Yeah, ok, it’s a bit of a gimmicky title

With my recent escapades into VOIP though, it quickly became annoying for me to have a desk IP phone and a softphone on my laptop, as well as my normal mobile and landline. Well, asterisk can route the landline as I want, so I guess that doesn’t really count. But given that I use my mobile for almost all of my calls (it is the number I hand out), it’s still annoying to have to swap phones.

Enter Siphon (click for screenies), a VOIP client for the iPhone. It is a real client, not a proxy like Fring (took me a while to figure that out :/). This means if you have a local Asterisk setup, you can use the local IP and actually get a reasonable latency The call quality is perfect with Siphon too. And it plugs into the addressbook in the iPhone, even better. The only down side is that apple don’t allow background applications to actually run on the iPhone, so incoming VOIP calls do not get routed through unless the application is left open. Oh well, it’s still a cool app

I wonder if I will have problems remembering when I’m calling someone over VOIP and when I’m calling over the mobile network given they are both made with my mobile phone device now…I don’t really want to spend an hour on the phone to a landline thinking I’m talking over VOIP only to discover a bill for $60

Another glaring oversight of having a Mac, and one that I think should be exploited by those making parodies of the Mac v PC ads

I have a mac, therefore, I can do “everything” out of the box…except resize an image. Or create an image. Or, edit an image in any way. There is no Mac equivalent to MS Paint. Not that paint is very good, but at least in a pinch you can save a screenshot to paint and then resize it. Sure, the Grab utility in Mac OS X is great, but it’s not very much good to me at full size. Ohhh, right, I’m supposed to buy Photoshop, because that’s the only well known program that PC users are going to recognize that is also on a Mac that can edit images. Or I Google a lot and find a bunch of new programs I’ve never heard of, none of which are endorsed by Apple.

So, anyway, I’ve settled on SeaShore, which is based on GIMP. I didn’t like GIMP because it runs in X11 and doesn’t interpret key commands “properly”. By properly, I mean the same way Cocoa apps behave. You have to click on a window before you can click on any buttons in X11 i.e. if you are looking at the image and want to change tools, you must click the tool twice. One click selects the tool window, and one selects the tool. Then you have to click twice in the image to start using the tool. Annoying. Oh, and all of the commands are mapped to control button, not the command button. Also annoying.

SeaShore is a very cut down version of the gimp, but it’s small, Mac friendly, and allows me to paste and resize my screenshot easily

I also stumbled across this blog entry from 2006 that discusses some of the free editing tools for Mac, all of which turned up in my search as well, but it’s easier to link there for a summary.

Recently I have started getting into VOIP servers, specifically, Asterisk based VOIP servers. I use a Macbook pro as my everyday work computer (clamshell mode while at the office).

Problem 1) The Macbook Pro has line level inputs not mic level inputs. So when I bought a medium-range Logitech Clearchat headset, it didn’t work.

Attempted solution 1: I have an external Toshiba Dynadock which has a sound card in it, and connects up via USB. The mac detects the sound card. The Sound preferences control panel sees the mic and responds to it. No other application responds to the mic. I’ve absolutely no idea why. The only problem I could find on Google that remotely resembled this was when people are trying to get sound into a sound recording application, and the recording input is set at the wrong sampling rate. I tried modifying this to no joy. I can even hear the mic if I put the input on “passthrough” mode with Rogue Amoeba’s LineIn application, but I simply can’t get it to work in an application. The most simple test I have is using Audacity and recording off that input. Sigh.

Attempted solution 2: I un-clamshelled my mac to use the internal mic. So I have the internal mic and internal speakers and I’m talking and I can hear them, and they can hear me, but they are hearing an echo of themselves. Why? Because the internal mic in a Macbook Pro is in the speaker grill, next to the speaker. So the other person talks, it comes out my speakers, and the mic picks up on some of it and routes it back to the person.

Why put a mic next to the speaker? Lots of people say “oh I used it to record my voice and it was ok”. Yes, but you’re not outputting through the speakers at the same time. Even the normal Macbook has the mic next to the camera. It makes SENSE to put it next to the camera, because when people do video calling, they are looking at (and therefore speaking to) the camera.

As much as I like Mac OS X, I don’t think I’ll buy another mac. I might buy a Vaio instead. Windows 7 is quite nice, and even if it does “go slow” after a year and require a reinstall, I have discovered that a lot of what I do is server-based anyway, meaning that as long as I have a core set of applications on whatever PC I am using, I don’t have to back up / reinstall much.