Internet/Web

An Electronics Home Makeover for the 21st Century

An Electronics Home Makeover for the 21st Century

Saturday, October 23, 2021

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It was a sad day when we finally sold our Bozak Concert Grand speakers this year after enjoying them for over half a century. They were a graduation present from "Papa Gene" Newsom of Newsom’s Music Center when I graduated from law school in 1971. The sale got me thinking that I really needed to write about what has changed in home entertainment now that we’ve turned the page to another century. Back then, there was no Internet or Spotify,… Read More ›

Amazon’s Alexa Now Available for Incredible PBX

Amazon’s Alexa Now Available for Incredible PBX

Tuesday, August 3, 2021

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Loyal readers already know that voice recognition applications occupy a special place in the Incredible PBX® toolchest. Over 8 years ago, we introduced Wolfram Alpha integrating the world’s largest almanac into Asterisk®. And today we’re pleased to add Amazon’s Alexa to the Incredible PBX fold for our latest Incredible PBX 2021 for Debian, Raspberry Pi and CentOS 7 builds. Just dial 5555 and tell Alexa what you’d like to know or do. If you’ve been sleeping under a rock these… Read More ›

Review: The 2021 Cadillac Escalade – Everything a Tesla Isn’t

Review: The 2021 Cadillac Escalade – Everything a Tesla Isn’t

Sunday, February 14, 2021

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Happy Valentine’s Day. We’re on our fifth year of our love-hate relationship with Elon and Tesla. After a second purchase of a Tesla with Full Self-Driving (FSD) and no cigar, it’s beginning to smell more like vaporware. Tesla now is morphing FSD into a "feature set" that includes Automatic Lane Changes, Summon from across the garage, AutoPark (maybe and sometimes), Traffic and Stop Sign Alerts, and AutoSteer on City Streets (coming soon). You’ll note that AutoSteer on the highways and… Read More ›

Meet Acer Spin 713: A Phenomenal Computer for All Seasons

Meet Acer Spin 713: A Phenomenal Computer for All Seasons

Monday, December 7, 2020

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It’s a portable office. It’s a movie theater. It’s a LAMP server. It’s a desktop PC. It’s a tablet computer. It’s a Chrome browser. It’s an Android platform. It’s a Linux server. And it gets almost 8 years of free software and firmware updates. Meet the $629 Acer Chromebook Spin 713. And, if you hurry, it’s $80 off at Best Buy today. The checklist of superlatives is almost too lengthy to mention: a touchscreen of unrivaled quality, a 12-hour battery,… Read More ›

The Most Important Asterisk Component: It’s the Backups!

The Most Important Asterisk Component: It’s the Backups!

Monday, November 23, 2020

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You might think Backups are critical in the event of a catastrophic hardware failure. And you’d be right. But there are other equally important reasons to maintain current backups. If you decide to migrate to a new server platform, a current backup makes it a painless exercise. If you need to recover from a FreePBX® module upgrade that hosed your server, a current backup is critical. If you want to migrate to a newer release of Asterisk® or FreePBX, a… Read More ›

Finding the Perfect Laptop: Meet the System76 Lemur Pro

Finding the Perfect Laptop: Meet the System76 Lemur Pro

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

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While we’ve been hunkered down in Vero Beach dodging the Covid-19 bullets, we spent a little time searching for a turnkey Linux notebook computer that could do everything a MacBook Pro could do… and more. The machine had to offer PORTS WITHOUT DONGLES plus the added benefits that only a pure Linux platform could provide. For $1099, our dream machine has arrived. The Lemur Pro is custom-built which means you order the 2.2 pound base computer with its 14-hour battery… Read More ›

Travelin’ Man 3: A Plug-and-Play Firewall for Incredible PBX

Travelin’ Man 3: A Plug-and-Play Firewall for Incredible PBX

Monday, March 9, 2020

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Seven years ago we introduced Travelin’ Man 3 to simplify the task of securing the Incredible PBX® VoIP platforms. Today we want to reexamine the Travelin’ Man 3 firewall design for the benefit of those that are new to Asterisk® and FreePBX®. In the old days, FreePBX-based VoIP servers were notoriously vulnerable because of numerous bugs in the original FreePBX code which was developed by dozens of developers around the world with very different skill sets. Not only did you… Read More ›

A New VPN for All Seasons: Introducing OpenVPN for Asterisk

A New VPN for All Seasons: Introducing OpenVPN for Asterisk

Monday, April 15, 2019

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This month marks our twentieth anniversary wrestling with virtual private networks. Here’s a quick walk down memory lane. Our adventure began with the Altiga 3000 series VPN concentrators which we introduced in the federal courts in 1999. It was a near perfect plug-and-play hardware solution for secure communications between remote sites using less than secure Windows PCs. Cisco quickly saw the potential, gobbled up the company, and promptly doubled the price of the rebranded concentrators. About 10 years ago, we… Read More ›

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