{"id":258,"date":"2005-04-17T22:05:47","date_gmt":"2005-04-18T06:05:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/2005\/04\/12\/how-i-killed-my-answering-machine-part-vii\/"},"modified":"2005-04-17T22:06:35","modified_gmt":"2005-04-18T06:06:35","slug":"how-i-killed-my-answering-machine-part-vii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/2005\/04\/17\/how-i-killed-my-answering-machine-part-vii\/","title":{"rendered":"How I Killed My Answering Machine: Part VII"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the last of seven parts of the story of how I killed my answering machine. How complicated can it be to replace a simple little device with something a little more geeky? About 17 months, $500 and countless hours – that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how complicated.<\/em><\/p>\n

Part VII: The Damage<\/strong><\/p>\n

With everything finally working, it was just a matter of cleaning everything up and putting it away. But first, there was a need for some destruction. There’s no hole for the ethernet cable to get out of the TiVo, so you have to make one. This was fun. I pulled out a power drill, found a nice spot on the back case of the TiVo, and let out many months of frustrations on the box. The cable went through, I connected it to the wireless bridge, put the cover back on, and put it back in the entertainment center. I left the screws off – who knows when I’ll need to go in there again. So far, so good though. From what I hear, the next time TiVo pushes an update I’ll have to pull the drive out and reinstall any software I’ve added such as the telnet and FTP servers.<\/p>\n

My router that I no longer needed arrived from Amazon soon after and I sold it to a coworker minus the rebate which I said I would send in. Months later I would get a rejection postcard from Linksys saying that my purchase was out of the specified time period. It wasn’t, but I’m too lazy to fight it, which is exactly what they want I guess. So I lost $10 on that router.<\/p>\n

Some nights later I used the telnet and FTP servers I installed earlier to put TiVoWebPlus<\/a> and TyStudio<\/a> on my newly-networked TiVo. TiVoWebPlus’s interface is a bit funky, but it’s far easier to browse and search for programs and schedule programs when you have a mouse and a keyboard rather than a remote. I can also theoretically do last-minute scheduling from work if I wanted to.<\/p>\n

TyStudio is also quite nice if you want to get a program off your TiVo. I’ve only really wanted to do this once, but it worked. Tranferring a 300MB video file over a 802.11b wireless connection was pretty painful, but eventually finished. The hardest part was converting TyStudio’s MPEG2 stream to something that could be transcoded to something streamable. I forget what software I finally used, but it worked<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So that’s it? I’m done? Not quite. Lingo still had a few issues. For one, my outgoing callerid was still showing my temporary number. Worse, they were going to charge me for having two numbers after a few months. A few emails and calls later, they fixed that. <\/p>\n

The more persistent problem was that the time on the incoming caller id was wrong – 4 hours into the future. I live in California, not Nova Scotia<\/a>. This was particularly annoying because my spinning info globe thing also serves as a clock in my living room, so I’m always seeing the wrong time rotating around. I sent a few emails to Lingo (noting that my account had my time zone set to Pacific) about this and they responded to say it was fixed and that I may have to reset my modem for it to take effect. I did that a few times and it didn’t do anything. I sent another email and didn’t get any response at all. One day I had idea – what if I changed my timezone on the Lingo website to a timezone 4 hours behind Pacific, like Hawaii time? I did that and the callerID was now a couple hours in the past. Good. Then I set it back to Pacific. It worked. I guess that’s the telephony equivalent of “jiggling the handle.” Lingo customer support is pretty useless.<\/p>\n

My God, I think that may really be it. I have VOIP. All my cordless phones work. My TiVo can update. Best of all, my answering machine is collecting dust in the attic. <\/p>\n

So the final damage tally for this project is:<\/p>\n

\r\n17 months\r\n 5 modems ($46)\r\n 5 trips to Fry's\r\n 3 operating system installs\r\n 2 wireless routers ($55)\r\n 1 network card ($69)\r\n 1 CallSoftPro license ($50)\r\n 1 serial adapter ($4)\r\n 1 wireless bridge ($35)\r\n 1 cordless phone system ($216.42)\r\n 1 spinning info globe ($50)\r\n dozens of reboots \r\n many stupid hours wasted + several more writing a stupid blog about it\r\n<\/pre>\n
That’s about $550 plus whatever it costs to power a PC “answering machine” for a year.<\/p>\n
Of this I still have a license for CallSoft Pro, a serial adapter and a modem with broken caller id to sell. Oh, let me know if you’re interested in using Lingo<\/a> (despite my issues here). We both get $25 off our bills with a referral code. If I can refer 22 people, I could actually break even on this endeavor. Unlikely.<\/p>\n
If there’s a lesson here, it’s don’t try to build your own answering machine. Also, don’t call me – send me email. Given the fiascos of the last year, who knows what state my phone system might be in right now?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is the last of seven parts of the story of how I killed my answering machine. How complicated can it be to replace a simple little device with something a little more geeky? About 17 months, $500 and countless hours – that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how complicated. Part VII: The Damage With everything finally working, it was …<\/p>\n
Continue reading ‘How I Killed My Answering Machine: Part VII’ »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}