Category: Software

Spotify is a great way to listen to music. Unfortunately the official client only runs on Windows and Mac machines. There is an experimental unsupported client for linux, however it’s provided as a DEB (ubuntu/debian) package.

Here’s a gross hack for whom is desperate to get it working on Gentoo.
read this entry »

… or anyone else really, with a little trick to implement a black list and filter unwanted callers.
read this entry »

GoogleVoice (GV for short) is a great service (I won’t go into the details, but you can read up about it here), but it is unfortunately accessible only if you are in the USA.
Granted there is already plenty of documentation about how to circumvent this, but I’m not aware of any of those using Asterisk.

So this post will document how to sign up for a GV account as well as how to use it with Asterisk afterwards, in the prospect of using it if you are not in the USA.

In order to be able to sign up for GV, you need to meet 2 prerequisites :

1. You need to have a US IP address
2. You need to have a US phone number, which will be used to validate your GV account

Step 1 is left as an exercise to the reader (“Good luck ! I’m behind 7 proxies !” ).

Step 2 is the one we’re going to describe here, as an example of what you can pull with simple Asterisk configurations.

read this entry »

If like me you get tons of telemarketers calls, there’s an easy way to get rid of them with a quick Asterisk hack. The following Asterisk configuration snippet will immediately send any hidden caller ID (99% telemarketers, and I have a general policy of not picking up the phone for hidden caller ID anyway) to a holding music making them waste money and time…

read this entry »

One of the common annoyances of copy-pasting on Windows is that it tries to copy-paste the formatting as well. This issue can easily be fixed by the following AutoHotkey macro, which will copy the selection to the clipboard as pure text.

read this entry »

Asterisk is a free telephony software. I’m posting here sample commented configuration files for reference purposes, hoping they will help you get kickstarted if needed.

This config sets up :

• SIP phones (for softphones or harware phones with SIP capabilities)
• Voice mails
• A few test phone numbers
• Forwarding of calls to a SIP provider for outbound and incoming calls (from/to PSTN)

That should be plenty already for a SOHO environment !

Note to French readers : Si votre FAI est Free, cette configuration fonctionne pour passer / recevoir des appels via le SIP de Free (Freephonie).

read this entry »

Firefox will load whatever URL is in the copy-paste buffer in the page if you middle click somewhere on a page. My mouse’s wheel also serves as the middle button, and I found it really annoying that when occasionally middle-clicking while scrolling the page, Firefox would try to load another page …

You can control this behaviour with this about:config property middlemouse.contentLoadURL. Set to true, the middle-click on the page will load the URL (if it is one) in the page, set to false it won’t.

Thanks Ayman !

If you use Gentoo and tried to install Cacti with Lighttpd instead of Apache, chances are that you ran into this error message :

1
2
3
4
5
6

/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/WebappConfig/content.py:27: DeprecationWarning: the md5 module is deprecated; use hashlib instead
  import md5, re, os, os.path
* Fatal error: Your configuration file sets the server type "Apache"
* Fatal error: but the corresponding package does not seem to be installed!
* Fatal error: Please "emerge >=www-servers/apache-1.3" or correct your settings.
* Fatal error(s) - aborting

read this entry »

There is currently a little bug in Xfce4 which prevents you to bind the key combinations involving SPACE and ESCAPE. For example you can’t bind <WINDOWS>-<SPACE>, but you can bind <WINDOWS>-C . This behaviour affects only the xfce-keyboard-settings GUI, which is annoying but leaves us with a workaround using the following command line :
read this entry »

Conky is a lightweight system monitoring tool. It has many built-in probes (processor load, memory usage, temperature sensors, etc), but it is still pretty easy to extend it if you don’t find the feature you need.

In this post I’ll describe my Conky setup and explain how to extend it to monitor your rTorrent downloads.

rTorrent is a great BitTorrent client which offers an XML-RPC interface to its core functions, making it easy to get the downloads status through scripting. You can read more about that in this previous post.
read this entry »