Last blogs I mentioned I am now using voip. It works great. Sometimes there is some echo in conversations, but that I can live with.

What I dont like is that caller id does not work with my prepaid account and also budgetphones accounting is not acccessible for prepaid users. Maybe I will switch to a post paid account to have those features. Maybe not though.

To my surprise I noticed that there was a mythtv extension for sip. So this week I’ve set up an asterisk server on my mythtv box. The plugin of mythtv connects to it, and asterisk is connected to budgetphone. Et voila, when someone calls me, there is a popup on my television which shows who’s calling, hmmmm, at least that should happen when I have caller ID… The rest of the plugin I can not seem to understand, but this works.

Asterisk is really great. You can actually create a text file with information like a local extention and a number to dial and put that file in the spool folder of asterisk and it will dial the local extention, wait until it answers and call the number.

Yeah, I should spend my time on usefull stuff, I know. But I broke the digiKam tarball 0.8.1, which does not compile < KDE 3.4, I probably am to blame for breaking the search as well in that release, and I might be responsible for breaking the calendar kipi. So, I need to clean up some things in the near future. That will probably slow down developing rsibreak even further.

On other news, I'm starting to gather information about the people who want to attend to the multimedia meeting, so if I didn’t sent you a mail already, let me know.

Ha, finally the moment is there: goodbye KPN (Royal Dutch Telecom).

I bought an ATA (this is a device which connects your traditional phone to the internet). But this is not enough. To be able to make phone calls to traditional phones, you need a gateway which converts the internet call to a traditional call.

I found one in The Netherlands, called budgetphone. Payment for their services can be based on prepayments, or two types of postpayment constructions.

They also provide the telephone numbers. Even one from the region you live in, and lucky for me, a beautiful number.

I received everything today at work and installed it without big problems. I unplugged it to go home, plugged it in my local switch at home and I immediatly got a dialtone and could call people. Simply amazing.

I read the faq on the website of budgetphone and I read that if you login multiple times, all phones will ring simultaniously. Time to look for a softphone (basically using software to connect to a sip provider and talk through a headset connected to your computer), that way I can receive my private calls at work via a headset and at home via the ATA.

I quickly found Twinkle. The setup is understable and quick and again it works! It uses kaddressbook for its addressbook, so I have instant access to all my (kolab-stored) phonenumbers. Oh, I love KDE.

Since this all seems to work and the quality is ok, it is time to port my Royal Dutch telephone number to my sip-account and tell KPN to disconnect my telephone. Sip it is.

Just a note to let you know that two members of the digiKam team have started blogging. Jörn Ahrens starts with another succesfull install of Kubuntu.

Our commit king Gilles Caulier starts with a call for nice pictures for the splash screens for digiKam 0.8.1, which I will pack soon.

I want to pack it soon, so it can go into dapper, which release schedule was brought to my attention by Carsten Niehaus.

So if you have the ultimate splashscreen for digiKam or showfoto, jump into #digikam and show it to us!