A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way » Telephony

Stuff I Want But Don't Need — grab bag

john — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 03:59:30 +0000

Clickjacking. Pretty ugly form of attack.
Self-powered wireless light switches. Pretty cool, instead of running line voltage to every lightswitch, they harness ambient power and send wireless signals to outlets. Now if you just combine this with…
…Dirt-powered lamps! Or bacteria powered lamps. Way cool
Rich’s guide to your basic canon lens set, if you are willing to spend $4-5K on lenses
Charging station designs to hide cables. Hate dangling cables.
Combo phone/keyfob. Damn I wish this problem would get solved for real.
Probably too little too late, but a nice home phone base station with web/wifi functionality.

Need a fax service for a couple months

john — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 17:01:57 +0000

I don’t want to sign a long term contract or pay a jillion dollars. A quick scan of options:

RapidFax. 7.95 a month, 150 pages. 30 day free trial
efax. 30 day free trial, but 16.95 a month and only 130 pages. and per page overage charges look higher. I guess you need to pay for all their advertising
Myfax. $10 a month, 30 days free, 100-200 pages included
faxzero. Free limited sending with ads on cover page, no reception
Ringcentral. $10 a month, 300 pages included, low price for overage pages
fax.com. Annoying hostess started talking to me on the home page, i ran away
Packetel offers a very cheap receive only service — $3.95 a month. You have to sign up for 3 months at this price so $11.85.
Smartfax. 6.95 a month, free inbound, 5 cents a page outbound. 30 day free trial

a little confusing. my volume is going to be low. the first month is free from just about everyone. i need to look at cancellation policies a little closer and make sure none of these trap me. rapidfax or smartfax seem like the way to go, tho maybe combining the packetel service with faxzero for outbound might be optimal.

More stuff I don't need but want

john — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 17:15:38 +0000

No-staple stapler is better for the environment (and looks cool) — I hate freaking staples. This looks useful and cheap
B&W Zeppelin iPod speaker system. I would probably never actually buy this but it looks wicked.
Powerkayak. Take a nice ecofriendly sport like kayaking, and jam some gas-consuming horsepower onto it! Wonderful!
Tancher wrist beacon. I think this is just a concept but looks cool and is lifesaving
Credit Card multitool. This would be super useful. TSA approved?
Another HD hard disk videocam. Decent reviews.
Digium asterisk appliance. Now if it would just use my cell service as the outbound line…
A bunch of awesome watches all with a black theme.
Emergency food supply
Edge Brownie Pan. OK I actually got one of these. It works great — the fins really help with heat distribution.

Asterisk Reseller?

john — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 00:05:23 +0000

As I mentioned a couple days ago, I’d really like to flip my home phone system to an asterisk-based system, but I need a reseller because a) i don’t have time to do the deployment myself, b) i don’t want to be frontline support for my household, c) a special case of a, i have some funky analog control stuff wired into my current phone system that i need someone else to spend time figuring out how to plug into asterisk — intercoms, some mechanical actuators. It is probably not that hard but I don’t have a lot of time.

asterisk reseller – Google Search — points me towards digium. They in turn pointed me toward bitstruct and digitalcandle, both of whom have been totally unresponsive — their websites don’t inspire confidence in their asterisk reselling skills either. The guys that did my home theatre install
don’t do telephony projects, they pointed me towards someone who wanted to sell some exchange/activedirectory integrated thing, not what i am after.

If you know of an asterisk reseller/installer…