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.

John Siracusa - Mac OS X Reviews

 

I have been a long-time reader of ars technica and have been amazed by the amount of detail contained in John Siracusa’s OS X reviews each of which is a pocket symphony of tech information. I have been patiently working my way through all of his OS X reviews starting from 10.0 Cheetah from way back in 2001.

I had to spend a bit of time searching reviews of all of the releases and some of the results took me to seemingly old versions with missing graphics. After I bit of work I managed to find the best version of each review and thought it would be helpful to share them here.

John Siracusa’s Mac OS X reviews from are technica

• Mac OS X v10.0 Cheetah – March 24, 2001
• Mac OS X v10.1 Puma – September 25, 2001
• Mac OS X v10.2 Jaguar – August 24, 2002
• Mac OS X v10.3 Panther – October 24, 2003
• Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger – April 29, 2005
• Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard – October 26, 2007
• Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard – August 28, 2009
• Mac OS X v10.7 Lion – July 20, 2011

Happy reading.

Best Skype Microphone Ever

, a photo by John Robertson on Flickr.

I was about to purchase a Yeti USB microphone when I remembered I had this little baby tucked away in a cupboard.

Clutter Clearance Burst

Possessions can be a bit overwhelming can't they? They slowly and gradually take over your life.

I have always been a hobbies person. Over the years I have immersed myself in music, photography, computing and reading. All of these interests bring their associated paraphernalia such as books, manuals, accessories, tapes, cables, etc. As a consequence of this I have filled my house to bursting with the accumulation over the years. I am not thankfully in the hoarder class but am somewhere down that road.
It got to the stage where I could never easily put my hand on things I needed. I would waste hours searching for my capo, a lens or a specific book I needed to refer to. It was inconvenient but I could have happily continued like this but for the death of my father.

Without going into too much detail I can say for sure that dad was a hoarder. After his death my sister and I spent weeks clearing and sorting his possessions. There were drawers and cupboards overflowing with things that I remembered from childhood and knew them to be junk even then.

A combination of these circumstances started me on the road to a clutter-free life with the ambition of disposing of unnecessary possessions which would hopefully leave me with only the things that I needed.

Here is an example of my home office before I started. Almost everything you can see in this photograph is now gone.


It has been a slow start but I am getting into my stride now.

Goodbye floppy disks full of midi programming files from studio sessions in the late 1980’s.


Goodbye RAM for old laptops that run slower than the Simon game I have on my keyring.


Goodbye master tapes of old studio recording that nobody cares about.


Goodbye to the last of my vinyl collection.


Goodbye to boxes full of old music transcriptions.


Goodbye cassette tapes.


And goodbye to the storage all the above was contained in.


To end on a happy note here is my capo which finally turned up on the bottom of a box full of midi cables.

Technorati Tags: declutter,downsize,zen,home

Goodbye London, Hello Bellshill

iOS Update

iOS 5.1 was finally released last night. Get details here. I updated all four of my iOS devices quickly and without any untoward incident. Battery life does seem to have improved somewhat in my iPhone 4s based upon a single morning’s unscientific observation.

The iPad 3 keynote is now live on the Apple homepage.

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Avaya

I had a meeting today with Avaya, one of our communications technology partners. Usually a meeting for me involves trains, planes and automobiles as they are generally held in or around London. I live in Glasgow which is a place most tech companies don’t seem to know exists. I had a total door-to-door journey time of 15 minutes from my home to their office in Bellshill.
The meeting was fascinating as we are getting to grips with they typical large enterprise problems relating to platform proliferation. Industrialisation of platforms and processes is the order of the day and this is not an easy task with voice and communication systems. With a mixture of almost every type and age of PBX you could imagine the challenges are immense. Even where there is a single platform the integration options are limited due to the mixed use of SIP and H.323.

I am not sure where this is going to lead but the journey is starting to look interesting.

Technorati Tags: Apple,iOS,Avaya,Travel

Paradise for Techs

Where to begin?

I spent several hours today working on a strategy for evolving our global voice estate and associated services. We have a mixed estate comprising Avaya, Cisco, Siemens PBXs with limited integration. Even within a single platform such as Avaya there are integration challenges due to the use of both SIP and H.323 in different countries. And let's not even think about the issues with dial plans.

I am meeting our Avaya account manager tomorrow to put the pieces of the puzzle together and agree next steps. He is coming to Glasgow which makes a nice change from me having to travel to London.

Apple Next-Generation iPad Event

I am worrying fascinated by the launch of a device that is probably only going to be a little bit better than the one I already own.

Watching several liveblogs and the best seems to be from engadget.

I can’t imagine why Apple doesn’t stream these events.

iTunes Podcast Management

My mission for today is to get to the bottom of the consistent failure of iTunes to sync podcasts across my iPhone and iPad.

I have tried everything I can think of including completely unsubscribing and resubscribing but it still doesn’t work properly.

Psych Match

Image, a photo by John Robertson on Flickr.

Taken shortly before I was convincingly thrashed at chess.

World War Z

World War Z, a set by tiggtag on Flickr.

Great set of photos I found on flickr showing the transformation of Glasgow city centre into Philadelphia during the filming of World War Z.

New Appley Goodness

Rumours are that we in the UK could see OS X Lion appear in the app store as early as 1AM tomorrow. Hopefully this will be followed by the long-awaited Sandy Bridge MacBook Airs I have been waiting patiently for.

Dad's Car

edit oldpix 0012, a photo by John Robertson on Flickr.

An old photo of my sister and I sitting on dad's car. Looking at this I can still remember the smell and sounds of the engine.

Doppelganger

, a photo by John Robertson on Flickr.

We have a fake Cali.

iPad 2

The iPad 2 was released in the UK this morning. I have placed an online order for a 32GB model which is showing an estimated 2-3 weeks' delivery time.