Hacks and Hints TechieVarta

OK! you have setup your SIP phone in India. You have used services like VoipCheap and ipKall. The setup is working and you are saving a ton of money. But you still have to pay some money to VoipCheap or whoever your SIP service provider is. Although this money is significantly lower than what you were paying eralier. Now you want to setup another SIP phone at another location. This doubles the payment you need to make the SIP service provider: once for each line. In case of VoipCheap (which I use), that makes it 10 euro every 5-6 months. What if you needed 4 SIP phones. That implies you need to pay 4 times the cost. Each line can make 300 minutes of free call a week with VoipCheap. I am sure there are other services which offer similar free minutes/week. It is difficult to use these many free minutes/week. Here is a way to share your SIP-out minutes.

Voxalot is a good man in the middle service which provides capability to achieve exactly that. The lite version is free to use. The good part about the lite version is that it does not register with the SIP service provider. Which is essentialfor sharing the same SIP line between multiple phones.

In order to use Voxalot, configure every of your SIP phones to use seperate Voxalot account. At Voxalot configure your SIP provider as Voice Service Provider List. Configure the Smart Call to forward the calls to use configured SIP provider. And you are ready to make even cheaper calls.

Earlier, I had discussed how to setup Voip between India and several other countries at rather cheap price. I recently had to buy couple of VOIP phones for  India. I decided on GrandStream BT 200 and GrandStream BT 201. Now we have been using these devices for several weeks and I could not be more satisfied. These are not the most feature rich device in the market. However, they do the job. For what I needed the features were more than enough. I need good voice quality and STUN/NAT support.

Voice quality is very clear and they were easy to setup. The price for these devices is rather reasonable (~$50 a piece). Much less than what I had paid for SPA901. This device is a lot lighter than SPA901 and has an large LCD display. The only difference between BT200 and BT201 is that the BT200 has two Ethernet interfaces one for connecting to the Internet and the other for your PC/laptop. That may be handy for several homes. BTW, if you are wondering, I do not have any relationship with GrandStream. I do very small amount of money if you click on the links above to buy the phone. But, that has nothing to do with my opinion on the GrandStream.

BTW, did you know that you can share one voipcheap line between multiple VOIP phones. But, that is subject of another post.

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Apple has been adamant and provided a video recording application. Moreover they have blocked any thirdparty developer from providing video recording application at the app store.

Several of us espacially ones with young kids deeply miss it. There are always those precious moments where we don’t have our camcorder and want to capture them. A Video Recorder inside the phone is perfect solution. Welcome to the world of Jail Broken iPhone. In all there are two video recording applications. The first is iPhone Video Recorder which is free to try but costs $19.95 to buy. The other is Cycorder from Saurik which is free to use and completely ad supported. Both of them can do 15fps. But there is significant difference in quality. iPhone video recorder uses much lossier compression and this shows up in recordings. I use Cycorder and am very happy with it. Here is an example video. Even though effects of 15fps is very visible, as you can see this is pretty good quality.

To install Cycorder, jailbreak your iPhone and launch Cydia. Search for Cycorder and install it. The tricky part is getting videos out of the iPhone. In order to transfer the videos of the iPhone, I use iPhone browser. This application allows you to browse iPhone file system and backup data. Use the browser to get the data from /var/mobile/Media/Videos.

Happy recording!

Several of us don’t have need for and enthu for an elaborated backup system. Here is a small script that will backups the WPMU site including database and the file system and e-mails it to provided e-mail address. For small site this works perfectly. You can also use it to e-mail the backups to Gmail or msn mail. For automatic backup you can add this script to crontable of your host.

#!/bin/bash
DB=mu
WPMU_ROOT=/srv/www/mu-blogs

dirname=mu-backup-`date +”%m-%d-%y”`
cd /tmp
tmpdir=${dirname}

email=foo at bar . com

/bin/cp -R $WPMU_ROOT $tmpdir
/usr/bin/mysqldump mu > $tmpdir/db_backup.sql

/usr/bin/tar cfz $tmpdir.tgz $tmpdir

echo “Backup of WPMU $dirname” | /usr/bin/mail $email -s “WPMU Backup $dirname” -a $tmpdir.tgz
rm -rf $tmpdir*

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Look at some of the following screen shot:

Did you notice somehting? This screenshot has 5 docked icons not default Apple’s 4. That indeed is useful. Now look at the following:

A completely different looking iPhone springboard.

Now look at the following:

I completely different looking iPhone keyboard:

And no these are not photoshopped images of iPhone. These are actual screenshots. Apple ofcourse will never want you to change look and feel of their applications. The are control freaks when it comes to their applications and control every apsect of it. But some of us want to put our individual stamp on the device we paid for and own. We want our devices to stand out from the crowd. It is not about being better than Apple’s UI designers. It is about having control over the device we love and paid for.

Thanks to Saurik here comes the Winterboard which makes this possible.Winterboard is a complete theming engine for iPhone and iPod touch which lets you control every aspect of the user interface of your iphone including dock, sounds, keyboard, icons, transparancy, etc. 10s of themes are freely available for you to choose from.

If you have Jailbroken your iPhone as suggested in the previous post, installing Winterboard become a trivial exercise. As always backup iPhone using iTune. Launch Cydia and search for WinterBoard and install it.

Cydia also provide a host of various themes for Winterboard. Choose the themes you will like to try out and install them. Launch the Winterboard application and configure what you want. To use the 5 icons springboard, as usual press and hold one of the icons and than move desired items to the dock and you will now have 5 icons on the springboard.

Happy Theming.

You may be interested in iPhone App Reviews.

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Recent rumour has it that Apple and AT&T are working  on offering iPhone tethering plan. iPhone is based on BSD which means tethering is rather trivial. It is the cozy phone vendor and operator relationship which makes it difficult. It is like iPhone lives in a jail with AT&T and Apple as gatekeepers. Welcome to the world of jailbroken iPhone where every thing is possible and free/inexpensive. And no you don’t brick your phone, you don’t loose synchronization with iTunes. Sweet.

Here are the steps involved.

Step 1: Jail Break your phone. The best way to Jail Break is to use QuickPwn. The Jail Break removes Apple’s monopoly over the applications which can be installed on the device you paid for. It also installs Cydia and Installer the two leading independent software managers on your device. Before you worry about abuse, Installer and Cydia both are based on open source well proven tools. I have never seen any instability because of Jail Break. The guys who did QuickPwn have been good with quickly supporting new version of iPhone firmware.

Step 2: Start Cydia. Search for PdaNet from inside Cydia. PdaNet turns your iPhone in to a WiFi to Cellular router. They can also connect your PC and iPhone using USB cable. Let Cydia install it. PdaNet comes in two versions: Full and Free. The free version restricts you to web only contents while free version allows you to use other applications like e-mail. At one time $29 cost per license, this is no-brainer in my opinion. And no PdaNet guys don’t pay me for saying so. Once installed you need to set Ad-Hoc network between your laptop and iPhone. PdaNet guys have good instructions on how to do this. I think their site can use some redesign.

In fact I wrote part of this post using tethered connection. Look at the Speed Test result on the tethered connection:

That is 2.3Mbps sweet. Compare that to 960Kbps I gets from iPhone browser based speed test. Is Apple artificially limiting download speed? Running iPhone 3G connection at this speed created large drain on battery. So, if you decided to tether, keep charger handy.

One of the thing I had to decide is the main blog page on my new WordPress Mu site. I decided that I wanted this page to show off latest posts from all the blogs.Using Sitewide Tags was not an option since that does not have a way to import existing posts. I eventually decided to hack my own solution.

Doing this involved some PHP hacking, googling and WPMU Feed plugin. The overall design of the page now uses WPMU Feed to send site-wide post feed. This main page just uses this feed to display posts First download the WPMU Feed plugin and install it. I host feed plugin to http://techievarta.com/feed/.

I cloned my theme to create another copy used by the main site. Than I changed index.php to use the feed. A typical index.php looks like the following:

if there are posts

      show posts;

else

    show error;

endif

The changes required removing else part. So the new index.php looks like”:

if there are posts

     show posts;

endif

<-- Catch the feed and display --->

To catch the feed and display, the code (which is based of feed.php of wordpress installation) looks like the following:

 if ( $rss = fetch_rss( 'http://<site>/feed/',20 ) ) {
       echo '<ul>';
       if ( $num_items !== -1 ) {
          $rss->items = array_slice( $rss->items, 0, $num_items );
       }

       foreach ( (array) $rss->items as $item ) {
          printf('<a href="%1$s" ><h4>%2$s</h4></a><p/>',
             clean_url( $item['link'] ),
             htmlentities( $item['title'] )
             clean_url( $item['link'] ),
             htmlentities( $item['title'] )
          );
         echo "Published ";
         echo $item['pubdate'];
         $dc = $item['dc'];
         if( !empty($dc)){
           echo ' by ';
           echo attribute_escape(  $dc['creator']  );
         }
         echo '<p/>';
         echo attribute_escape(  $item['description']  );
         echo '<p/><br/>';
     }
     echo '</ul>';
 }

Replace <site> with your site’s URL and 20 with number of the contents you want.

Happy Blogging!

I recently consolidated several of my blogs to a single WordPress Mu blog site. This allowed me to have a streamlined single user and site administration across all my blogs. Wordpress Mu which stands for WordPress Multi User, is implemented as an extension to our beloved WordPress suite and can run most of the WordPress plugins and themes although there are differences.

Installation

1. Download latest WordPress Mu from the dowload site.
2. Unzip WordPress Mu to a place where your web server can find it.
3. Configure the web server and point it to the Mu site. For Apache the configuration looks like:

<VirtualHost>
 DocumentRoot /srv/www/mu-blogs
 ServerName example.com
 ServerAlias *.example.com
 ServerAdmin root@localhost
  AllowOverride FileInfo Options
 # AllowOverride All
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all
 CustomLog /var/log/apache2/mublogs-access_log combined
</VirtualHost>

Look at ServerAlias directive. This allows blogs to have addresses of the form <blogname>.example.com.
If you would rather use the blog names of the form:
example.com/<blogname>, you don’t’ need to add the server alias directive.

4. Now make sure DNS for *.example.com correctly points to your site.
5. Point the browser to your newly created site, answer simple question and let WordPress Mu install the site and the site is up and running.

Themes

Most of the WordPress themes should work with WordPress Mu theme. For themes to be available for individual blogs, they must be enabled in the admin menu. I wanted all my blogs to use the same theme and did not want to manually edit theme setting in every blog. To achieve this, I replaced the default theme with the theme of my choice. Any future created WordPress blog will automatically inherit the default theme.

Plugins

One thing you noticed when installing plugins is that MU has two plugin directories: <wordpressroot>/wp-content/plugin and <wordpressroot>/wp/content/mu-plugin. Any plugin placed in the <wordpressroot>/wp-content/plugin are available to every blog but still must be activated just like any normal wordpress plugins. The mu-plugin directory is special. Any plugin placed in this directory is automatically activated and all the blogs automatically get it. In addition WordPress Mu does not scan subdirectories under mu-plugin directory. The plugin’s php must be directly placed in the mu-plugin directory.

Happy Blogging!

Isn’t it great that FireFox has capability of to add addons? The FF’s addon site is full of features. Every one has their favorite set of addons. I have mine here is the list:

1. Wired-Marker: Every wondered if you can just mark a part of the webpage you are visiting and get back to the mark later. Something like a book mark but instead of book marking full page, just mark a part of the page. Wired-Marker is to rescue.
2. Delicious Bookmark: This addon allows you to sync you del.ico.us advertisement with firefox. This will allow you to share the same set of bookmarks on all the machines you work on. The biggest problem with delicious is that they don’t upgrade the addon fast enough when FF upgrades. So at time I am forced to use an earlier version of the firefox just so that I can use del.ico.us.
3. Stylish: Use stylish to change look and feel of any site. This works by adding a site specific CSS. For example, you want the page to look darker and save your eyes, just use stylish script. I need to write a seperate post of stylish.
4. Greasemonkey: Greasemonkey is like stylish but you can do much more then changing just look and feel.  This works by and adding a javascript which is run whenever you visit the specific site. There is a very large script library at usescripts.org. I need to write another post just on Greasemonkey scripts. These have become essential part of my daily browsing. For exampl, if you don’t like Google text adds, write Greasemonkey script.
5. NoScript: Scripts are evil. They open possibility of attacks and privacy compromise. Most sites work very well without scripts anyway. I will strongly suggest using NoScript and getting rid of scripts at several sites.
6. IETab: Even after so much FF usage, if the site does not provide IE supported randoring, use IETab and you will be able to dynamically change the randoring engine between IE and FF. Any of the FF tab can be changed by clicking an icon in the status bar.
7. ForecastFox: Don’t we all love weather? Use this to get live weather.
8. Adblock Plus: If you are sick and tired of advertisement on various sites, just use adblock and block out those advertisements. You can also block out other content. Anything which has a different object type then HTML can be blocked.
9. Adblock Filterset.G Updater: Community maintained set of adblock filters. This will cleanup most of the sites you regularly visit.
10. Download Sidebar: I hate the default FF download list interface. This addon provide a status bar interface to provide the list of downloaded files and their current status.

In my post on free VoIP calls to India I had discussed my setup for free VOIP calls to India. The setup discussed required PSTN caller the SIP broker number and then dial *010 followed by Voxalot extension to connect up to the VOIP phone. This works. However it is not very convenient. Also, the SIP broker number cannot be used as the number to forward your calls to. For example, if you were going to India and wanted to forward all your incoming cellular calls to your VOIP phone number in India, this solution will not work. You will be forced to use something like Reliance Passport Service.

Here is an update which allows one to have a normal USA phone number from Washington state for free. Also, you can use this number as the forwarded number for your regular cellular phone in the USA. Whenever one makes a phone call, the operator which handles origination of call, pays a part of their revenue to the operator which handles termination of the call. IPKall provides free Washington state regular phone number. They terminate regular phone calls to a PSTN-SIP gateway and forward it to SIP service provider of your choice. Their site says they can work with FWD and MutualPhone. However, they can work with almost any SIP service provider. In order to have a free incoming USA number, you can sign up with them. Once you sign up, and logon on to their site, provide your SIP proxy’s address and SIP extension number and you are all set.

Since IPKall earns revenue by handling incoming calls, if you do not receive an incoming call for an extended period of time they will terminate your number.