,|) Phones!
 |'
 |. 
 `|)  Soooo,... I've been having a bit of fun with asterisk again 
      lately. For a long time I've been wanting to hook up the
	  payphone, among other things, up to a hand-configured
	  asterisk server. My first attempt was with a raspberry-pi
	  based setup, with a hat that provides 2 phone ports. Alas,
	  the drivers for that bit of kit, were not well maintained,
	  and the whole thing only really worked if you used the
	  pi image that came with the hardware, which ran some
	  butchered version of FreePBX. I don't like it when web-based
	  UI's overwrite my hand-written config files, so this was
	  less than ideal.

	  When I eventually gave up on that, I used an off-the-shelf
	  cisco voip thingy for a while, because it was less headache
	  than trying to get the pi-based franken-pbx thing to work.

	  But now, I have finally achieved the setup that I wanted 
	  from the get-go. I ordered some telephony cards and set up
	  a machine to put them in, and installed and configured
	  asterisk on that. Now I can have proper phone menu's, and
	  patch in the various upstream voip providers in a nice clean
	  way.

	  I never signed back up to tilde.tel after cat stopped
	  running it, mainly because I never got around to setting up
	  my phone stuff the way I liked it. And now that I finally
	  have, I submitted another account request. I also got a few
	  extra DID numbers from voip.ms and I also patched in my
	  sdf voip subscription into this system. So in the end I 
	  should have a bunch of local phones, and 3 upstream voip
	  providers, all patched into the same system. FINALLY. 
	  
	  >> FEELS GOOD. <<

	  I've been pretty happy with voip.ms -- They have a huge 
	  bunch of numbers to pick from, in many geographical
	  locations. They also have a search function, so obviously,
	  I had to pick up a few that end in -1337, you know, for
	  extra cheeeze, hahaha. I also picked up a number in Belgium
	  so family can call me without having to be charged with
	  outrageous fees. For that one, I set up a queue in asterisk
	  that rings all my phones simultaneously, including my cell.

	  I updated my main gopher landing page and got rid of the
	  fancy ansi color version. It was a bit of a pain to maintain
	  and I plan on finishing my BBS and put all the fun ANSI art
	  on there, which is a more suitable platform for that anyway.
	  And cat's new (well, I guess not-so-new anymore) baud.baby
	  design is so awesome now, it serves as a much better demo of 
	  what can be done with gopher. 

      Anyhow -- as Blondie puts so eloquently: CALL ME

	  SDF did:       +1 360-485-0273
	  voipme number: +1 872-246-3117

		(both currently route to the same menu)

	I also picked up another -3117 number that's intended to be 
	the modem number for the BBS. For now I've been doing some
	testing by dialing out to BBS'es just to see what baud rates
	I can get using this system... voip is always kinda... tricky
	with modems. I can get it to negotiate 9600 baud, but there
	are many random lags and drops. I'm not sure what else I can
	do to make this better. I'm also not sure if the problem is
    with my end, or the places I'm calling, as I imagine most of
	them are using voip these days as well, so that just makes 
	things even more flakey.
	
	I'm using iax2 to connect w/ voip.ms (not sip) and I've got it
	set up to force the ULAW codec, which i *think?* should be 
	alright for modem use? I also set up a jitter buffer, but yeah
	... obviously it's still not as smooth as it would be over a
	copper pots line. If anyone knows other things that can be
	done, let me know!