Binaryfaith

Just finished installing FreePBX onto a Sheevaplug Plug computer. At $99 for the dev kit, its about one of the most cost effective embedded systems you can get.
The process is very simple, go to PlugPBX and grab the image for the FreePBX install that gets imaged onto an SD card. Grab an SD card and dd the image over. Then upgrade the uboot on the Sheevaplug so that you can boot from the card and viola. The device boots in under a minute with Asterisk, postfix, munin, mysql, and everything else you need to get your pbx up and running. The only hard part is configuring the pbx to make and receive calls through your DID and provider. If you’ve configured Asterisk you pretty much know what you’re doing.

I finally got the Adafruit VFD (Vacuum Fluorescent Display) clock. Took about 3 months to get it shipped due to backorder (parts sourcing) on their part. This clock was well worth the wait! For $70.00 you get the PCBs, parts, tube, case and power supply.. This is a great deal…

Thanks to N6IL, I managed to get a nice DAC that is small enough to stuff in an Altoids tin with a CmoyBB headphone amp.
The mod was quite easy. The altoids tin needed some nibbling around the area where the USB ‘B’ connector goes through and I just needed to pull left, right and ground off the CmoyBB into the DAC. The whole thing took about 2 hours to assemble the DAC and about 5 minutes to add it to the headphone amp. The only reason the DAC takes that long is that there are LOTS of surface mount components to install and test. Totally worthwhile project.

There are a few posts on the net showing you how to spoof your browser’s user agent to make it look like you’re using an iPhone but it appears that Starbucks has gotten wise. So an alternative is to do the following. (Warning, typical mac users are going to cringe cause this requires *gasp* Terminal usage…)
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Well, I installed Fedora 11 over my Ubuntu Jaunty install today and am so far very happy for it. Fedora appears to be quite a bit faster with X as well as things like the VPN client (VPNC) work VERY well. The upgrade was for the most part seamless and the only thing I can’t seem to get working well is the fglrx driver so, fo the time being no big monitor. (The T500 has 2 cards and the Discrete is the only one that appears to be able to drive an external display)

In any event, I’m happy with this new distro for the time being and I can’t wait to see what they do next.

Yesterday I went to the apple store to inquire about the 8G ram upgrade for the new 2.66GHz Macbook Pro that I got. I was told by 2 of the apple store employees (a manager and a genius) that this laptop doesn’t support 8 gigs of RAM.
Well, I did a little poking around on Apple’s online store and found This .. $1200 but there. So, once again, all I ask from apple employees is that they are honest. If they don’t know say “I don’t know” there is no harm in it.. There is, however, harm in lying to people. Especially customers.

Email to SMS.. Pretty basic one would think.. At&t simply doesn’t get it..

Nor do they get basic concepts like customer service, troubleshooting, provisioning or systems management. Here is a case in point.

It appears that the pager that my company has been using maxes out at 500 messages a month. I’ve managed to severely get the company overcharged due to some system alerts. .. So I was asked to have my cell be used as a pager ($20 unlimited is way better.) This person said that he has had no problems sending email to his phone number @ txt.att.net.. When I tried it, I got a bounce.

So I called at&t and spoke to a standard rep. She had me reset my phone no less than 4 times before she was willing to escalate me to a higher support person. Once with that person, she had me reset my phone again. After I did that, we tried more attempts before she told me to go to the at&t store to exchange my SIM card.

While at the store, I replaced the SIM and tried the email again.. It failed (as expected)
At that point, the associate said “try # @ mycingular.net”, which worked! He said that he had done that years ago and happened to think of it.

Now, fast forward a couple of hours. I sent my phone the test, and it worked, but then I replied to the text and the “from” address was the txt.att.net! This means that should I respond through SMS, the recipient can’t respond back to me through that message… It gets bounced.

After figuring this out, I called AT&T after hours support and they basically told me that I’m attempting to use old tech and that they don’t know anything about it and they can’t support it. Looks like I get to make a phone call tomorrow. Oh the joy.

I’m sitting here at a BayCon meeting with a bunch of fans (in this instance, it is short for fanatics). Sitting next to a fellow geek I notice that his Mac has an altered login window. The tool Protector Suite is pretty slick. It also appears that it is sold through Apple even.

Hopefully I will get a chance to pick one up. It’s exactly the sort of thing I’ve been wanting for my work laptop for ages.

I’m sitting here at the nine inch nails concert at the Oakland arena. They are doing all of my favorite songs. F’ing awesome.