Sunday, January 4th, 2009
Did you ever want to receive Caller ID information from your SIP VoIP phone line on your Jabber Instant Messaging account? If you did, I can now provide you with a little hack that does just that: phonering.pl is a messy Perl script that connects to a SIP registrar, waits for incoming calls and notifies a given Jabber ID of new calls, including their SIP caller ID.
You can download phonering-0.01.tgz here, the archive includes the Perl file and a README file that explains the (few) configuration options. The script uses the Net::SIP and Net::Jabber CPAN packages, so you need a working copy of those two.
Note that the script only works if your SIP provider permits multiple concurrent registrations to a single SIP account - otherwise if you run phonering.pl you won’t receive any calls anymore on your (soft)phone. If your SIP provider does not permit multiple concurrent registrations, you can funnel your SIP traffic through intermediary services such as Voxalot. We use Voxalot here, it supports multiple registrations and is highly recommended by us (note that for Voxalot you need to use the specific server name for both the SIP hostname and the SIP domain, so always use e.g. eu.voxalot.com instead of voxalot.com).
If you have any problems you can always use the Contact page or the comments to drop us a line and we will try to help you out.
Some of you have probably already heard about Jott: Jott allows you to call their toll-free number, speak a short note to yourself and Jott will transcribe the note, store it in your Jott account, SMS it to yourself or someone else, etc. The transcriptions are amazingly accurate, which is due to Jott using a mixture of automated speech-to-text and human transcription. It works very well for me, even though I’m not a native English speaker. Our favourite productivity blog, Lifehacker, has already quite a lot of useful applications for and information about Jott.
Only downside: Jott only works if you have a U.S. or Canadian phone number from which you can originate calls to Jott. If you’re from the UK you can use the similar service reQuall instead. But if you’re neither from North America nor from the UK and you still want to try out Jott, here is a way out. It will mean that the free calls to Jott get replaced by merely cheap calls to Jott, however, but if that doesn’t stop you read on.
Continued reading >
Last week I bought a protective case from proporta for my Nokia N800 (one of the best gadgets I ever owned). It has an additional aluminum layer inside it’s leather skin to offer the best possible protection for my precious little device.
So I hope you can now imagine me: I am opening the case for the first time, feeling confident that with this case I will do the utmost possible to protect my N800, ensuring it won’t break anytime soon. So… I am opening the case, and the first thing I see is a tiny sticker inside, stating: “For mobile device repairs visit proporta.com.” Yes. The company that makes this ultra-protective case is already offering to repair my broken device. What an odd kind of marketing.
Wednesday, June 6th, 2007
Ever spent a lot of time debugging that one missing curly bracket in your source code file? Sure, there are code editors available that help you out with this daunting task. But if you cannot or don’t want to use one of those you can try these ten lines of Perl code:
bracket_detector.pl (also available on our pastebin) accepts any text as standard input and outputs the code, prepending each line with the current “curly bracket level”… Makes it a lot easier to figure out where things went wrong.
Saturday, April 28th, 2007
And I couldn’t resist: Another IMified widget. This one provides a collection of networking tools: The “NetLookup” widget that should show up on an IMified widgets page near you soon allows you to query a variety of network databases. You always give it a command in the form commandname target. The following commands are currently supported:
ping domain.com - Pings the given hostname five times and outputs the results.
traceroute domain.com - Outputs a traceroute to the given domain.
alexa domain.com - Prints Alexa Web Information about the given domain name.
whois domain.com - Looks up information about the domain name in the WHOIS database.
enum +1-604-958-1212 - Looks up ENUM entries for a phone number.
help - Prints this help text.
The traceroutes and pings originate from the logfile.ch server which is located in a datacenter near Munich in Germany. The Alexa service uses the Alexa Web Information Service from Amazon Web Services. The ENUM lookup is not very intelligent right now but it should suffice for the more common ENUM entries - and it looks up ENUM entries on a lot of different ENUM directory services, most notably of course e164.arpa and e164.org.
Adding the widget until it shows up on the IMified database is easy as well. You can proceed according to the instructions given for the BudgetBot, using the following information:
- Name this Widget: NetLookup
- Widget URL:
http://www.logfile.ch/imified_netlookup.php
- Type: Basic
Again, let me know if you find bugs or have ideas for additional features.
Thursday, April 26th, 2007
Discovering that IMified launched an easy-to-use API for their service, I was soon thinking about what to implement with it.
And then I remembered Adam Pash’s BudgetBot presented on LifeHacker. Unfortunately you have to set it up on your own server and it only works with AIM, limiting its use to the more tech-savvy and AIM-using people out there. So there we go: BudgetBot on IMified!
I use the ‘budget.pl’ code by Adam Pash and rewrote the front-end to this in PHP for the IMified API. I submitted the widget via the IMified “submit widget” form, but until it shows up in the widget database you can easily try “BudgetBot on IMified” yourself:
Go to the Add Widget Page, select “add by url” (small link next to the search bar) and enter:
- Name this Widget: BudgetBot
- Widget URL:
http://www.logfile.ch/imified_budgetbot.php
- Type: Basic
You can use the widget in Basic type, which is the preferred mode, but the world won’t collapse if you select “Advanced” (read: it’ll work just the same).
After that procedure BudgetBot should show up in your IMified main menu - just select its number and you can use all the commands described in the LifeHacker article. I did change the categories a bit, though: There’s a new “dining out” section and “car” was renamed to “transport” to cater to all the Non-Americans who actually use public transport.
By the way : If you want to clear your data you can remove the Widget and add it again. This is also a warning: If you remove the widget your budget list will be gone.
For now, the IMified BudgetBot doesn’t do anything the Lifehacker one doesn’t - just to keep it simple. I do plan on adding a few features, though: Choosing your own categories is one, CSV export to applications such as iFinance (which I use to track my budget) is another one. If you have specific BudgetBot needs just post a comment!
