AAARGH! Everywhere I turn I see Australian phone numbers formatted in a mess of crazy ways. Websites, auto-sig’s – there might even still be some printed business cards left in circulation. PLEASE! IT HAS TO STOP! Some History As public switched telephony has evolved we’ve jumped through various stages. We started with the manual switchboard …
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I’ve long been fascinated by electro-mechanical devices – a contraption that uses electricity to make things move in the real world. This explains my love of pinball machines, and of the wonderful mechanisms inside public telephones (“PTs”), both of which I have examples of in our home today. It probably also explains the drive to …
My introduction to desktop video came back in the days of OCS 2007 R1. It quickly occurred to me that this wasn’t going to take off until we had two things: 1) the upload bandwidth to support a decent outgoing video stream; and 2) the ability to look at the incoming video of the person …
The phone in my ‘mugshot’ this year is, like me, quite a relic. It’s an ivory-coloured handset from a 400-series phone. At the start of last century telephones were typically constructed of timber or metal. It wasn’t until the late 1920’s that the British Siemens company developed the first plastic phone, made of a “thermo …
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Rocky and I bought our first home together back in late 1995. It was a lovely 3-bedroom semi-detached house in one of the inner-western suburbs of Sydney. We found ourselves holding a housewarming for it in January 1996, and for some reason lost to history we settled on a parody / lampooning of the poster …
This is part 2 of a 2-part series covering how we built the “Disco Death Star”: Part 1 – The Build – construction and assembly Part 2 – Control, programming & examples – (this post) The controller Here’s the final version of the control PCB. It’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast, but it’s what …
If you’re new to the “DHMG” – our annual housewarming party – and its attendant excuse for some crazy home-brew tech, there’s some back-story and an index of the things we’ve done here. This is part 1 of a 2-part series covering 2019’s “Disco Death Star”: Part 1 – The Build – construction and …
The phone in my ‘mugshot’ this year is an old red buttinski, or ‘butt’ for short. In other countries you might call it a lineman’s handset. (If you refer to these by any other name in your country, please post it to the comments).
In my line of work RDP is an essential tool. Take it away and you might as well have cut off one of my arms. And so it was this morning where after my Windows 10 machine (running the latest 1803 build) applied updates overnight, all my attempts at RDP-ing to systems presented me with …
I’m encountering a growing number of customers upgrading and centralising their Skype for Business infrastructure, and as part of that they’re decommissioning their Survivable Branch Appliances. At some stage I’ll be asked how they can turn off the SBA, which in the case of the Sonus/Ribbon SBAs is running on a daughter-board inside the appliance …