In an attempt to cut my bordem levels and to learn something useful, I've been playing with setting up VoIP in the ClaudeStreet house. After a bit of a frustrating start I think I've begun to crack it.
I've set up internal extensions for both myself and Ant. I've also got an external connection which comes into the house that allows me to call other people on other VoIP networks (and Free phone numbers around the world). My external number is 437614@fwd.pulver.com, so if you are on FreeWorld Dialup it's easy to call me.
If you've got broadband, why not download the soft phone from FWD yourself, it costs nothing and then you could call me (or anyone else who's got it) for free... thus costing you nowt. All you need is some headphones and a microphone (or use another set of headphones as a quite crap mic).
These were a problem to me before. I had a broken headset where the headphones didn't work and another set of airline head phones, where the wires were all kinds of too short... At work today I saw a headset on the main switchboard on reception, perfect I though. So I tealeafted it. Unfortuanly, it has big telephone jacks on it, after a bit of butchery I found an RJ11, which converniently fits into an RJ45 socket. It just so happened that on Thursday I'd accquired one of these from work... I took the microphone of the original lead from my old headset, and punched this down in the RJ45, which now lives on the top of my computer... allowing the headset to be plugged in as I wish.
To get sound out of the soundcard I've cunnningly set up my surround sound sound card to output the same output on all channels, so I can still use my speakers without any messing of wires if the phone should ring.
I'm quite happy with myself!
The next plan is to get a PSTN to VoIP card for the linux box, and a VoIP to PSTN network device which would allow the house phones to be plugged into the VoIP system. Then I could call people from my computer using the headset which means I don't have to hold the phone whilst typing or whatever. It also means I could walk around the house on the wireless phones and talk to someone on the VoIP network. Very very cunning! All depends upon me buying the relevant bits of kit... this working lark is making me rich though... :-)
Any references to me stealing things in this blog post are not strictly true... I merely took things that BT or the skip would end up receiving...