It's a Girl!

Well, we found out today that we'll be having a baby girl. As convinced as Sheila was it was going to be a boy, I was able to give her a girl instead. We are both thrilled and the baby is doing well and she is healthy. We found out just a couple of days ago. The picture above was taken about two weeks ago, so in that picture she's about 14 weeks new. It's actually a 3D picture. We're looking forward to seeing more 3D pictures when she's a bit further along to see who she looks like (hopefully like Sheila, with no goatee).

Asterisk - Open Source PBX

I've been fooling around more with VoIP stuff. I remembered hearing about an open source PBX system called Asterisk a while back. At the time, I didn't really understand how I might be able to use such a system. Well, with my new interest in learning more about VoIP in conjunction with the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network), I decided to look into it again.

As it turns out, you can use Asterisk as a SIP (Session Initiated Protocol) client. What exactly does that mean? Well, if have a SIP account (many broadband phone providers use this protocol) then you can use Asterisk to interface with it. So you can have Asterisk answer at the number of your SIP account and set it up to do anything that a regular PBX can do.

I signed up for a free DID (Direct Inward Dialing) with Stanaphone. They give you a free New York phone number that you can receive unlimited phone calls on. Then I downloaded Asterisk Win32 and installed it. It's really meant to run on Linux systems, and you can get the "real" version of it at www.asterisk.org. Then all I had to do to have it answer the free New York number was add the following line to the sip.conf file:

register => <phone number>:<password>@sip.stanaphone.com

without the <> symbols, of course. Then I launched AsteriskWin32 and I was in business. Now when someone dials the New York phone number, the AsteriskWin32 system running on my PC answers! Neato! I'm going to fool with it more and see if I can't get it set up to do some forwarding to other phone numbers. Stay tuned...

Make Free International Phone Calls!

I found a fantastic free service provided by a clever group of folks in the United Kingdom. They will provide you with a UK phone number where you can receive inbound calls from the UK. You can also forward calls sent to that phone number to any international phone number. My brother is living in London, so I set up two numbers: one to forward to my cell phone and the other to forward to home. This way he can reach me on either line.

To get the UK inbound phone number, go to www.voipuser.org and sign up for a new account. Once you get logged in, click the My Numbers link and then request a new number. Then set it up to forward to whatever phone number you would like. For the outbound service, go to My SIP Account and request a new SIP account. Then just wait three days and you'll be able to use it.

You'll need to either have an Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA) to hook up a real phone, or use a software telephone on your PC, such as X-Lite. Go here to see how to configure X-Lite for voipuser.org. There was one trick I had to use to finally get it to work. I had to reset the configuration for the SIP account before entering all the info. To do that, launch the X-Lite menu, navigate to System Settings > SIP Proxy > (Select the proxy) > Reset > Confirm Reset.

Once you do that, just enter your voipuser.org username, your password, and sip.voipuser.org for the domain and proxy. It seems that there is some difference between the default settings and the settings from the reset. I'm not sure exactly what the reset does to fix the configuration problem, but it works.

Eventually I got it working and was actually able to call my house as well as Sheila's uncle in Colombia. Since it is a UK phone number, you have to dial 00 to get out of the country (out of the UK), rather than 011. So to make a call within the U.S., you dial 00-1-(555)-555-5555. Give it a shot, it works great!