A couple of years ago I was given an aliph jawbone bluetooth headset. It was really convenient for using the phone without having to hold your cell phone up to your ear. Unfortunately it was stolen and when I went to replace it I found that the only available from the company was the jawbone II. Now, initially I read about the Jawbone II and it sounded like a disappointment after the first one. But, went ahead and ordered and found my expectations were surpassed.
Tag: phone
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Frustrations with Verizon Landline
As you may know we had a good size snow storm here in the mountains of western North Carolina. It’s not unusual, but we will many times go a few years between these big storms. This one brought a tree down on the phone line just before it branches to our house and one other. I called Verizon the first night (Saturday) and got a (!$!$!$!) robot attendant that told me many outages were reported in our area and it should be fixed by Monday at 9 something AM. Not wanting to waste the time then with holding for a person I resolved to call a second line. At this point I could see the line hanging to the ground from the pole and knew they were not aware of it though. I called from a cell phone (of course…)
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SlyDial – Drop your call Straight to VoiceMail
We’ve all been there… 2 minutes to return a call with a “quick” answer. There’s not enough time for a real conversation. You HAVE to start a meeting in 2 minutes. Times like this, making a call can be like a roll of the dice, do they pick up? If they do, how can I tell them gently that there isn’t time for more than just the message I planned to leave? Well, Slydial is your answer to that. If you’re calling a mobile phone in the United States, you dial slydials number first, then the number you’re calling and you are dropped directly to their voicemail box to leave your concise message!
No need to put off those calls until you have more time “in case” they answer!
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GrandCentral – One Ring to rule them ALL?
Has Google gone too far with the purchase of GrandCentral? “One number that rings all your phones” (and in the darkness binds them?) There are already great privacy concerns with google. This new acquisition I am SURE will lead to more worries. The idea with grandcentral is that you have a unified inbox for voicemail. All of your voicemail can be accessed in one place. You can get voicemail notifications via sms or email. You can screen calls it looks like, you can have incoming calls ring specific phones depending on who’s calling… it sounds like there are some interesting features including (of course) managing it all online. The service is currently in beta and is taking “reservations” for YOUR unified phone number.
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Voiceshot – Easy Way to Get a Message Out – Automated Message Calling
We’ve all received them…. “robocalls”. Usually they fall into a couple categories…. 1) doctors appointment reminders and 2) political campaign ads and 3) telemarketers. Items 2 and three annoy me to no end. In hotly contested elections we have easily received several robocalls a day from each side for a decent stretch. These types of things do have their use though. Recently I had a bit of a dilemma, I needed to cancel about 20 appointments in a short period of time with short notice. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could send out one phone message and not have to call each one individually (in some cases at multiple numbers…)
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Home Asterisk system VOIP adding phone lines
I’m tempted many times to setup an asterisk system at the house – and use VOIP for additional lines. Here’s an article on asterisk the easy way., telaisp has good deals on residential voip service.
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Using DNS servers other than your ISP’s
As I mentioned earlier, Bellsouth seemed to be in the midst of a big DNS meltdown when I got up this morning. I spent some time getting various bellsouth customers “worked around” the issue by setting up an alternate DNS server for them. For starters…. DNS translates addresses like google.com into numbers (like 72.14.207.99) Think of it as a telephone directory lookup service… you can’t pickup a phone and punch in the letters of someones name to call them, you have to dial a number and first you have to see what the number is…. in networking, the computer does the DNS lookup for you when you type google.com in your browser bar. (Or when the browser tries to load it’s home page for instance.)
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Verizon emails a customer spreadsheet by mistake….
Verizon Wireless accidentally attached the wrong file to an email and wound up broadcasting an Excel spreadsheet with the details of some 5210 customers to about 1800 people. Apparently, they were sending out a promotional email to some of their customers and instead of the electronic order form they intended to send. The promotional email was for a bluetooth headset.
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Skype and linux audio issues
One of the things I didn’t mention in my first skype post was the “getting skype to work with linux” bit… The version available via urpmi in Mandrake was 1.2, so I installed it (before I had the usb audio phone) and gave a try. It gave consistent errors trying to access the audio device (/dev/dsp). I looked and it seems that the older 1.2 version used OSS exclusively for this and had LOT’S of problems. I did find that version 1.3 that can use either OSS or ALSA seemed to work flawlessly on the three systems I tested. (Two of them Mandriva 2006 and the test box Ubuntu 6.06.1) The testbox didn’t have a sound card prior to the usb phone, the other two had built in sound and that is what was tested.
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Skype and USB phones….
I’ve seen skype I just haven’t used it personally until very recently. In fact there was a place (dialpad?) that I had used once upon a time for a few free long distance calls online. It was neat, but had some limitations (delay). It quickly became non-free and frankly the microphone I have hooked up to the PC fell back in the corner beside the desk and I haven’t dug it out in quite a while. A few weeks ago though my Dad discovered Skype and ordered a cheap ($17) “phone” that plugs into the usb port of the pc and can be used with skype and a variety of other services. (in fact, it works as a generic usb sound card so… there might be other possibilities for using it to record wav files directly, etc.)