TechnoClippings

We’ve been Skype and SkypeOut users for a while. For the most part it works great. And BTW, if you’re disappointed in the sound quality, get a headset. It’ll work wonders.

But this wasn’t enough, what I really wanted was to make and receive Skype calls from our cordless phones. The Vosky Call Center makes this possible. Overall it works very well but there are definitely a few gotchas to be aware of.

Here’s our setup:

Here’s how it works for Inboud calls:

• Land line calls (green dotted line) come in from the telco, switch through the Vosky, and ring on your phone.
• Skype calls (red dotted line) come in via the network, through your Skype’d desktop, and on to Vosky which causes your phone to ring with a different ring tone. This is the same for SkypeIn as well.
• If you config the Vosky as your answering machine, it will provide voicemail for green-line calls, but Skype will still handles red-line voicemail. This is somewhat annoying because you now have two voicemail boxes to check.

And now for outbound calls:

• When you pick up your phone, you will get your normal dialtone. If you dial now, you’ll red-line dial just as before.
• If you hit ## then Vosky greets you and you can either dial a Skype speed dial number (that you’ve previously config’ed on your desktop) or enter a number to call in full international format, i.e. 011-1-area code-number. Yep, Vosky wants to know exactly where you’re calling.

In addition to handling your land line vmail, the Vosky Call Center can also let you dial in via the red-line, enter a passcode, and use Skype to dial out via the green-line. This gives you (for example) international calls from your cell phone at SkypeOut rates.

Pros: Easy to setup, works as advertised (you start to forget it’s there, a good sign) Using your phone as a universal interface to land line, Skype, SkypeIn, and SkypeOut calls is great Cheap international calls! (~$0.025/min to most of Europe, India, China, etc.) Land line calls still go through if your computer is off

Cons: Your computer has to be on all the time so some of your cost savings will get eaten up by electricity bills Only works on Windows not linux or OS X When you dial out via SkypeOut, your caller id is “0000123456″. This is Skype’s issue, not Vosky’s, but I have a feeling some of my friends will think twice about picking up this call The unit will work without a land line but then you can’t do the nifty red-line in, green-line out dialing. Why can’t I use Skype for both? Vosky takes over the audio out of your Skype configuration. In other words, if you’re at your computer and someone calls you, you can’t pick up on the computer because the audio will get piped to the phone. In practice not a big deal but worth knowing.

Overall I like it. I’ve already cancelled our long distance provider and scaled back our land line subscription. The Vosky’s $60 cost will be made up pretty quickly. Even quicker if I cancel our land line, which I may do since my wife and I both have cell phones.

I’m still amazed by the $2.7Bn price eBay paid for Skype… but with excellent features and add-on peripherals such as Vosky, it’s not hard to envision Skype becoming a universal telco. In a few years, Skype’s price tag may seem like a bargain compared to the very juicy revenue stream eBay will be receiving.

BTW, if you want to change the default answering machine response, just replace this file with your own:
C:\Program Files\Vosky Call Center\VoicePrompt\United States\vp15.wav
But make sure that you’re using the same settings as the original (i.e. 16bit samples, 8KHz sample rate).

Tags: skype, vosky, voip

I’ve been watching videos on my Treo for a couple years now but since recently upgrading to a Treo 650 (which has a nice fast processor and a gorgeous 320×320 screen) I’ve found it even more compelling to do so. Another factor is the increasing prevalence of video on the web: screencasts, movies, video podcasting… There’s a ton of content out there.

The best program for viewing videos on the Treo is the free TCPMP. It does an excellent job at smoothly handling many formats and is a lot more stable than MMplayer, my previous choice.

So… We have a device and a player. Now we need content and we usually need to convert it to a mobile format. There’s no use in putting a DVD quality AVI file on your PDA or phone if it has a small screen and when storage space is at a relative premium.

I won’t discuss where to get content, assuming you already have a number sources at your disposal from DVDs and other media you own and/or thanks to sites by google, yahoo, and a host of others where you can download content.

Once you have that content, here are the two programs that I’ve found extremely useful for preparing it for your mobile device are PQ DVD and SUPER:

• Pocket DVD Studio (or PQ DVD) is a low cost ($32) Windows tool that will take a DVD or video file (it supports .avi, .wmv, .mpg, and .rm among others) as input and re-encode it according to your specs. This allows you to pick the optimum resolution, bitrate, audio quality, etc. for you iPod, Pocket PC, Palm, or PSP. The software is very easy to use and quite powerful. The interface feels a little klunky but you get used to it and PQ DVD delivers good results
• SUPER won’t work with DVDs directly (though it apparently handles VOBs), nor can you pick segments of a file to re-encode as you can with PQ DVD. However it makes up for this in versatility. SUPER supports a ton of formats. I originally came across it because I was searching for a way to convert Flash videos (.flv files) into AVIs. Flash videos are popular these days because they’re basically a combo player and video in a single file, and are therefore nicely cross platform, thanks to Flash. They’re useless to me on my Palm though and SUPER does a great job at conversion. Oh yeah, did I mention it was free? :-)

One word of caution re: SUPER. I have no evidence to base this on but you might do well to install free software in a virtual environment so as to protect your host machine. SUPER runs fine for me in VMware and that way I know I don’t need to worry about spyware. Better safe than sorry.

Tags: video, encoding, treo, media player, flash, flv, tcpmp, codec, flash conversion, pqdvd, super

I played with the Keyhole client a long time ago: it allowed users to roam the earth viewing satellite images, zooming over my house, checking out where I worked, tilting the view so I could the images rendered on the contour of landscape (very impressive). It was all going so well… And then my 30 day free trial expired.

Though I enjoyed it, it didn’t seem worth the $30/year subscription. I mean, it was just a toy right?

Fortunately for everyone, a few months ago Google (having acquired Keyhole) decided to improve and make the entry level client free to all. However altruistic Google is, I suspect they also believed that the free version of (the now-rebranded) Google Earth was the best advertisement for the commercial version.

So is it worth trying Google Earth?

Most definitely yes! And not just for the pleasure of flying over your neighborhood. Playing the virtual tourist is a ton of fun, esp. when all you do is type “Paris, France” in the search box and you’re wisked off to Europe (in my case zooming out from North America, flying over the Atlantic, and zooming down on Paris). And once you’re there, why not check out the Eiffel tower?

The software’s real strength, as you’d expect from Google, is in the way it leverages the internet community. The Google Earth bulletin boards are filled with lots of destinations (double-click on them in the browser and they’ll direct your Google Earth program to that spot, usually with notes describing what you’re seeing) and overlays (imagine being able to see hurricane Katrina’s before and after impact on New Orleans, or viewing storm forecast models).

My favorite is the National Geographic coverage of Africa and the data they’ve set-up for Google Earth. There are over 4,000 high resolution pictures that you can zoom in on, each represented by a little plane icon. Click on the icon once and you get a callout with a low-res picture and description of what there is to see. Double-click on the icon and you zoom into the picture. Check out the elephant family I found… And this isn’t even the full resolution.

Very cool!