voicemail notifications.  THAT is something I’d actually use on occasion!

EDIT: After posting this, I tried a basic installation on a NON-PBX in a Flash system.  Besides removing the references to Flite, I found I had to do the following:

  1. Change ownership of /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/speech-recog.agi to  asterisk:asterisk
  2. Install the perl modules mentioned in the “use” statements in /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/speech-recog.agi
  3. Install flac (some users may also need to install sox, but I had installed that previously).

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Updated two Obihai/VoIP-related posts today

January 8, 2012 at 5:12 pm · Filed under Asterisk, AsteriskNOW, Elastix, FreePBX, FreeSwitch, Google Voice, hardware, Linksys, Obihai, PBX in a Flash, Review, Security, Sipura, Telephone, Trixbox, VoIP ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

(If I could find an ideal image to put here, it would be the WordPress logo with voodoo pins in it. Read on to find out why…)

I just thought some of you might like to know that I updated two Obihai and VoIP-related posts on my blog today.

In my post, Review of the Obihai OBi110 VoIP device, Part 2: The OBiTALK portal, documentation, and using the device as an FXO port with Asterisk, I added information on how I configure a Service Provider account to work with Asterisk when using the OBiTALK portal. Basic stuff that most Obihai users could probably easily figure out on their own, but some folks might appreciate it.

Also, I updated my post “Link: Interesting security technique for Asterisk and FreePBX users (may work with other SIP-based PBX’s also) to show how to use a unique string found in every Obihai device’s SIP registration packets as the “knock” string to allow it to access your server, for those of you using The SunshineNetworks Knock or something similar as a security enhancement. Some other VoIP devices also send similar unique strings, though Linksys/Sipura devices apparently do not (if they do, I haven’t found them).

While editing that last post I discovered just how much WordPress hates any edits that include angle brackets (even if properly changed to their HTML entities) – it even trashes other parts of the article not even close to where you made your edits. WordPress is a great blogging platform 99% of the time, but then there are those occasions that have me screaming “WordPress, you’re a $^&%^&* piece of $^$&” at the top of my lungs (and damn near popping a blood vessel). That particular article is one that apparently breaks their editor good and proper if you try to edit it.

Hope these are useful to someone. If I drop dead in the next 24 hours I blame it entirely on WordPress!

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Top five articles in 2011 (and what might be coming in 2012)

January 4, 2012 at 8:56 pm · Filed under Blog, Editorial, Google Voice, Linux, Mac, Opinion, Ubuntu ·Tagged

WordPress sent me this lovely summary of the five most popular articles in 2011, so without further ado, here’s the articles you visited most often last year:

  1. Review of the Obihai OBi110 VoIP device, Part 1: Use your phone with Google Voice for free incoming and outgoing calls
  2. How to install Midnight Commander under Mac OS X (the easy way, using Rudix)
  3. How to install NX server and client under Ubuntu/Kubuntu Linux (revised)
  4. How to use Google Voice for free outgoing calls on an Asterisk/FreePBX system (the easy way)
  5. How to use Google Voice for free calls on an Asterisk 1.8+/FreePBX 2.8 system (the easy way)
They also tell me that, “Most visitors came from The United States. Canada & The United Kingdom were not far behind.”  I guess that should not be surprising, since this blog is written in English!

With regard to the top five list, I guess what’s a bit frustrating to me is that the second and third articles on the list are what I call “the articles that refuse to die.”  They were things I wrote “way back when” that year after year continue to get a lot of hits.  Apparently there are a LOT of people who still want to know how to install Midnight Commander on their Macs (and if so, I hope they are reading the comments under that post, because that’s where the current solutions are mentioned) and another significant group pf people who want to know how to install an NX server under Ubuntu/Kubuntu Linux.  That one particularly surprises me, both because I would never have suspected there was that much interest in that topic, but also because at least some folks are saying those instructions still work, despite the fact that they were written a LONG time ago (back when Dapper Drake was the current Ubuntu version, if I recall correctly).

The fact that the Obihai review is #1, or that three of the articles in some way deal with Google Voice, does not surprise me.  Many readers of this blog seem to have an interest in Google Voice, even if it occasionally frustrates the hell out of us (at least those of us trying to make it work with Asterisk).  Assuming I don’t drop dead or stop blogging, you can probably expect to see more on both the Obihai devices and Google Voice this year (not that I have anything in the immediate pipeline; I just expect those subjects to stay popular).

What I’ll almost certainly be writing less about is Asterisk (their lack of attention to the problems with their gvoice channel driver means maybe I shouldn’t pay as much attention to them anymore) and F—PBX.  In the case of the latter, it’s like a bad divorce — I wish I’d never heard of it, and I want as little to do with it as possible, and at this point there is nothing anyone can say or do that will ever make me like it again.  So, under the “if you can’t say something nice” theory (not that it ever stopped me in the past), you won’t be seeing much if anything about that here anymore.

I do plan to continue writing some of my occasional opinion pieces.  I know, a lot of you hate them, but nobody forces you to read them and I just feel like I have to get some of this stuff out from time to time.  From time to time I get somewhat angry about the fact that we are lied to so often by the people we were taught to trust while growing up.  That especially includes religious leaders, and people in the medical field (I would include government officials and politicians, but I came of age during the Vietnam war, so I never really trusted them to begin with).  If writing about this stuff helps relieve my anger, and maybe helps educate the few of you who are not totally turned off by it, then it’s worth it in my book.

I know that probably 90% of the people out there seem to want to be lied to, and go out of their way to avoid truth, particularly uncomfortable truth that challenges their preconceived beliefs.  If you are one of those people, I suggest you skip my articles tagged with “opinion”.  I know it may seem strange that I’m using the words “truth” and “opinion” interchangeably here, but it should be obvious that what one person believes to be the absolute truth is very often seen by another person as a wrongheaded opinion.  That’s part of the reason we can’t all get along, because we never have and probably never will all agree on what is true (at least not in this plane of existence).  And even what we believe can change over time — I used to believe, as do many people, that most of what is in the Bible is true.  But, having obtained better information during my lifetime, I now believe that at best most of the Bible is bad copies of earlier writings, with edits made to enhance the ability of the early church/state to put people under their control (and to support the idea that there was only one “god”, which is patently untrue if you go by any of the earlier writings), and at worst it’s a pack of lies.  Obviously, that puts me at odds with the self-righteous prig who thinks I’m going to hell for not believing that every word of it was written by the hand of deity (but only if you have the King James Version, of course).

I’m now even comfortable in saying that I believe the “god” of the old testament was an evil bastard — or perhaps more likely, several evil bastards — that were probably aliens or interdimensional beings of some kind (anyone who honestly reads the old testament would almost be forced to agree), whereas twenty years ago I would have been scared to death to think that our “heavenly father” could have ever been anything other than good and kind.  Such thoughts still came, but back then I tried to banish them from my mind as quickly as possible (of course such thoughts had to be coming from “the devil”, just like rock and roll, and anything the church didn’t happen to approve of).  I know that just saying such things causes some folks to get red in the face, and wish that “god” would strike me down with fire and brimstone, but I would hope this blog appeals to a more intellectual crowd, that is willing to every so often take out their deeply held beliefs and re-examine them in the light of new archaeological discoveries and new evidence.  If you are not such an open-minded person, you can always skip the opinion articles, or find another blog to read.

Anyway, some people believe this will be the year that everything changes.  I’m not nearly convinced enough of that to sell everything and go sit on a mountaintop, but I would like to see the power of those with evil intentions broken once and for all.  Some people claim that’s already happening, but so far I haven’t seen any evidence of that in day-to-day life (we still haven’t seen any virtually free energy devices on sale at Home Depot — yet).  But I am hopeful that perhaps this will be the year that things start to change for the better!  And I also hope that this year we’ll see some exciting new developments in technology, particularly technology relating to VoIP and telecommunications.

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Happy New Year – It’s THE year we’ve been waiting for?!?!

January 1, 2012 at 12:01 am · Filed under Editorial, history, Opinion, quantum communications ·Tagged ,

A Bold GNU Head

No, I didn't say "Happy GNU Year!" (Image via Wikipedia)

Ask any ten different people what they expect will happen in 2012 and you’ll probably get ten different answers.  But “everyone knows” by now that 2012 is the end of the Mayan calendar, or something like that.  A lot of people think that means something big is going to happen, but nobody is sure exactly what.  We know it is an election year here in the United States and so far it seems as though the best way to qualify as a candidate, at least on the Republican side, is to be borderline insane and maybe slightly dangerous.  No longer can you get by with simply being dumber than a bunch of rocks; now you have to actually be a little crazy.

The thing is, if you have taken a good hard look at the real origins of humanity — which is not the condensed and heavily edited version that appears in your King James Bible — you start to understand why this all happens.  I won’t go into that right now (many of you just aren’t ready for that level of knowledge, I’m afraid) but if you want to know, you can read William Bramley’s “The Gods of Eden” and/or Zecharia Sitchin‘s “The Lost Book of Enki”, among other books on the topic (if you enter those titles into a YouTube search, you will probably find enough videos to give you the gist of what they are about, then you can decide if you are ready for them yet).  If you have read either of those, then some of the speculations about what might happen in 2012 start to make more sense.  For the record, I am really skeptical about Sitchen’s postulation that there is a large 12th planet in our solar system that we don’t know about, but to me it almost seems as though by putting that preposterous claim front and center, he was able to get away with saying a lot of other things about our ancient history that he might not have been able to say otherwise.

Anyway, here’s just a few of the speculations about 2012 that I have heard:

- The end (or effective end) of the world (this includes destruction by solar flare, coronal mass ejection, comet, meteor, asteroid, the planet Nibiru, some other planet or moon, etc., or an electro-magnetic pulse that destroys all our technology, effectively putting us back to the stone age).  Sorry, not buying that one.  I think if 2012 was the end of the world we’d have already started to see signs of that.  And yes, I realize that as I type this it is 40 degrees outside and we have no snow on the ground — in Michigan!  But that’s really not that unusual (if history holds, we are going to get buried in January, February, and March).

- A transformation of people into some form of higher consciousness (in effect, something akin to the “rapture” that some Christians in name only believe in).  I’d actually love to believe this could happen, but somehow I suspect that my chances of getting hit by lightning, ten times on the same day, are probably better!  As a people we may evolve to higher consciousness someday, but given what human nature is today, I just don’t think most of us are nearly evolved enough (but I would love to be proven wrong on that!).

- Disclosure of the existence of UFO’s.  Look, people, if you are waiting for an official acknowledgment my only question is, what rock have you been hiding under?  The president is not going to walk out onto a stage and proclaim that UFO’s exist, but government agencies worldwide have been leaking information for years now, and various “whistleblowers” have confirmed that UFO’s and even alien/interdimensional beings exist (search for “The Disclosure Project” and watch their 2001 news conference video on YouTube if you haven’t already).  For those who really want to know the truth, a simple acknowledgement that UFO’s exist isn’t going to cut it (though it would certainly change the level of public discourse on the subject, which is why I guess some people want it so bad).  What I REALLY want to know is, where do they come from and why are they here, and which alien race is it, exactly?  (If it’s the Annunaki, we might all be in trouble!)

- A collapse of the worldwide banking/monetary system (some who predict this hope it will be replaced by a much better system).  I actually could believe this one, but whether it would be a welcome change or not depends on how it plays out.  Our current system has become pretty corrupt, but keep in mind that we’ve been sold on the idea of change before, only to have our dreams yanked away the way Lucy yanks the football away from Charlie Brown.

- A revolt against big corporations and the politicians that are in the pockets of same.  This is sort of what the “Occupy” movement is about, but it seems like that has sort of fizzled in many areas (particularly the colder climates).  Will it come back with a vengeance in the spring?  Darned if I know.  If you’ve read many of my past posts you know I would be positively ecstatic to see the end of corporate influence in American politics.

- Americans put in concentration camps (although they would not be called that).  Do I believe some people in our government are evil enough to do this?  Without a doubt!  What I DO have doubts about is whether our military would willingly participate.  I actually think we are sort of at a “tipping point” — if sanity prevails, and the goals of the “Occupy” movement and other reform-minded movements succeed, then America could once again become a great nation.  However, if the big corporations, corrupt politicians, and evil, treasonous judges have their way, America could start looking a lot like Germany under a guy with a Charlie Chaplin moustache.   Some web sites would tell you we are there already but realistically we are not (unless there are secret gas chambers somewhere that none of us know about), however 2012 may well be the year that determines the future of at least America, and probably much of the world, for years to come.

- Something that will blow the lid off of the lies the various religions and churches have been telling for centuries, and/or a major archaeological discovery that will prove once and for all that the ancient peoples has technology equal or superior to ours.  Yeah, and if they did find that, do you really think they would tell us?  Even today, most people are in denial about the contents of the Nag Hammadi Library, and that was discovered in 1945!

- A breakthrough in “free”/cheap energy.  The thing is, I firmly believe we already have this, but it has not been released to the public in order to protect the profits of the oil industry.  Have you ever notice that people who develop free/cheap energy devices in their garages have a tendency to turn up missing or dead?  Part of the problem is that everyone who develops such a thing wants to keep it secret and patent it (if they can even get a patent) and try to become rich, not realizing that is the quickest route to seeing the technology buried.  What they should do is publish their plans far and wide on the Internet, from multiple sites in multiple countries, so the plans cannot be suppressed.  Of course, even if the plans were actually valid, that doesn’t mean anyone would be allowed to build one.  I actually think that unless things change a lot here in the good old USA, when we do see such a breakthrough it’s going to come out of some nation where we least expect it, or at least a nation that’s not aligned with the USA.  And that will be sad, because sooner or later people will realize that we had it here, and could have been reaping the benefits of it for many years, were it not for the influence of the petroleum and other traditional energy lobbies.

- An enhancement of human abilities/lifespan.  Whether due to that raise in consciousness that some are hoping for, or through scientific and genetic research, I have no doubt whatsoever that eventually humans will be enhanced in some way (assuming that the end-of-the-world predictions don’t come true).  This could be a mixed blessing, however.  Would you really want to live a thousand years or more if you could?  Maybe on some planet, but not on this one (the way things are now), is the way I feel about it.

- An enhancement of human spirituality.  This and the previous one are sort of like equal but opposing forces.  The more we depend on technology and science, the less spiritual we become.  For example, there are some who believe that everyone could heal themselves and others with only the power of their mind (this is why prayer sometimes works, regardless of the actual beliefs of those doing the praying) but if we depend on modern medicine and the pharmaceutical industry (both of which, in my opinion, have become much more evil in the past century) then we tend to let the spiritual side of us atrophy.

That’s a summation of just a few of the predictions I have heard.  Will any of them actually come to pass, or will we be sitting here a year from now thinking, “this year sure turned out to be a disappointment!”?  Just remember the old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times!”  And for better or worse, I have a feeling we are entering a very “interesting” year!

Oh, and what about the year in telecommunications and VoIP, you ask?  Well, I have a feeling that we are going to see more breakthroughs in that technology soon.  Remember that it was only about a decade ago that commercial VoIP even started to catch on, and only about two decades ago that a few people started to be able to access the Internet from their homes (anyone remember Michnet?).  I’m still hoping that the principle of quantum entanglement well be further developed so that we no longer need to rely on wires, fiber optics, or cables, nor on traditional electromagnetic (radio) waves, to have communications between two points.  All you should need is a few pairs of “entangled” particles, and a way to change their state at one end and read the change at the other (and vise-versa).  When that is developed commercially, it’s going to blow all existing means of communications right out of the water.  Maybe 2012 will be the year we see a major announcement in that field?  I certainly hope so!

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Happy Boxing Day! Did you celebrate anyone’s birthday yesterday?

December 26, 2011 at 1:12 pm · Filed under Editorial, issues, Opinion ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

Boxing gloves

What do you mean, it's not that kind of boxing? (Image via Wikipedia)

Bible scholars (those that aren’t batshit crazy, that is) pretty much agree that Jesus probably was NOT born on December 25, if only because it’s highly unlikely that shepherds would have been out watching their flocks at night in mid-December.  So, where did we get the December 25 date from?  Leave it to the British quiz show QI to spill the beans:

Now of course, if your thinking is as out of the box as mine (or if you have read William Bramley’s book, “The Gods of Eden”) you may realize that it’s entirely possible that the same “script” was used to set up the lives of two different individuals in the past (remember my comment the other day about how it’s not really prophecy if you plan to do something, reveal your plan to one or more chosen “prophets”, and then later on follow through on that plan — well, nobody says you can’t use the same plan twice).  It’s just that as far as the December 25 date goes, I think that might have been assigned to Jesus a few centuries after his birth, by a church hierarchy that wanted to convince the masses that they didn’t really have to give up their all of their cherished pagan traditions even if Christianity (in name only) was now the “official state religion.”

And anyway, I may be wrong, but somehow I suspect that the Jesus that drove the money changers out of the temple would not think much of the way we celebrate his supposed birthday (see: “If You Are Poor, It’s Because God Hates Your Guts” — and yes, that title is dripping with sarcasm).

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The biggest error in thinking of many employers?

December 24, 2011 at 11:42 am · Filed under business ethics, Editorial, Opinion ·Tagged , , ,

“If I want to make my employees feel happier/more rewarded/valuable/part of the team, all I need to do is give them a raise.”

Now, especially in these hard economic times, I’m certainly NOT saying that employers should be stingy with raises and rewards. What I am saying, though, is that those are not always sufficient to motivate employees to do better, or to change a surly employee into a happy one.

“I give you a paycheck! Isn’t that enough motivation?”

If any employee were honest, they tell you that no, it isn’t. A paycheck alone just about guarantees they will put in the minimum effort to avoid being fired, sometimes less. Your employees would never tell you that, of course, but if they thought they could be honest and not be fired for insubordination or bad attitude, that’s what many of them would say.

The thing is that even if you start out loving your job, getting a paycheck to do what you love does NOT guarantee you’ll be happier – in fact, just the opposite. I refer you to this article:

The Overjustification Effect (You Are Not So Smart)

The point of the article is that if you can find employment doing what you love, chances are you won’t love it anymore, especially if you see the paycheck as your new primary motivation.

I have found this so true in my own life. When I got my first computer (a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I), I used to enjoy trying to write programs in BASIC. Then I got a job as a computer operator at a small business. While most of my job was mundane stuff like feeding the correct paper into a printer, starting and stopping jobs, and doing backups, there were times I was called upon to write an occasional program — and yes, it was in BASIC, though a variation of BASIC not all that similar to the one used on the TRS-80. This was actually before the days of most commercial software.

What I discovered was that my employer would ask if I could write a program that would automate some small task he’d been doing by hand, using pencil and calculator. The first few times it was easy. But each time he realized what the computer could do, he’d want to add on more functionality, and about half the time his new request would require almost a complete rewrite of the program. And, he had essentially purchased an “orphan” minicomputer (translation: A computer as large as a home furnace, with far less processing power than any handheld device available today), which meant there was virtually ZERO commercial software available — otherwise he could have bought any off the shelf spreadsheet program (in other words, Visicalc) and accomplished most or all of what he wanted.

Life circumstances intervened and I had to leave that job sooner than either of us would have preferred, but by the time I was through I had really started to hate programming. When I could do it on my own time and no one was pressuring me to get it done in a certain amount of time, it was sort of fun. When I was getting paid to do it and my employer wanted it a week from now, and I would spend hours chasing down one or two bugs and losing sleep trying to figure out why the dumb program was producing the wrong result (sometimes it was my fault, other times it was buggy floating-point math in the underlying system), it was definitely NOT fun — in fact, to say I began to hate it would be an understatement.

The ONE thing that made the job bearable was that my employer frequently expressed how much time and effort my small programs were saving him. I never made big money there (it was a really small firm, and he had paid WAAAAY too much for that minicomputer to start with, so I think he was already in hock to his eyebrows for that thing) but the fact that I knew that my efforts were appreciated was more of a factor than my paycheck in my willingness to spend those extra hours (often working until dawn, then coming back at 5 PM for another all-nighter) chasing down bugs and rewriting the program.

At this time of the year, we are bombarded with variations on Dickens, basically implying that the tightwads of the world will get theirs in the end. And that may be true, but many people often miss the other point of such stories, which is that the Scrooge-like character is often a foul-tempered, mean-spirited beast that couldn’t pay anyone a sincere complement if their life depended on it. And after their “conversion”, their whole nature changes (sort of like what happens to many people who’ve had near-death experiences in the real world). If your takeaway from some stories is that the “Scrooge” turned into a more generous person, you’re only getting about half the point. The old saying “money isn’t everything” is true – it’s definitely one component to happiness for many people, but it’s NOT the only one. You can be very well off and very unhappy, if the people in your life do nothing but tear you down and constantly demand more.

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Why newspapers are becoming irrelevant

December 23, 2011 at 3:44 pm · Filed under Editorial, issues, Opinion ·Tagged

Newspapers B&W (4)

Actually, there are several reasons newspapers are becoming irrelevant, but I can tell you one in particular.  They have not learned something that every webmaster learns sooner or later (hopefully sooner), and that is, you don’t give the trolls free rein over your comment section.

I don’t know if it’s that newspapers pride themselves on being the last bastions of freedom of speech or what, but the problem is that they will publish a quite reasonable article about some person or event, and then it seems like every mental patient in the country descends on the comments section to viciously attack the person or event at the heart of the story.  No comment is too savage; no remark is too cruel.

I read an article today which I will NOT link to because I do not wish to give either that newspaper nor its asinine commenters any additional exposure.  I hope both the paper and those commenters (the ones that were maliciously cruel, that is, and in this case that would be about 90% of them) all die in a fire, so to speak.  I mean, I don’t really wish them that kind of death, but if by some circumstance they actually did die that way, I would say it’s their karma catching up with them.

What REALLY ticks me off is when commenters start attacking young children.  You would think the papers would have the good sense to at least moderate out those kinds of comments, but apparently they do not.

If you enjoy wading through a cesspool of toxic waste, then you might enjoy the comment sections on most newspaper sites.  I am of the age where I remember the time when almost every family subscribed to a local paper (and argued over whether the advice given by Dear Abby or Ann Landers was right on, or a bunch of B.S.) but back then the papers generally had no hesitation about ignoring “letters to the editor” that had a decidedly uncivil tone, or that conveyed the idea that the writer might only have one foot in reality.  At this point I would never spend a dime on a paper, let alone the dollar or so they charge nowadays.  If they want to be the putrid press, where every asshole gets their say, then so be it, but they have completely lost my respect, and I do not shed a single tear when I see that a newspaper (especially one that’s part of a major newspaper chain) has ceased publication.

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Republic Wireless becomes cheapest unlimited wireless service

December 23, 2011 at 9:47 am · Filed under Wireless ·Tagged , , , ,

The deal is this:  You pay $199 for the first month of service, which includes a new LG Optimus smartphone.  After the first month, you pay $19 per month, plus tax. For that, you get “Unlimited minutes, data, & text – No contracts or early termination fees – No overages, ever!”

The company apparently tries to send calls via a Wi-Fi connection where available, and in the past they’ve apparently attempted to force customers to make sure that a certain percentage of calls went via Wi-Fi (rather than over Sprint’s network, which is the fallback option), with a “fair use policy.”  But as of this morning, the “fair use policy” is apparently gone, and customers get unlimited service with no restrictions, or at least that’s what’s being reported here:

Republic Scraps Their Fair Use Provision (DSLReports.com)

Unlimited Cellphone $19/mo. (PBX in a Flash forum)

I suppose a lot of folks will think twice about that first month cost (although the fact that you get an Android-based phone probably makes that a lot more palatable) but the “unlimited minutes, data, and text” will certainly be attractive to many users.  Just keep in mind that no contract means that they can change the terms of the offer at any time, and if too many people fail to offload enough of their traffic to Wi-Fi to make the service financially viable they may be forced to raise the monthly rate at some point down the road.

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Link: Horror Stories From Tough-Love Teen Homes

December 15, 2011 at 5:39 am · Filed under Editorial, issues, Opinion ·Tagged , , , , ,

If you are not yet convinced that many Christian (in name only) fundamentalists are truly sick, demented individuals, here is an article that should give you pause:

Horror Stories From Tough-Love Teen Homes

What REALLY makes me mad is that if you or I, as parents or grandparents, treated our kids or grandkids even one 0ne-tenth as abusively as these teen homes treat kids, Child Protective Services would be all over us like flies on shit.  Yet places like this are allowed to exist in the United States of America, and they hide behind “freedom of religion” as a way to escape investigation and punishment.  And where the hell is the mainstream news media when this stuff goes on?

I personally believe that the god of the old testament was not what most people think of when they think of God, but was in fact an imposter, an EXTREMELY vile and evil being that probably came from another planet or dimension.  Any God that truly loved his creation would have stepped in by now and stopped some of the abuses that are happening in his name.  And don’t even say those folks will be punished in the future – the suffering is happening here, right now, on this earth, and either the god of the old testament no longer has any power to do a thing about it or he just doesn’t give a damn, assuming he’s even still alive (which there’s a good chance he isn’t, because the ancient texts say that the “gods” started aging a LOT faster once they arrived on this planet.  They were never immortal to begin with, but only appeared so due to their extremely long lifespans compared to us, but there’s something about our planet that shortened their lifespans, which is probably why they eventually departed).

And for those who wonder what I think about Jesus, I will just say this much – we don’t really know that much about him because the original Christians (who had much different beliefs than today’s Christians in Name Only – for one thing, many of them accepted reincarnation as part of the natural cycle of death and life) pretty much disappeared after Constantine basically pulled a stunt worthy of a George Orwell novel, and effectively renamed the paganism of the time as Christianity and made it the new state religion (it might be more correct to say he and other religious leaders of that time put a thin Christian veneer over the old paganism, which is why old pagan festivals like winter solstice and the spring fertility festival became Christmas and Easter).  And there is no reason to believe that those folks did not heavily edit and revise what later became the Bible.  I know, the fundies have one verse they fall back on (written by the fake apostle Paul) that says that all scripture is inspired by God, but anyone could say that everything they write is inspired by God, yet that would not make it so.  And anyway, inspiration is not the same as dictation (inspiration leaves a lot of room for the writer to add his own views and opinions before setting quill to parchment) and then there is the small matter that when new testament writers referred to “scripture”, they were probably referring to the Jewish Torah, not their own writings! And to top it all off, there is nothing in that verse that says that scripture will not or cannot be revised after it has been written, by those with evil intent.  Sometimes leaving out one verse or changing one word can make a huge difference in the meaning of a section.

I am not one of those atheists that insists that neither a true God nor Jesus ever existed, but I just think that the entire Christian religion has been corrupted and perverted (and I use that last word very deliberately) over the centuries.  Many people who attend churches today are being led by some very evil, sick people and they don’t even realize it.  They keep looking for the coming of the antichrist and false prophet (to fulfill prophecy – see below) without realizing that if such things exist, they are more likely to be some prominent “Christian” leaders that they love and trust, than some beings that come at them out of a pit somewhere.  Anyway, I can accept that perhaps Jesus was a spiritually enlightened being that may even have had some advanced technology at his disposal, but I’m starting to have a real problem with going much beyond that because again, if he is a God (or a part of the “one true God”, as many believe, again because of things the fake apostle Paul wrote, and not things that Jesus himself said) then why has he allowed so many atrocities to be committed in his name, by people who have the unmitigated gall to say they are followers of him?

(That question is NOT an invitation for some fucktard “Christian apologist” to post a response trying to justify the sins of the church, or the inaction by the “god” of Christianity in the face of unspeakable evil, to which he sometimes was an instigator or a participant).

I think maybe we may be reaching the point (if not now, within a generation or two) where the Constitution may need to be revised.  What most people want now is not freedom OF religion, it is freedom FROM religion, and there is a huge difference.  Religious people should not be able to impose their beliefs on the rest of society, not should they be exempted from the laws and regulations (and, yes, taxes) that apply to everyone else in society.  I’m not saying the government should be able to just shut down churches (unless there are significant violations of the laws we all have to live by taking place), but why would the government want to?  Freedom of speech and freedom of association would still protect most churches, but we need to be able to put an end to some of the despicable practices that are now not investigated nor prosecuted because government officials are too afraid of stepping on someone’s freedom of religion.

(By the way, I will leave you with a thought about prophecy.  Let’s just for a moment pretend that you are an evil alien being with a very long lifespan, and you have a long-term plan for the Earth that at times includes some form of death or destruction.  Then you use your advanced technology to beam graphic images of what you plan to do into the head of someone who is gullible enough to think of themself as a prophet.  Centuries later, you (from your position off-world) set in motion events that will bring your plan to fruition.  You will have then convinced a certain segment of people that your chosen “prophet” actually had the gift of prophecy, and a smaller subset of those people will be convinced that everything that “prophet” said, whether about the future, religion, morality, etc. must be correct.  Of course, maybe you might choose to deliberately lie to your chosen “prophet” about some of those things, but as long as you step in at appropriate times and make sure you do your part to see that at least some of your “prophecies” (plans) are fulfilled, people will become convinced that everything the “prophet” says must be true.  Of course, something may happen to stop you from completing your evil plan, but that the people who believe the prophecies won’t know that, and they may keep repeating the no-longer-relevant prophecies for centuries.  The point is, you as an individual have no way of knowing if someone has a true gift of prophecy, or if they are just repeating some long-term plans that were whispered to them, so to speak.  But either way, even if a prophecy is fulfilled, that does NOT necessarily make that “prophet” an authority on matters of religion or morality.)

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It’s official: Free calling within the US and Canada through 2012

December 13, 2011 at 8:07 pm · Filed under Asterisk, Google Voice, VoIP, VOIP News

This short but oh-so-sweet post appeared in the Google Voice Blog:

Free calling within the US and Canada through 2012

Tuesday, December 13, 2011 | 9:24 AM

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(Cross-posted from the Gmail blog)

As the holiday season approaches, we’re happy to announce that we’ve extended free domestic calls within the US and Canada for 2012. This is our way of helping you connect with friends and family across the country. And you can still call the rest of the world from Gmail at our insanely low rates.

Posted by Vincent Paquet, Group Product Manager

So, another year of free “almost but not quite” phone service!  Now we can hope that perhaps the folks at Digium will be motivated to fix the Gtalk channel driver in Asterisk!

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Why is is so difficult/expensive to detect a simple switch closure?

December 13, 2011 at 9:43 am · Filed under Asterisk, Editorial, FreeSwitch, hardware, Opinion ·Tagged , , , ,

USB ConnectorIf you go on eBay and search for items with USB in the title, you will find thousands of items that do all sorts of complicated things for under $5 or $10.  What you WON’T find, at least at any reasonable price, is a device that will let you simply connect a pair of wires and determine if a connected switch is opened (nearly infinite resistance) or closed (nearly zero resistance).  It’s as if all the designers of USB devices were so obsessed with doing complicated things that they never stopped to think that someone might want to do the simplest possible thing – monitor a switch to see if it’s open or closed.

Heck, if they simply MUST make it complicated, put a USB plug on one side and an 8-pin RJ-45 style jack on the other side and allow the simultaneous monitoring of four pairs of wires (four switches) using standard RJ-45 pairing (as would be used with Cat 6/5e/6 wiring into such a plug).  Or include two such jacks to allow monitoring up to eight pairs.  Or put an LED bar on the device to visually show which switches are closed.

Then all we need to know is how to read the state of the switch closure(s) using software.  This should be possible using a shell script or program written in a higher level language.

Asterisk or FreeSWITCH PBX users could use such a device to trigger which announcement to play if a custom extension is called.  For example, by connecting a simple thermostat, you could play a different recording depending on whether a room temperature is normal or abnormal.  By using a microswitch, you could play a different announcement depending on whether a door is opened or closed (call your home and easily determine if you forgot to close the garage door, for example).

This type of device certainly ought to be possible.  After all, many UPS’s use a USB connection to indicate whether the UPS is running on the battery or not.

I just can’t understand why you can’t buy an inexpensive USB device to do this simplest of functions.  I know, you can buy expensive devices that cost hundreds of dollars that will perform this function, but why, when you can buy USB devices that do far more complicated functions for under ten bucks, finding something that will inexpensively detect simple switch closures is like looking for unobtainium!

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Link: Google popups are saying: “Calls to the U.S. and Canada are free in 2012″

December 9, 2011 at 12:38 pm · Filed under Google Voice, VoIP, VOIP News

Image representing Google Voice as depicted in...

Image via CrunchBase

I refer you to this thread in the Google Voice help forum:

Will we know if GVoice calling through gmail will be free in 2012?

While this may not be “official” enough for some, it is encouraging for those of us who have been wondering if Google Voice would continue their free service into 2012.

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