The Cruft Of My Brain

so far I’m quite happy with 2.0. tommorrow’s the first work day though. battery life tomorrow should be interesting

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A Night of 140 Tweets: A Celebrity Tweetathon For Haiti

up to 2.0 and everythings great! I’m posting this from twittelator (I think)

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Getting Started with Twitter For Dummies

Just frightening…I have my first follower. How fast can I cost Nate $100…

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The Twitter Book

I’m not sure that anyone cares but I’m officially endorsing Ron Paul for President.  That being said, I really wish I could just nominate his ideals.  I like the idea of a strict adherence to the Constitution.  As Glenn at Instapundit suggests, Ron Paul as a candidate leaves a bit to be desired.  When I showed Ang a video of an interview the first thing she said was something like “crazy old man”.  I’m sure that’s a relatively widely held opinion and because of that he stands little chance of winning.  The groundswell of support though would indicate that there are enough people that like the idea of libertarianism to finally get this idea in the forefront.  I’m hoping to push that along by voting for him.

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Hybrid VoIP/PSTN Solution with 6 VoIP Accounts and 4 Calls at Once C610A-IP DECT_6.0 1-Handset Landline Telephone

We’ve been Tivo owners for some years now.  We used to use it constantly, now we just use it often.  The sole reason is HD.  Or rather, lack of a good way to record HD.  Yes, we can get the HR20 from DirecTV but I don’t believe there’s any ability to move content between devices.  Plus, that’s another closed system.  No, what I really want now is an HD MythTV setup.  I could have that today, no problem.  Except, how would I then go about getting HD content?

You see, the only way to legitimately record HD content into MythTV or any similar PVR is to pull it over the airwaves.  Two problems with that.  It’s only the local broadcast channels and we’re so far out in the country I’m not sure we can get a signal anyway.

I know, we can do RSS subscriptions and suck it down over Bittorrent.  Aside from the illegal aspect of that Comcast has noticeably affected Bittorrent speeds of late.  It simply wouldn’t be practical.

No, what we need is a Component recording card.  There’s one on the market that I’ve found.  It’s made by Blackmagic, costs >$1k and isn’t supported in MythTV or any other open source system.  Yippee.

Someone help me.  Tell me how to fix this.

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Switching to VoIP

I might have discovered the limitation with Freecall.  There’s a reference to the calls being limited to 1 minute until you buy credits from them.  Well what’s the point of 300 minutes per week then?  Are you really going to make 300 1 minute calls???

I’ll report back once I test it.

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CCNA Cisco Certified Network Associate Study Guide: Exam 640-802

I think I’m finally going to work on this test.  I’ve discovered that I can re-cert my CCNP by passing this and I’ll only have one test left for the CCVP then.  I have the book and the PEC material is free and looks like it might be pretty good, if not long.  Anyone have any suggestions for training material?

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Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach (5th Edition)

I’ve been running on Asterisk, actually Trixbox, for probably over a year now.  It works ok but I have several issues that I’ve never been very happy with.  For one thing I’ve been using an old version of the SCCP channel to run the Cisco phones.  I have 7940′s and 7960′s and the SIP implementation on those phones is somewhat weak.  The SCCP channel hasn’t been developed much at all so there’s not been much reason to upgrade.  The problems I have though revolve around my 7905 flaking out occasionally and the laptop I run * on doesn’t like to go on UPS power for any extended period of time.  How weird is that?

Time to upgrade.

I have an older PC that I’m hoping will have sufficient power although I do have concerns.  It’s a Celeron 466 with 640mb of ram.  * requirements are pretty light so hopefully it’ll work ok.  I’ll be using the new version of the non-commercial Trixbox CE.  I also have concerns about that but I’ll give it a go.  I’ve also discovered that there’s been some new development on the chan_sccp side.  Hopefully I can set up a more stable system and start extending it.

I’d like to figure out how to get Google Talk working with it so I can extend calls to my laptop.  At some point I’m hoping the VoIP apps will come about on the iPhone and I’ll be able to extend calls to it.  I read something the other day about someone finally testing a demo app for this but it struck me as being very preliminary.

I’ve also discovered a service called freecall.com. I’m going to see about giving this a shot too.  From what I can tell you get 300 free minutes per week.  I’m sure there’s a catch that I’m missing but I’ll find out.

I was considering going to CallManager 6 since DLU’s are now included but that would leave me with the problem of voicemail.  I could do Unity but the demo license only supports a 30 second message and that won’t cut it.  Extending the system to support other VoIP methods will be easier with * too.  Just too hard to justify it for home use.

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Networking Bible

I just came across Andy’s comments about the state of room based video conferencing. I have to say that I agree completely.  I’ve been to a number of Cisco Telepresence demo’s now and there’s no question it’s impressive.  The price tag kills the interest for all but the richest companies though.  $250k for the required two sides of the 3 TV Telepresence unit and that doesn’t even include the UCM system it requires or the 15mbps of bandwidth it needs for start up.  No doubt it’s easy to use and the video is absolutely incredible, but it’s just one of those technologies that hasn’t filtered down yet.

One thing Andy mentions is the ultimate ability for the home user to access the same tech.  Well, that’s a ways off but you can see it coming.  Cisco’s acquisition of Scientific Atlanta is all about just this sort of thing.  I’m kind of surprised Cisco hasn’t kicked something out in that regard.  Their assimilation usually takes a couple of months but they’ve had SA for how long now?  2 years maybe?  Bandwidth is less of a concern than in the corporate world and more and more houses have HDTV’s already installed.  Maybe Cisco’s too hung up on the “experience” which would certainly be affected by consumer class implementations.

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Networking (2nd Edition)

I just discovered that I’m #1 for “cobra build” on Google.  Wow!  Except it’s for the old site.  The one I haven’t updated in years.  So, I’ve put in a redirect to the blog here and just to the Cobra related posts.  Please feel free to look around at the rest though.

And yes, more Cobra related posts coming soon.  I haven’t spent much time at all on the Cobra lately but I’m hoping to be able to get back to the dash soon.  Can’t wait to see those gauges move!

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