Monthly Archives: October 2005

Free World Dialup

I spent some time this weekend playing around with Free World Dialup. What is that?

FWD allows you to make free phone calls over any broadband connection using devices that follow current accepted Internet Standards. This can be a “plain old telephone” with an IP adapter, an IP based phone or any number of free soft-phones (software for your PC or PDA like Pulver Communicator). However, FWD is more than just free phone calls. FWD is a complete IP communications network.

I mucked around with this a bit in the past when I was experimenting with Asterisk. But let’s face it, using a laptop to do phone calls was just… well… I’d rather use a real phone. To do that, I needed some sort of SIP adapter. Interestingly enough Linksys is making zillions of these, specifically the PAP2, which are generally sold locked to Vonage, one of the cheaper and best known VOIP providers. They are cheap (Staples had them for $50 with a $50 rebate, and the one I got from Best Buy was $35 with a $10 rebate), so it’s kind of a pity they are locked.

Well. You can get around that. It’s not a complete nobrainer, so I don’t recommend this process unless you are fairly comfortable with screwing with things, but I did manage to get it to work. Once you’ve got it unlocked, you can use Sipura’s instructions on using their adapters with FWD to retarget it (it turns out that the PAP2 is identical to an Sipura 2000, except for minor software differences).

So now I’ve got an IP phone. It doesn’t really interface with the PSTN, but it’s a cute gadget. I will probably use it to play around with Asterisk. Should be fun.

Besides, it’s got blue LEDs in it.

Anyone whose using Free World Dialup can call me at #709654 and leave me a voice mail.

More about pot roast…

I’ve mused about potroast before on my blog, but it’s such a great (and now overlooked) dish when it came up on Slashfood
I thought it deserved a link. A couple of additional comments on the recipe presented:

  • This is a long cooking recipe, so if you want any of the vegetables to actually be in one piece, I wouldn’t add them until later. The mirapois (celery, carrots, and onion) add a lot to the flavor, so I’d go ahead and use them from the get go, but I’d add the potatos and peas later in the cooking process, after the meat is half done at least. Otherwise the little potatoes will dissolve and the peas, well, I usually add frozen peas just before serving.
  • I’d probably brown the meat, set it aside, lower the heat and sweat my mirapois for three minutes or so, then add the garlic for 30 seconds longer, deglaze the pan with a little red wine, and then dump it all in the slow cooker.
  • I like chuck for pot roast, which can have quite a bit of fat. Skim it off as it cooks. It doesn’t add any flavor, and just makes the roast greasy.

There you have it: more on pot roast.

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit Movie Info – Yahoo! Movies

The movie for the weekend is Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, the first full-length Wallace and Gromit movie produced by Aardman and distributed by Dreamworks.

I’m a great fan of Wallace and Gromit, in particular Close Shave and the brilliant Wrong Trousers, both of which won Academy Awards for Nick Parks, so I was looking forward to a full feature length dose of the man and his dog.

Sadly, I think the longer format doesn’t really help. It’s not a bad movie, but it really doesn’t seem to reach the level of their previous efforts. Both A Close Shave and Wrong Trousers achieve a certain degree of actual tension and excitement which Curse of the Were Rabbit never seems to reach. It might be just a matter of pacing, but I also think that perhaps the story isn’t as imaginative as his previous efforts.

It’s getting pretty good reviews, others seem to like it just fine, I merely thought it could have been better. I’d give it a B- or so.

Cervical cancer jab ‘in a year’

From the “It’s fun to be a Luddite” file, witness this bit of news from the BBC that Merck’s new vaccine to prevent cervical cancer might be available within the year.

Cervical cancer is associated with the human papillomovirus. The drug Gardasil was apparently 100% effective at preventing early stage cancers and pre-cancerous abnormalities, which account for 70% of all cervical cancers, and over a quarter of a million deaths world wide each year.

So why is filed under the “I Kid You Not Section” of my blog?

Researchers believe a vaccine could work best if given before adolescence, but critics fear this could encourage under-age sex.

Yeah, getting stabbed by needles really makes me want to go out and have sex. Who are these critics?

Well, apparently they include Scott Phelps, executive director of Abstinence and Marriage Education Partnership. His comment:

“Sexually transmitted diseases in the United States will not be contained by injecting vaccines into pre-adolescents in anticipation of promiscuous behavior,” Scott Phelps, executive director of Abstinence & Marriage Education Partnership, wrote in a recent statement.

Of course, Scott has yet to tell us exactly how these diseases will be contained.

‘Bride’ Stripped Bare

Editor’s Guild has a nice article on the creation of The Corpse Bride. Apparently the entire thing was shot with the Canon EOS-1D Mark II, a commercial digital SLR, and assembled using Apple’s Final Cut Pro.

While testing a variety of commercial digital still cameras, they said the following:

“We shot the same scene on every camera, converted the digital frames using dcRAW [an open-source program that accesses raw digital images], crunched everything to 2K, color-timed the sequences to match using Baselight and then output to film,”says Watts. “Basically, everything looked great until the film-originated version came up, then everyone yelled at the projectionist, `Focus!’ The images from digital cameras looked so stunning when projected.”

They ended up buying 24 cameras. That’s roughly $100K of 8 megapixel cameras. Cool.

Creationism in the Supreme Court

Panda’s Thumb reports on the ties between Supreme Court Nominee Harriet Miers and creationism. The Valley View Christian Church that she attends apparently has a webpage which links to The Creation Evidence Museum, run by Carl Baugh, a creationist so absurd that even Answers In Genesis can’t accept his conclusions.

Apparently it’s not just Roe v. Wade that we have to worry about, but perhaps Epperson v. Arkansas or Lemon v. Kurtzman.

Traffic

I remember reading Russell Beattie’s blog, where he said that merely by posting something about the Apple or Macintosh, his traffic doubled or tripled or something. If I was using Adsense or something, then the recent back and forth I’ve been doing with Scoble might make me a few cents. As it is, I have to just settle for that smug sense of self satisfaction.

Boost in Web Traffic

Note to self: beware portupgrade -R!

Well, last night I decided to try to fix a dangling problem with out of date versions of ImageMagick for one application completely unrelated to my webserver by running portupgrade. Net result: it fubarred mod_perl somehow, and that borked my webserver, which is why it was down for ten hours or so. Sorry for the inconvenience.