Stephan Sokolow's Blog

Ever wanted to use a VoIP client to answer phone calls over your traditional phone line instead of getting VoIP service? (Surprisingly difficult since everyone seems to want to use their crappy old phones on VoIP instead) Well, here’s the trick: Buy an FXO card like the Voxzone X100P and install the open-source Asterisk PBX software.

Not only do you get to use the VoIP client and high-quality $7 Skype-certified, noise-cancelling microphone of your choice, you can trap telemarketers in a voice-mail maze of your own fiendish design. 🙂

In essence, an FXO card is the “voice” portion of a voice modem isolated and made Linux compatible so Asterisk users will buy them. As such, they’re cheaper than an equivalent voice modem and, since voice is the core function rather than an afterthought, their noise/echo-cancellation is usually better.

Oh, and if you want to plug traditional telephones into VoIP… perhaps to use Asterisk as a full-fledged PBX, you’ll want an FXS card (internal) or an ATA (external, Analog Telephony Adaptor). (FXO cards act as phones, FXS cards act as phone lines)

Update: Given how unpredictable quality can get when you have multi-process C++ compilation running in the background, I decided to use a dedicated box. If you like the idea of open hardware, take a look at the IP04 Open-Source PBX. (I use the one-port version with an FXO module and a bunch of Linksys PAP2T-NA ATAs)

I’ve been busy lately, but I can at least share a few noteworthy things I ran across.

• A faint background image in your terminal reduces eye-strain. (source)
• KDE users can use kioexec to pass URLs as command-line arguments to non-KDE apps. (source)
• set ttymouse=xterm2 will fix mouse support in Vim when you’re running it inside GNU Screen. (source)

I’m not really in the mood for blogging right now, but this took me a lot of googling, so I should probably share it.

Did you ever wonder what arcane incantations went into customizing that “ActionList: viewmode_toolbar” subsection in your Konqueror toolbar? Wonder no more.

First, anyone who has used both Kubuntu and another distro (eg. Gentoo) will notice that it’s possible to change the number of dropdown buttons. I’m happy with the three I have, so I didn’t really look into this very closely, but apparently this patch file will switch between the two configurations when properly applied:

http://launchpadlibrarian.net/4891395/un84.diff

Now that the difficult part is out of the way, here’s the part that is so typically “KDE voodoo”. Easy to do… but you have to know it’s there first. (Which is still better than GNOME in my opinion, but that’s just me)

If you want to change the order of the buttons, remove (or re-add) entries (but not change which ones go into which buttons), or re-order the entries within each button (Keep in mind that this also lets you control which one gets the ‘default for this button’ status), here’s what you do:

1. Go into the file association controls (Configure Konqueror –> File Associations is a nice quick way)
2. Choose inode/directory and click the Embedding tab
3. Re-order, add, and delete KParts.

It’s that simple. My suggestion is to install FileLight and then make it the top-most item in the right-most button with the traditional disk-usage viewer the bottom-most one.

Here are the relevant pages I ran across while googling. The rest was just experimentation on a hunch.

• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kdebase/+bug/43949
• http://strabes.wordpress.com/2007/04/05/make-konqueror-use-your-default-view-mode-in-new-tabs/