I tried to solder the whole thing together finally and ran into some troubles, basically it didn’t work. I don’t know what was different from the first time I clipped it all together but I got no sound out of the mic. So I ripped out the funny circuit and tried to splice it all together. That didn’t work either on the first try because the phone cord has funny copper-wrapped nylon wires and they don’t solder well. In the end I did the unthinkable: I twisted the wires together and shrink-tubed them. This worked better than anything I tried before and the handset is what I will call complete. Actually I’m going to want to get some bigger shrink tube (preferably black) and cover up some ugly spots before I call it done, but I probably won’t write about that.

In summary, this was a fun project and I’ve got a really nice phone handset on my computer now. It cost me very little and wasn’t terribly hard. I’m happy with the results.

Some time ago I had a little project which I hosted a site for at LiveCD.ORG. The project has since died as I lost interest in it. I still own the domain name, though, and it’s a pretty cool domain name if you ask me. Anyway, what I’m getting at is that it’s up for grabs but I don’t want to let it slip into the hands of one of those evil squatters.

So here’s the deal: If you have some legitimate reason to want to own LiveCD.ORG (you maintain an Open Source Live CD and you want a nice redirect to your project page) get ahold of me and I’ll try to verify the legitimacy of said reason. If I think you’re legit you get the domain for free. If I think you’re not legit or I don’t like you much I’ll let you know and you can offer me money instead. Sounds fair? I thought so.

If you happen to work for Canonical the domain is totally yours. Ubuntu rocks!

Update: Brendan Sleight of the Morphix project has accepted this offer.

Some time ago my older brother Jens came back home for a visit and, while here, showed me his USB phone. These things are very cool indeed. They’re a simple USB-Audio device, sometimes with a USB-HID device for a keypad. They’re basically shaped like a cell-phone but they have a USB cable hanging off the end. If you’re going to use a VoIP softphone like Skype or Ekiga I highly recommend getting one. Jens gave me one for Christmas, I was thrilled.

Unfortunately for me ALSA is in a sad state on my favorite Linux distro right now and I rarely use Windows. USB phones work, they just don’t work particularly well on this particular distro. So rather than wait and hope that the engineers would fix the problem real-soon-now I decided to get an old phone handset and see if I could put microphone and speaker plugs on it. I picked up an old phone at DI for $1 (be sure to get one where the handset it just a handset, no keypad and definitely not cordless) and cut off one end of the coiled cord. Then the fun began…

First of all you need to know which wires are which. One site I looked at said that green and black were both ground, which would have been fine if they were a common ground but they aren’t. A look inside the handset showed that Yellow and Black are for the microphone, Red and Green are for the speaker.

Thankfully I was clever enough to use clips to test everything before attempting to splice the wires. On the first attempt I got absolutely no sound out of the mic and had to turn the volume all the way up to hear anything on the speaker. After cracking the handset open I discovered there were capacitors across both the speaker and the mic (I would have taken photos but my old camera doesn’t take macro shots at all really). These act as filters, but in my case they stopped the mic from working at all.

Naturally the first thing is to remove the capacitor from the mic. It wasn’t particularly difficult to remove it with my soldering iron and the result was amazing. Without it the microphone is actually very sensitive and very clean. There is a very small bit of noise but I’m pretty sure it’s from the computer’s internals and the signal is much stronger than the noise (no, I don’t have equipment to prove that and I can’t give you a numeric SNR, sorry).

I haven’t spliced the cable yet as I’m waiting for Eric to get back to me about a circuit I’ll want to build for the mic. Computer sound cards have a bias voltage on one of the lines which I should handle properly.

My friend Jared Bellows pointed me to this site which shows how to modify a cordless phone to this same purpose. There were a lot of people who reported back that it worked for them. I may have to try this some day.

Update: Eric pointed me to this schematic and we built it. I’m not entirely sure what it does, but I know that the people who drew the schematic knew what they were doing and I trust them. The handset works exceptionally well.

It turns out my home phone number can be reached for free over the Internet thanks to SIPphone. I live in Student Family Housing at BYU. We have an analog phone but the whole system is backed by a SIP-based VoIP system. Apparently the University has a peering agreement with SIPphone. Not only can we be called over the Internet but we can call a variety of SIP networks from our analog phone. But it gets even better. This VoIP thing opens up a huge number of possibilities.

SIPphone offers conference lines. These can be accessed via SIP by anyone, anywhere (and by myself and some other lucky souls from an analog phone). They don’t have any passcodes or anything so there’s no security but there are 10,000,000 possible lines so as long as you’ve picked one nobody else is using you should be fine.

IPKall offers a free phone number (Washington state area codes only) which will forward to any SIP URI you want it to. I’m not joking. I have an area-code 360 phone number that calls my computer. It’s possible that this kind of thing will spread to other areas than Washington but for now you can take comfort in the fact that most people have free long-distance in the US of some kind or other.

A recent bad experience (I fried all of our fleece blankets) lead me to dig deeper into the meaning of the various cycles on a clothes dryer. It’s always been a mystery to me why appliance manufacturers can’t say Hot and Warm rather than Whites and Colors and Permanent Press. I mean, c’mon, comparing the color of your clothing to it’s need for ironing is comparing apples to oranges anyway. So why don’t they just tell you what the temperature is?

The reason is that it’s not that simple. Whites and Colors, or Normal, or whatever your dryer calls it is basically Hot; Delicates is basically Warm; Fluff (my favorite cycle) is no heat at all, just air. But Permanent Press is Hot followed by some cool-down time so that your clothes aren’t hot when the dryer stops tumbling.

The reason behind this is that wrinkles are caused by pressure and heat. Pressure and heat are also what’s involved in ironing, so this makes sense. The cool-down time at the end of the Permanent Press cycle takes away the heat so that only pressure remains when it stops tumbling making wrinkles less likely. Don’t ask me why they called it Permanent Press. If the press were permanent you wouldn’t need any help keeping the wrinkles out.

As for fried fleece: you can brush out the really prickly parts with a fine stiff brush. I used a fingernail brush. Please note that this will damage your blanket to some degree, but then again what use is a prickly fleece blanket? Unfortunately your blanket will never be quite as soft as it once was.