Paul Howard

first iphone visit

Posted by Paul Howard - 26/02/08 at 04:02:54 pm

While checking through my web stats today I just noticed I had my first visitor using an iphone.

How exciting!

enhance your n95 while driving

Posted by Paul Howard - 15/02/08 at 08:02:39 pm

I’ve been using Nokia’s flagship n95 for a few months now and up until recently I have been using it with a bluetooth headset while in the car.

About two weeks ago my old, and up till now trustworthy, Motorola headset finally gave in and decided to hold no more than 20-30 minutes worth of charge. At the same time my wife was looking at getting a cheap sat nav unit and an MP3 player to use in her car. The obvious answer for me was to give her my ipod nano and my old sat nav and to use the n95 for both of these tasks in may car.

The first thing I had to do was get a universal car kit for the n95. All it needed to to was hold the phone. I managed to pick one up on Amazon for about £5 including shipping. Not bad at all.

I already had a decent FM transmitter so my setup was complete.

Having used my old ipod with the transmitter I was fully aware of the quality and what to expect. What I did forget is that once you plug headphones, or in this case the transmitter, into the n95 it takes over all of the audio.

It was great using the n95 as my mp3 player, synced with itunes using the excellent synctunes app. What I didn’t expect was that when the n95 was in sat nav mode that the audio would come through the FM transmitter too. The result was excellent. Instead of having to listen closely in case the sat nav gave me directions when a loud bit of music was playing, the sat nav spoke directly over the music. Very cool indeed.

Now for the best part. If a call comes in while you have the transmitter attached, the callers voice is piped through your speakers too. So it turns the transmitter/car cradle into a fully working car kit for your phone.

So rather than looking for a new bluetooth headset I am just working with my cheap cradle and transmitter. You do lose the privacy element of taking calls with a headset but I’ll take full handsfree kit over a BT headset any day.

sipgate and trixbox

Posted by Paul Howard - 01/01/08 at 06:01:59 pm

About two years ago I had a post on my blog with details of how to get a sipgate account working with trixbox. I still get one or two emails a month asking me for the information so I am reposting it here. I have purposely set the time of the post to 1st January so it appears at the start of the blog. Google should pick up the details without it interfering with the normal posts.
The following worked fine for me for both incoming and outgoing calls.

Outgoing settings

allow=ulaw&alaw
authuser=NNNNNNN
canreinvite=no
disallow=all
dtmfmode=info
fromdomain=sipgate.co.uk
fromuser=NNNNNNN
host=sipgate.co.uk
insecure=very
nat=yes
secret=PPPPPPPP
type=peer
username=NNNNNNN

Incoming settings

context=from-trunk
fromdomain=sipgate.co.uk
fromuser=NNNNNNN
host=sipgate.co.uk
insecure=very
qualify=yes
secret=PPPPPPPP
type=friend
username=NNNNNNN

Register String

NNNNNNN:PPPPPPPP@sipgate.co.uk

Where NNNNNNN is your username and PPPPPPPP is your password.

Once this is done you should be able to make outgoing calls. To receive incoming calls you then need to edit your sip.conf file.

Replace the line:

context = from-sip-external ; Send unknown SIP callers to this context

with

context = from-trunk ; Send unknown SIP callers to this context

Don’t forget to reload your config files or you will be scratching your head for 15 extra minutes like I did.

And Voila! Incoming and outgoing calls should work from your sipgate account.

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