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I’ve added a new feature to my PhoneGnome Java midlet: toggling the on/off state of PhoneGnome’s FindMe/FollowMe feature. FindMe/FollowMe (“Multinumber forwarding”) is a PhoneGnome feature whereby calls placed to your PhoneGnome ring on three alternate numbers simultaneously.

The new feature allows you to turn FindMe/FollowMe on, for example, from your mobile phone for the case where you leave the house having forgotten to enable FindMe/FollowMe.

Download the application, and its associated source code.

[tags]phonegnome,jme,j2me,mobile voip[/tags]

And the results are in!

Without modifying my local calling behavior to any real extent, I saved $7.00 this month on my local phone bill by switching from flat rate ($17.00/mo) to measured service ($10/mo). In fact, I didn’t even break the $3.00 allowance mentioned in my earlier post, such that any per minute charges kicked in for local calls!

Without PhoneGnome to help me keep track of my actual call data, I never would have had the data that allowed me to confidently make the switch to measured service. Now that local flat rate calling is no longer important in the post-dialup Internet access era, switching to measured service can make a lot of sense.

Awesome. $7.00 I keep, instead of sending to the Telephone Company. $7.00 saved is $7.00 earned.

[tags]phonegnome,thrift,verizon,ben franklin[/tags]

Of interest to the genealogical community: PhoneGnome, an inexpensive voice over IP device, allows one to effortlessly record oral histories recounted over a telephone call.

Aside from requiring a broadband connection on the caller’s end, no new computer technology need be learned to use PhoneGnome. It plugs into your existing telephone system in the same way an answering machine is connected. Once you’ve installed the device, dial **REC, followed by the number at which your interviewee resides. When your call is complete, your recorded call conversation is waiting for you in your PhoneGnome web account in the popular WAV sound format. These oral histories can then be archived, converted to mp3s for podcasting, or distributed to family members and to posterity.

PhoneGnome is not the only way to record phone calls, clearly. But it allows you to use devices both parties are almost certain to already possess: a telephone. No computer required on either end.

I consult to PhoneGnome (disclaimer), but my interest in it goes beyond the immediate client relationship. The device gives us a powerful means by which to preserve personal histories that are easily accessible and subject to perfect copies for generations to come.

[tags]genealogy, genealogy tools,oral history, family history,rootsweb[/tags]

Having paid a high price in terms of time and effort to capture audio packets for purposes of recording phone interviews, I figured there had to be a better way. There was.

I am already a PhoneGnome owner and user (1, 2), and consultant to the company. I dropped a note to friend and founder of PhoneGnome, David Beckemeyer, pointing to my hardcore way of capturing audio for podcasts. Within 24 hours, David wrote back: “Dial **732, followed by the number you want to dial. When you hang up, your recorded audio will be waiting for you on my.phonegnome.com”.

No packet sniffers, no godawful softphones (read: O Lord, deliver us from PC audio), no OS software shims to capture bidirectional audio, no new billing relationship that I don’t want. Just my plain old telephone handset and my existing IP voice service.

So how does this work? I use long distance provider Voxee in conjunction with PhoneGnome, so long distance phone calls are automatically routed over IP from my home, where PhoneGnome can save the media as it goes by. But it works for local calls, too, by simply dialing those as ten digit calls, thereby forcing them over IP. At $0.011/min long distance rates, I can afford this.

Implicit in all this is that if a call is deemed “local” by PhoneGnome, PhoneGnome passes it straight through to the Gnome PSTN port, and the call travels over the PSTN, out of view of any IP infrastructure. But by dialing a podcast target as ten digits, I therefore have the option of doing recorded phone interviews with a local or long distance called party.

Thanks, David!

Update 7/15/2005:   **687 is now implemented in PhoneGnome. It’s a Note to Self function, which can be used for producing podcasting monologues over the phone.

[tags]voip podcasting,podcasting,phonegnome,phonecasting[/tags]

This story is about as nerd-like as anything gets. I can’t help it. Here goes. If you think this is useful stuff, I have a question for you at the end that perhaps you can help me with.

Q. How to develop podcast audio from a phone call when all you have is VoIP, and no ability or inclination to install audio capture shims and wedges in whatever consumer OS you have lying around?

A. Capture both RTP audio tracks of audio using a PC-based packet sniffer, and save each track to raw u-law. This is actually more expensive - because it took time to figure out - than the already free Gabcast audio-capture service, but it keeps me in possession of my own mp3s (an issue surrounded by some legalese I don’t quite understand in the Gabcast Terms of Service). But I only pay this price once: the first time, when learning.

My first inclination was to use tcpdump and libpcap to capture and render audio to a disk file. That was really harder than I wanted to work on this if I could help it, but which would work nicely if it came to that. This blogger had the same basic idea, although he didn’t go into detail on how he captured and rendered audio packets.

Some poking around led me to Ethereal, the packet sniffer written by my old friend from Kansas City, Gerald Combs. Ethereal captures the packets and can save the RTP streams to disk in .au mu-law format. What a time saver this was.

To proceed, make sure your packet sniffing host can see the VoIP terminal’s packet flow. Meaning, make sure the sniffer and the VoIP terminal (I use PhoneGnome through an ITSP gateway to force the audio over IP) are on the same unswitched network (use a dumb hub). This is already obviously not a situation where you can use Skype. The audio has to be observable in the clear, not encrypted. So we’re talking unencrypted SIP-based VoIP here.

So start the sniffer, make the call, hang up, stop the sniffer. Then save the RTP streams to disk. Here is Ethereal’s audio output file:

$ file whitehouse.au
whitehouse.au: Sun/NeXT audio data: 8-bit ISDN mu-law, mono, 8000 Hz

Next, compile SoX with mp3 support, which means you need /usr/lib/libmp3lame.so (LAME). Or, make sure your version of sox has mp3 support (type “sox -h” and look for “mp3″ in the supported file formats output).

Next, convert the au file to mp3

$ sox whitehouse.au whitehouse.mp3

And you’re done. What’s cool about using Ethereal, or really bidirectional VoIP, is that whatever you say can be captured in one audio track, and whatever your interviewee says can be captured to another, separate track. Enter something like Audacity or Garage Band and you can edit both tracks independently of each other. Very cool.

So here’s the question: the mp3 audio sounds ok (and just ok, frankly), albeit a bit hollow compared to the rich, sonorous original, if I use play (also now with mp3 support, because parent sox has it) or realplay. But it has an annoying “chirp” or high-hat if I play the mp3 file using xmms or mpg123. This smacks of an mp3 sampling problem, but I don’t know on whose part. I can render the .au file to .ogg Vorbis, and play with xmms and that sounds ok, too.

More good fundamental information on audio capture over the phone was provided to my by Jon Udell.

[tags]podcasting,voip,gabcast[/tags]

As a technical person, CSS for years has baffled me. Not simple things, like turning <h1> red. I mean real CSS for modest web sites that need to look good for clients.

I own two books on CSS: Dave Shea/Molly Holzschlag The Zen of CSS Design and Eric Meyer’s Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition.

Zen is a decent book oriented toward graphic designers for the web, and doesn’t purport to be a CSS reference. It shows what can be done to well structured html with full CSS treatment. Zen covers a contest for designers whereby a fixed set of input html was the operand for whatever CSS operator they could come up with. Stop by the book’s site and take a look at the number of ways to dress up basic markup with original CSS. Basically, skins for html.

Meyer’s book for some reason I just can’t learn from. I don’t know why. I’ve tried reading it three times since I bought it a couple years ago. I don’t know if it’s because the book starts off discussing issues that every time surprise me, or what. I use the CSS reference in the back of the book not infrequently, but the remainder of the text has become jinxed for me. It’s probably a perfectly good book for others, but it doesn’t work for me. Meyer’s book is published by Tim O’Reilly, no less, whose good reputation as publisher of technical books is second to none.

But I was struck by the intro chapter on CSS that I ran across while reading Ajax in Action. No, the CSS treatment is far from complete, but as a programmer it spoke to me. Succinctly and clearly.

What I’d like to see is a “CSS for Programmers”. Programmers primary line of work is not site layout or presentation, but they’re intimately involved in generating the horse on which those clothes will hang. And often, a programmer has to know some presentation CSS to make a site look passable, until a design person can be brought in to bring it home.

CSS for Programmers — the K&R of CSS: emphasizing presentation from an analytical point of view for people whose handwritten notes look like pseudocode.

Anyone know of such a book?

[tags]css,web design[/tags]

As a technical person, CSS for years has baffled me. Not simple things, like turning <h1> red. I mean real CSS for modest web sites that need to look good for clients.

I own two books on CSS: Dave Shea/Molly Holzschlag The Zen of CSS Design and Eric Meyer’s Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition.

Zen is a decent book oriented toward graphic designers for the web, and doesn’t purport to be a CSS reference. It shows what can be done to well structured html with full CSS treatment. Zen covers a contest for designers whereby a fixed set of input html was the operand for whatever CSS operator they could come up with. Stop by the book’s site and take a look at the number of ways to dress up basic markup with original CSS. Basically, skins for html.

Meyer’s book for some reason I just can’t learn from. I don’t know why. I’ve tried reading it three times since I bought it a couple years ago. I don’t know if it’s because the book starts off discussing issues that every time surprise me, or what. I use the CSS reference in the back of the book not infrequently, but the remainder of the text has become jinxed for me. It’s probably a perfectly good book for others, but it doesn’t work for me. Meyer’s book is published by Tim O’Reilly, no less, whose good reputation as publisher of technical books is second to none.

But I was struck by the intro chapter on CSS that I ran across while reading Ajax in Action. No, the CSS treatment is far from complete, but as a programmer it spoke to me. Succinctly and clearly.

What I’d like to see is a “CSS for Programmers”. Programmers primary line of work is not site layout or presentation, but they’re intimately involved in generating the horse on which those clothes will hang. And often, a programmer has to know some presentation CSS to make a site look passable, until a design person can be brought in to bring it home.

CSS for Programmers — the K&R of CSS: emphasizing presentation from an analytical point of view for people whose handwritten notes look like pseudocode.

Anyone know of such a book?

[tags]css,web design[/tags]

As a technical person, CSS for years has baffled me. Not simple things, like turning <h1> red. I mean real CSS for modest web sites that need to look good for clients.

I own two books on CSS: Dave Shea/Molly Holzschlag The Zen of CSS Design and Eric Meyer’s Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition.

Zen is a decent book oriented toward graphic designers for the web, and doesn’t purport to be a CSS reference. It shows what can be done to well structured html with full CSS treatment. Zen covers a contest for designers whereby a fixed set of input html was the operand for whatever CSS operator they could come up with. Stop by the book’s site and take a look at the number of ways to dress up basic markup with original CSS. Basically, skins for html.

Meyer’s book for some reason I just can’t learn from. I don’t know why. I’ve tried reading it three times since I bought it a couple years ago. I don’t know if it’s because the book starts off discussing issues that every time surprise me, or what. I use the CSS reference in the back of the book not infrequently, but the remainder of the text has become jinxed for me. It’s probably a perfectly good book for others, but it doesn’t work for me. Meyer’s book is published by Tim O’Reilly, no less, whose good reputation as publisher of technical books is second to none.

But I was struck by the intro chapter on CSS that I ran across while reading Ajax in Action. No, the CSS treatment is far from complete, but as a programmer it spoke to me. Succinctly and clearly.

What I’d like to see is a “CSS for Programmers”. Programmers primary line of work is not site layout or presentation, but they’re intimately involved in generating the horse on which those clothes will hang. And often, a programmer has to know some presentation CSS to make a site look passable, until a design person can be brought in to bring it home.

CSS for Programmers — the K&R of CSS: emphasizing presentation from an analytical point of view for people whose handwritten notes look like pseudocode.

Anyone know of such a book?

[tags]css,web design[/tags]

As a technical person, CSS for years has baffled me. Not simple things, like turning <h1> red. I mean real CSS for modest web sites that need to look good for clients.

I own two books on CSS: Dave Shea/Molly Holzschlag The Zen of CSS Design and Eric Meyer’s Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition.

Zen is a decent book oriented toward graphic designers for the web, and doesn’t purport to be a CSS reference. It shows what can be done to well structured html with full CSS treatment. Zen covers a contest for designers whereby a fixed set of input html was the operand for whatever CSS operator they could come up with. Stop by the book’s site and take a look at the number of ways to dress up basic markup with original CSS. Basically, skins for html.

Meyer’s book for some reason I just can’t learn from. I don’t know why. I’ve tried reading it three times since I bought it a couple years ago. I don’t know if it’s because the book starts off discussing issues that every time surprise me, or what. I use the CSS reference in the back of the book not infrequently, but the remainder of the text has become jinxed for me. It’s probably a perfectly good book for others, but it doesn’t work for me. Meyer’s book is published by Tim O’Reilly, no less, whose good reputation as publisher of technical books is second to none.

But I was struck by the intro chapter on CSS that I ran across while reading Ajax in Action. No, the CSS treatment is far from complete, but as a programmer it spoke to me. Succinctly and clearly.

What I’d like to see is a “CSS for Programmers”. Programmers primary line of work is not site layout or presentation, but they’re intimately involved in generating the horse on which those clothes will hang. And often, a programmer has to know some presentation CSS to make a site look passable, until a design person can be brought in to bring it home.

CSS for Programmers — the K&R of CSS: emphasizing presentation from an analytical point of view for people whose handwritten notes look like pseudocode.

Anyone know of such a book?

[tags]css,web design[/tags]

About two thirds the way through my first Grails web app, and I can say this platform has tremendous potential. The app is still predeployment, so I have no deployment experiences to which to point - yet.

But if Grails sticks to its promise of rapid webapp building for Java, it will make programming webapps in Java fun, rather than the usual solid as a rock, but nevertheless hurts-so-good fashion. Groovy scripting in Grails is awesome, and lets you think about the business problem you’re solving, rather than configuration. Way fun!

[tags]grails[/tags]