Cricalix.Net

December 2, 2005

Asterisk, house upgrades, KJS

Filed under: 42 — cricalix @ 16:13

A mish-mash of things today I think.

A bank has granted my loan request, so I’m well on the way to getting my central heating upgraded, and I’ll be able to get my kitchen done, along with a shower (I only have a bath right now, and that’s quite irritating) and possibly even my parking spot. Better control of my heating bills will be wonderful, as will thermostat controlled heating. A kitchen upgrade is desperately needed too - I have no (working) oven, a stove, 4 cupboards and a sink. One wall in the kitchen is currently dead, though the central heating upgrade will change the dead wall to one I don’t use anyway, making it possible to really enhance the kitchen.

I’ve been poking Asterisk for a while now, setting myself up as my own tel-co. I’ve ordered two £39 boxes, which are waiting for Paypal to clear funds. One is for me, the other for Dad - he’s supplying the PSTN cards - and we’ll be setting up dedicated PBX boxes that can bridge PSTN to VoIP and back. Add in my bluetooth adaptor which can sense when my mobile is at home or not, and I can do follow-me for certain callers, VoIP dialing from work via a local call and more. Very nifty.

I happened to e-mail one of the Kopete developers about the KJS Kopete client I put together a while back, and he’s interested in using it as a sample tutorial for doing nifty things with Kopete, so I’ll be looking to polish up the blog entry and make it something useful to someone. Yay me I guess!

On the downside, my A75 has developed hot pixels (at least one, possibly more), which is irritating. I can work around it with a photo editing program like ShowFoto, but I can’t say I’m happy. I’ve been eyeing a DSLR for a while now, and until a few weeks ago the Canon 350D was winning. I went down to Jessops the other day and handled both the 350D and the Nikon D50, and the D50 was so much nicer. Slightly chunkier, and my index finger didn’t hit the lens when trying to operate the shutter.

December 1, 2005

KDE 3.5 is out!

Filed under: Reviews, Technology — cricalix @ 17:33

Apparently KDE 3.5 is out, and the Kubuntu hackers have released the packages for Breezy within a few days. So what’s a KDE fan(atic?) to do when faced with the knowledge? Add the repository to my list of places to get software from and apt-get dist-upgrade of course! Standard upgrade doesn’t work due to some libraries being obsoleted and thus held back, and thus holding back some applications.

First impressions? Nicer eye candy, a wee bit faster (subjective) than 3.4.3, some nifty features in the CD handling code and Kopete has picked up the webcamera support (which I was fiddling with ages ago when it was very unstable). ArtsD is still as annoying as ever, but that’s a legacy issue with Arts. Hopefully it’ll be gone by 4.0. In the mean time, I’m probably going to look on eBay for an old SB Live PCI so that I can get a hardware mixer and use Alsa instead.

My boss asked me about a decent linux distro he could run in VMWare 5.5 - so I’ve pointed him at Breezy, and so far he’s happy. wonder how long that’ll last? His last impression of KDE was on a RH 7.3 install, so it wasn’t very impressive, and had an annoying tendency to go splat.

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