Chilling_Silence's blogChillingSilence / Chilling_Silence and blog home
Just thought I should write a quick note clarifying: Yes, I’m Chilling_Silence, wordpress just wouldn’t let me have an underscore in my name. I also cross-post this at lazy.geek.nz while I figure out which I want to keep as “home”, though I suspect I’ll be shifting to lazy.geek.nz and eventually letting chillingsilence.wordpress.com die a slow […]
Initial thoughts on FreePBXv3 and FreeSWITCH vs Asterisk
As I’ve been testing out FreePBXv3 with FreeSWITCH, I figured I should blog my experiences, as they’ve been surprisingly pleasant! After I got notification on the Elastix Beta mailing list about FreePBXv3, I was stoaked to learn it’s been released, even in an unfinished form! I went looking a while back for a FreeSWITCH GUI […]
My thoughts on the Toshiba NB200
As the need arose for me to replace my previous work laptop, I was very keen to go to the opposite end of the scale. From a 17″ semi-powerhouse laptop to a smaller 10″ Netbook. It was a mission to carry it around everywhere, battery life sucked, and it was just not functional for anything […]
What you never knew that you needed to know about Broadband and Fibre to the Home
With the government investing NZD$1,500,000,000 into this “Ultra fast broadband” Fibre-Optic network, you’d expect them to have good reason for it right? You’d also expect people would generally back the idea of it, and know why we, as a country, need this infrastructure investment. If only that were so! Communications and Information Technology Minister Steven […]
My thoughts on the WDTV Live
Yes, I’ve had my WDTV Live for a while now, and have had several requests for my thoughts on them. They’re priced very nicely, mine cost $229 + GST on my account with PBTech. Just make sure you search for “WD TV Live”, and not “WDTV” or you’ll get the regular one without a LAN […]
PC / Router failing? It might be overheating
Yes, with the advent of summer, and more sunny days, hardware *does* fail. I just recently fried two sticks of RAM, as I pulled them out of my PC they were so hot I burned my fingers. Serves me right for having so many Hard Drives in there without thinking about fans. You may be […]
The importance of a good router – Why your internet keeps failing
EDIT: Found this in September 2011 that agrees with pretty much all I write, from a major Australian ISP. Well worth the read:Â http://www.internode.on.net/support/guides/internet_access/broadband_adsl/optimising_adsl2_/ “But I have a good router already! My ISP gave me it, it must be the best!” Man if I had a couple of bucks every time I’ve heard that, I’d be […]
Speed up your internet with OpenDNS
If the button says “Sweeeeet” then good on you for doing the right thing and using OpenDNS. If it says “Get Started” then read on! What’s that you say? I can speed up my internet without doing anything? Surely not? Well you’re kind of right, technically we’re not going to “speed it up”, however […]
Telecom Geek Exchange Tour 2009
Let me just start by saying what an amazing and impressive tour it was, so much knowledge, so much cool tech stuff, so a big thankyou to Telecom Wholesale, Chorus and Jay Best for organizing the whole thing! Anyway for now there’s just photo’s, I’ll go back later and add some tags or comments about […]
iLBC vs g729 — The quick guide to using compressed codecs in Elastix
Updated Sept 2011 for Elastix-2.* and Asterisk-1.6+ as well as the broken links since Google seems to have taken over GIPS We all know that g711 (alaw / ulaw) is meant to sound the best. It’s uncompressed and equivalent quality to ISDN, which most businesses are used to with their traditional PABX System. However, it […]