VoIP

VoIP for free with the Sipura

Chris writes “I’ve been a regular user of Skype for about a year now and have been using my own solutions to try to make this as user friendly as possible. But it was never perfect and I’ve always been the only one in my house using it as it hasn’t been user friendly. Then I heard about the Sipura and started looking around on how to use it, and then I heard about VoIPBuster which provided free VoIP calls to land lines all over the world. In this how-to I will explain why I made the choices I made and show you how easy it can be to have this up running in your own house. Calling nationally and internationally for free to regular telephones.” Link.

Continue Reading February 9th, 2006 Phillip Torrone

Distributing the Future Podcast: ETel

111-Future Distro Bruce Stewart, editor of the new ETel site, joins The Distributing the Future Podcast for a look back at the highlights from last week’s O’Reilly Emerging Telephony conference. Josh Kinberg shows you how easy it is to get started with video blogging and what to expect if you just want to watch some good ones. Bruno Souza continues his look at open source in Brazil. Link. MP3.

Continue Reading February 9th, 2006 Phillip Torrone

HOW TO – Read your car’s mind OBDII

Drew writes “If your vehicle was manufactured after 1996, it contains an On Board Diagnostic (OBD) computer that captures information about how it’s running. I’ve put together a basic HOWTO Guide for OBD-II so that you can get started playing with it. I use ScanTool‘s great hardware and GPL’d software for my setup. You can use it to save money by reading error codes without a trip to the mechanic when your “check engine” light is on, capture performance data about your car’s drivetrain in real-time, or log data as if it were an airplane’s “black box”.” Link.

Continue Reading February 5th, 2006 Phillip Torrone2

SRL Shop Photos

Srl La Party Scott writes “Here’s an inside look at the legendary Survival Research Labs shop where they create the robots and machines for their amazing shows. It’s been at it’s current San Francisco location since 1982, but will soon have to move.” Link.

Continue Reading January 30th, 2006 Phillip Torrone

Phoning It In From ETel – Radio Handi Makes Its Debut

Brian McConnell on the Etel blog writes “Radio Handi enables people to create voice communities around any subject, place of interest or peer group, and to telecast live audio from MP3 feeds or conference phones. You can create a message board and party line for your club, for people who share an interest, or for your friends. With it, you can create an open party line that people can dial into from all over the world (30+ countries and 1 VoIP network to start with, much more to come). It’s also a great platform for ad hoc broadcasting. Just hook a microphone up to a Mac running Gizmo, and you can beam a live audio feed into a conference room that people can then dial into from all over the world (watch for a series of how-tos on ad hoc telecasting and other topics later this week).” [via] Link.

Continue Reading January 25th, 2006 Phillip Torrone

“Call out” with Google Talk with the JabPhone

I’m going to try and get to ETel to check out this new JabPhone. Nat writes – “The Poly9 hackers who were at Where 2.0 in 2005, showed up at Emerging Telephony today with Jabphone, a service built on libjingle, Jabber, and Asterisk that lets you call out to regular telephone numbers from Google Talk. This is the power of open standards and open source, folks–they’ve been able to add the Skype Out feature to Google Talk without any assistance from Google.” [via] Link.

Continue Reading January 24th, 2006 Phillip Torrone2

HOW TO – The Internet Dog Feeder

Kkassing writes “After setting up two webcams and the new Skype beta to watch my dog while I’m out, I decided to give him some incentive to obey my commands over the internet. So I built an internet powered dog feeder with a Basic Stamp kit and two servos (one to drop the food, one to knock the funnel if it gets stuck). Full source included.” Link.