From PSTN to SIP

I work from home and spend much of the day on conference calls which ties up my landline. This was a problem as I was worried about missing urgent calls from son's school and suchlike. I was considering adding a second line for business when it occurred to me that, as I work on telecommunications, I should try a SIP provider.

Virgin Media is my broadband provider and I currently enjoy a healthy 100Mbps downstream (shortly to be upgraded to 120Mbps) with 10Mbps upstream. Latency on the service is also generally very good. The house is flood wired for 1Gbps Ethernet using several HP ProCurve 1810-8G switches. WiFi services are handled by a 5th generation Apple Airport Extreme.

Following a period of deep research (a quick google) I settled on trialling Sipgate as the SIP provider and ZoIPer Classic for the softphone.

For audio I have been using a combination of a Plantronics Blackwire C720-M headset and a Calisto 835 
for a desk phone.

Everything was up and running in 10 minutes and it has worked well so far.

Future updates will discuss some of the usability issues I have uncovered as I use this setup for work.

Kilmory Beach

DSC_9990e, a photo by John Robertson on Flickr.

iPad Clock Time Travel

For the past few days the clock on my iPad has been 25 minutes slow. I tried setting the time manually and then going back to automatic time but it always jumped back 25 minutes. Now I could have just left it on manual but I like things to work properly.

This was more than a minor inconvenience as my reminders were all happening at the wrong time. I also use logmein and it was refusing to connect to hosts producing a time mismatch error.

The usual Google showed lots of posts from people having similar problems and suggesting a number of fixes.

I tried:

• Turning location service off and on
• Hard reset
• Changing regional settings to something random and changing back
• Setting the time manually several hours out and then turning automatic time back on

All of the above resulted in an iPad that was still consistently stuck 25 minutes in the past.

Some of my forum reading suggested a hardware problem may be the cause so I looked out the receipt to discover that he iPad was delivered on April 13 2011 so it just out of warranty by a few days.

I decided to contact Apple support on the reasonable basis that a few days shouldn’t matter between friends. On the support site I selected the Express Lane contact option and, after entering my Apple ID and iPad serial number, I was told that it did not qualify for support. Undeterred I selected the option worded along the lines of I believe my issue is known and covered.

A helpful Apple guy called me back almost instantly and took me through most of the steps I have listed above. He then went through a system reset which still didn’t fix the issue of the sticky clock. Finally he suggested I try a full restore before he could go any further.

I use iCloud backup and recently paid for additional storage to make sure I could back up everything needed. As I type my iPad has completed restore and it slowly restoring from iCloud. I have never performed an iCloud restore before and expect to have lots of post-restore cleaning up and reconfiguration to do before I am fully up and running.

To finish on a positive note I can see that the clock is now at the right time.

Wedding Anniversary Treat

Hotel indigo, Glasgow.

 

IPhone Personal Hotspot - Day Two

I battled with random disconnections and downright wilful refusal of my iPad to find the iPhone Personal Hotspot throughout the day.
I have concluded that this feature is too unreliable and will do all I can to avoid having to depend on it as my main method of iPad Internet access in the future.

iPhone Personal Hotspot

I am on holiday this week staying in a location with no Internet connection. I used to have a mifi from 3 which worked well. When I upgraded my old iPhone 3Gs for a 4S I got an unlimited data usage contract and so cancelled my mifi contract in the expectation that the iPhone Personal Hotspot feature would provide Internet access for my other devices when necessary.

I feel a bit anxious about this as I am a connection obsessive.

Day one. Simply tethering my iPad is causing connection problems already. It takes an age to find the iPhone and frequently drops the connection, refusing to connect again until I have muttered incantations over both devices and reset various network settings.

I shall persevere for the rest of the week as I have no choice now but suspect I will be ordering a new mifi as soon as I return from holiday. I don't use it frequently but the few times I do need to use it I really need it.

 

Fun with Cubase

Recorded over a long period of time as an exercise in learning to use Cubase. I never got around to adding the bass but think it sounds better without it.