a lot of things going on

This is the second time my draft got wiped out. If it doesn’t work this time, I am going to go to bed and try again tomorrow. Anyways, I got some cool things I am working on so here’s a quick update. Expect some updates over the next couple of weeks.

  • Trixbox and ViaTalk
  • Zero-Cost HTPC

My VoIP provider is ViaTalk. I’ve been with them since 6/06 and they have been great. I’ve been using an unlocked PAP2 ATA adapter. Recently, my Dad sent me a wonderful PC case he no longer needed and I installed Trixbox. I’ve played around with Asterisk on FreeBSD but the whole Trixbox suite is pretty neat. So now I have several softphones and my PAP2 all talking to the Trixbox box. The whole things works so well, I am used to tweaking something until it is perfect and this exceeded my expectation since it works so well. Once I understood everything, it is a snap to set up and adminstrate. A UNIX/LINUX background will give you a leg up on understanding the internals and help you debug all that much more effectively.

Now, my brother-in-law wanted to find a way to display German videos on his TV. In my case, I have an xbox with XMBC and it is a no brainer for me. But he has some intersting limitations, like he doesn’t want to spend any money on it, he might not be able to easily wire his connection, and it has to pass the spousal approval factor. Luckily, he’s got an old AMD PC laying around so we are going to install, (at least the plan is at this point), Ubuntu and MythTV on it and hook it up to his receiver. He doesn’t have an HDTV so RCA or S-Video will probably be okay. This is a learning experience for both of us, so I’ll be posting some updates on this effort over time.

More as time permits. I’ve kept some of the person updates out of this post. Those will come at a later point.