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Newbie’s Roadmap to Streaming Audio and Music

Monday, July 31, 2023 / 3 Comments on Newbie’s Roadmap to Streaming Audio and Music

We’ve been a diehard audiophile beginning with our in-person autograph from Elvis on a Sunday afternoon while he was playing touch football in the vacant lot beside his mother’s home in Memphis. My first serious setup was a law school graduation present that included a McIntosh amp, preamp, and tuner with Bozak Concert Grand speakers in the early 70’s. From there we added Revox, Tandberg, and Nakamichi tape machines. And then along came MP3, Napster and 10¢ music downloads from sites in Russia. That finally persuaded the RIAA to come to the bargaining table over streaming audio compensation, the same issue facing the movie industry today with the Writers Guild of America strike.

Fast forward a few decades and XM Radio introduced streaming audio for your car and later for your home. Sonos saw the writing on the wall and quickly followed with sound systems offering the flexibility to play streaming content from different sources in every room of your home or office. We actually lived in several homes that were pre-wired for speakers in every room and, thanks to Sonos, the days of multi-zone receivers costing thousands of dollars were numbered. And then along came Spotify to make streaming music a household word and music piracy a thing of the past thanks to reasonable pricing and $5 a month streaming subscriptions for college students which live on to this day.

Choosing a Provider for Streaming Audio

That brings us to today with streaming music content from Apple, Amazon Music, and Spotify. With Apple Music and Amazon Music Unlimited, you can choose CD-quality and high-resolution audio streams at no additional cost. And you can stream the content to wireless speakers with dynamic range comparable to speakers costing thousands of dollars and occupying a fraction of the space required by standalone speaker systems. So we begin with our recommendation for a streaming provider that offers the best feature set for families. With all three providers, the breadth of the music content is virtually identical topping 100 million songs and each of the family plans supports six accounts. With Apple, you’re pretty much locked into the Apple ecosystem. If your family is loaded with iMacs, iPhones, and iPads, then Apple One is worth a careful look which bundles Apple Music, Apple TV+, some iCloud storage, and Apple Arcade for $22.95/month or $16.95 a month for an individual subscription. While there is no Apple One student plan, their Apple Music Student plan is $4.99 a month and includes Apple TV+ but no Apple Arcade or iCloud storage. Spotify’s student plan is priced the same and bundles Hulu but no longer includes Showtime. And, speaking of Spotify, the deal breaker with their $15.99/month, 6-user, family plan is that all members of the family must reside under one roof. Spotify reportedly uses the location of each family member’s phone to verify location.

So we’re left with Amazon Music’s $14.99/month Family Plan which includes six accounts with no restrictions on location of each family member and no requirement that all users own a Mac, or iPhone, or iPad. That works out to $2.50 per person per month. Quite a deal. In addition, you always get HD audio quality which is more than double the quality of standard quality streaming services. For millions of songs, Ultra HD audio quality is offered with up to 10 times the quality of standard quality streaming services. The absence of gotchas made this an easy choice for our family, but your criteria may differ. The one objection we heard from a family member was preservation of their Spotify playlists, but this was easily solved here.

Speaker Recommendations for Streaming Audio

Now that we have music content, we need something on which to play our favorite tunes. With the exception of Apple, both Spotify and Amazon permit streaming to virtually any smartphone, tablet, or desktop PC. But the silver lining is the ability to stream the content to three of today’s best wireless speakers, all of which we have put through their paces. These include the Denon Home 350, the Sonos Five, and Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin. Suffice it to say, all three provide superb audio quality using both Bluetooth and WiFi with AirPlay2.

We’re big fans of most refurbished electronics products but, if you’re new to the game, we would caution you to carefully pick your provider. Make certain that their offerings include a good warranty and free returns with free shipping with problematic devices. These speakers in particular are fairly heavy because they also include sophisticated electronics in the form of amplifiers and network connectivity. That also means they are more subject to problems down the road. There’s a reason there are so many refurbished offerings for these particular speakers. So you may also wish to consider extended warranties if you go the refurb route. If you’re not dissuaded, we cannot recommend a better supplier than Accessories4Less.

Insofar as audio quality is concerned, if you are a fan of booming bass in your speakers, then the Denon Home 350 and Sonos Five are your best picks. The Zeppelin has equally pleasing audio quality, but the bass emphasis is not quite as pronounced. All three provide excellent mid-range and tweeter response, and all three allow adjustment through a smartphone-based app that includes an Equalizer.

Setup of the three devices is performed using a smartphone app, and the Denon Home 350 and Zeppelin also provide a button for automatic Bluetooth connectivity. The apps on our Denon Home 350 and Sonos Five worked flawlessly for painless setup. On our refurbished B&W Zeppelin, we never got connectivity using the app despite the fact that the speaker was successfully connected to our phone with Bluetooth. Initial unpacking revealed that the factory-refurbished Zeppelin was dead on arrival. We only managed to restore it to a functional state after hours digging through B&W’s web site to locate this tutorial to restore the firmware on the speaker. Despite a generally favorable impression of Zeppelin and its sound quality (once restored), we never managed to get connectivity to the smartphone app and ended up returning the unit, a real disappointment given its gorgeous design.

In choosing between the Denon Home 350 and the Sonos Five, we would rate this pick as a tossup. We own both units. If you are already heavily invested in the Sonos ecosystem, then the Sonos Five will not disappoint. The Denon Home 350, however, is less dependent upon its smartphone app in terms of usability. On a Mac, for example, navigating to Sound preferences in Setup, lets you instantly switch your Mac sound output to AirPlay after which all apps on your desktop machine play flawless audio through the Home 350. And on either an iPhone or an Android device, Bluetooth connectivity is as simple as pressing the Bluetooth button on the back of the speaker and selecting the Home 350 on your phone or tablet. Similarly, if multi-room and multi-device connectivity are on your radar, both the Sonos unit and the Home 350 speaker through its HEOS app provide this functionality. Finally, both speakers support Amazon Echo devices so Alexa awaits to power on and off your speaker as well as to adjust the volume and skip songs.

Both the Sonos smartphone app and the Home 350 HEOS app provide the ability to stream content from a number of sources without Bluetooth interaction with your phone. Using the Home 350 HEOS app, you can also drill down into your Amazon Music Playlists to choose individual songs to play. You also can play music from your favorite NAS or USB flash drive.

Once you dive into streaming audio and wireless speakers, post a comment and add your 2¢.

Originally published: Monday, July 31, 2023

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FULL DISCLOSURE: ClearlyIP, Skyetel, Vitelity, DigitalOcean, Vultr, VoIP.ms, 3CX, Sangoma, TelecomsXchange and VitalPBX have provided financial support to Nerd Vittles and our open source projects through advertising, referral revenue, and/or merchandise. As an Amazon Associate and Best Buy Affiliate, we also earn from qualifying purchases. We’ve chosen these providers not the other way around. Our decisions are based upon their corporate reputation and the quality of their offerings and pricing. Our recommendations regarding technology are reached without regard to financial compensation except in situations in which comparable products at comparable pricing are available from multiple sources. In this limited case, we support our sponsors because our sponsors support us.

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Our Favorite All-You-Can-Eat Deals in Cyberspace

Monday, May 15, 2023

Let’s begin with a mea culpa. We’ve been wrong on a few all-you-can-eat deals over the years including the CloudAtCost switcheroo, the Google Voice fiasco, and a few other cloud provider implosions. But our overall track record has been pretty good over the past decade, and today we have some fresh deals that are worth a careful look. We, of course, would encourage everyone to perform their own due diligence and at least acknowledge the cautionary note: "If a deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is." Having said that, these are all deals that we continue to use and to rely upon as this is written.

Free Oracle Cloud Hosting for Life

We’ve previously written about the free Oracle Cloud hosting deal so we won’t dwell on it here other than to provide a link that will show you how to sign up and use the Oracle Cloud to host your Incredible PBX servers for life at no cost, up to four of them. Here’s the link.

Domain Names at Cost

There are lots of sources to acquire domain names whether you need one or dozens. But nobody comes close to matching Spaceship pricing across the board. Here are some examples: .com for $8.80/year, .org and .net for $9.80, .us for $6.48, and .uk for $5.23.

VPN Unlimited for Life

Whether you use a VPN for anonymous protection while surfing the web or for access to premium movie services while visiting countries that block some services, a lifetime VPN subscription is a worthy investment. In this case, waiting for the deal to come along is worth a little patience. Our favorite lifetime service is VPN Unlimited which, as recently as November 2021 was selling for $18. Today it’s $199.99. Two weeks ago it was $99. There are numerous VPN for Life services but, if you stray from VPN Unlimited, we would encourage you to sign up for a one month plan to be sure it meets your needs in terms of performance and reliability with services such as Netflix. In the alternative, make frequent visits to LowEndTalk, LowEndSpirit, and StackSocial and await the next deal. It won’t be very long.

Unlimited Music Streaming Services

Perhaps the greatest blessing for parents was the arrival of unlimited streaming music services which all but eliminated the risk of being sued or prosecuted for music piracy. If you have a kid in college, the best deal on the planet is Spotify’s 4-year, $4.99 a month plan which provides access to their entire music catalog as well as a Hulu subscription. While you only get one stream at a time, lucky parents will soon discover that their listening hours rarely conflict with the waking hours of college students.

For Amazon Prime subscribers, Amazon has recently sweetened their music deal with Amazon Music Prime which provides free streaming access to 100 million songs. You can build playlists and so long as you stream them in Shuffle mode, Amazon will play all of your playlist selections before injecting any other content. Quite a deal.

Unlimited Home Internet Service

If you’ve grown weary of Comcast, Spectrum, and WOW regularly moving their pricing goalposts, you’ll be pleased to learn that both T-Mobile and Verizon now offer Home Internet Service with no data caps. We actually use T-Mobile’s offering in two locations so the first costs $30 a month with a Magenta Max cell plan and the second costs $50 a month, still a deal compared to the cable companies. Even in remote areas, we’ve found the download speeds to be quite reasonable at 200+ Mbps. And, with T-Mobile, the price is guaranteed for life. With Verizon and a qualifying cell plan, the monthly cost is $25 a month with a 2-year price guarantee. Both will partially cover early termination fees from your previous cable provider.

Lifetime Cloud Storage Services

We would be the first to warn you that lifetime cloud offerings can be a slippery slope simply because the provider’s monthly costs never go down. So long as their subscription model provides more revenue than their cost of doing business, they will probably stay around. Once the math changes, your investment AND your data goes down the toilet along with the provider. Having said that, we’ve signed up with pCloud which has been in business for a decade and boasts a subscriber base of 16 million users. Their lifetime 2TB Individual Plan provides 2TB of storage and 2TB of monthly download bandwidth for $399. Their 500GB Individual Plan provides 500GB of storage with 500GB of monthly download bandwidth for $199. Both plans include a PUBLIC folder (ours is here) in which you can store files with download links that are accessible anonymously using web browsers, wget, and curl. All of their monthly and lifetime plans include a 10-day money-back guarantee. Rave reviews are available from numerous sources using a Google search for pcloud reviews.

On the other end of the usability spectrum is the first provider we tried, Internxt. We bought their 1TB lifetime offering for €99.00, and it’s no longer available. Instead, they now offer a 2TB lifetime plan for $299 or a 5TB plan for $499. The gotcha with Internxt is their crippled download service. It only supports downloads using a web browser. Wget and curl downloads all fail with their support staff professing surprise or ignoring support requests. Steer clear!

Lifetime Email Hosting for BYO Domains

Email hosting is something that most of us take for granted, either because we have a free service from Google or Microsoft or because our Internet provider provides "free" email accounts. The old adage that you’re being penny-wise and pound-foolish seems particularly appropriate here. Your email service is a key critical component particularly if you’re in business. Our solution and the one we recommend is the MXroute Lifetime Plan for $199. With it, you can host unlimited domains and unlimited email accounts with a storage limit of 10GB and 300 outbound emails per hour. They have awesome tutorials to help you get started.

Originally published: Tuesday, May 23, 2023

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The All-Purpose Device for Home or College-Bound Students

Monday, October 10, 2022

We won’t attempt to educate you on the feature set of Alexa devices other than to note that, in the words of Bob Dylan, "The Times They Are A-Changin’." What was once a device to provide a weather forecast, turn on your lights, lock your front door, and start your car can now function as a full-featured HD TV with an Echo Show 15 and one of your favorite streaming providers including Netflix, Sling, Hulu, and YouTube TV. And, if you didn’t know, Amazon Prime Day is upon us. While we had no insider information, we now can report the Echo Show 15 is discounted from its regular $249 price tag to $169.99. Of course, we would be remiss in not mentioning that Echo devices also can make free phone calls by simply saying, "Alexa, call 800-555-1212." Full Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, Nerd Vittles earns commissions from qualifying purchases to keep the Nerd Vittles lights burning brightly.

We know you’re wondering whether the streaming TV is really up to the task. Having watched sports and news with YouTube TV on our Echo Show 15, my answer is a resounding YES. Our device sits atop the refrigerator in the kitchen and serves up recipes and timers while also delivering the latest TV shows and sporting events. After all, who can live without "Bachelor in Paradise" while cooking? And the design of the Echo Show 15 gives you the option of positioning it on an optional stand or affixing it to a wall with included mounting hardware.

Loading Hulu or Netflix is simple. Just tell Alexa to open the desired application and login with your credentials. Running YouTube TV on Alexa devices takes a bit of tweaking. Begin with the command: "Alexa, open YouTube." Once YouTube loads, click on the Options icon at the upper left corner of the display. YOUR BOOKMARKS will appear including YouTube.com. Tap the pencil icon and edit the YouTube web address so it looks like this: https://tv.youtube.com. Save your change. Then tap the YouTube.com bookmark to load YouTube TV. Once you log in with your credentials, you will have total access to your YouTube TV channels and your DVR saved recordings. Once you’ve reconfigured the YouTube bookmark, future access to YouTube TV is a three-step process: (1) Alexa, open YouTube (2) Tap Options icon at the upper left corner of the display (3) Tap YouTube.com bookmark.

Finally, Amazon has just announced that Fire TV will be added to the Echo Show 15 user interface later this year. This will allow you to stream TV shows, live news feeds, movies, and sports content. CNET reports that "according to Amazon, the upgrade will provide an additional selection of video titles from Paramount Plus, Showtime, Disney Plus and other platforms. New and existing Echo Show 15 owners will be able to take advantage of the Fire TV update, which will be available as an opt-in feature."

Originally published: Monday, October 10, 2022

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Happy Fourth: Our Gift to You — 17+ Years of Nerd Vittles

Monday, July 4, 2022 / 5 Comments on Happy Fourth: Our Gift to You — 17+ Years of Nerd Vittles

Originally published: Monday, July 4, 2022

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Unified Communications: Adding SMS to the Asterisk Toolkit

Wednesday, September 1, 2021 / 2 Comments on Unified Communications: Adding SMS to the Asterisk Toolkit

As we roll into September, the VoIP landscape continues to evolve. For various reasons, SMS functionality has become a must-have with many VoIP deployments. What we’ve observed lately is that many businesses and professional offices now assume that all phone numbers are SMS-enabled which means, if your primary phone numbers don’t support SMS, you may miss important notices and reminders. Particularly in this COVID era, physicians have incredibly high rates of no-shows for appointments so you’ll typically get multiple SMS messages to multiple numbers beginning several days before an appointment. And, believe it or not, there are many locations where a cellphone lacks service but VoIP is alive and well.

The gap we want to close today is to enable SMS on your Incredible PBX® platform and its critical extensions. It’s also a good time to determine whether your existing SIP phones include SMS support so that notifications can be delivered to the desktop PC and phone in a reliable and timely manner. The good news is you don’t need to mortgage your house with a BroadWorks Instant Message and Presence (IM&P) subscription in order to implement SMS messaging on Asterisk® and FreePBX® platforms. SMS VoIP implementations typically cost less than a penny a message. While that’s not as inexpensive as many cellular services, it won’t break the bank either.

While we’ve all grown accustomed to SMS messaging on our smartphones, SMS and MMS messaging in the VoIP sphere is a different beast because there’s little uniformity in the way messages are sent and delivered. Proprietary messaging unfortunately is the rule rather than the exception. So today we’ll offer several VoIP provider alternatives. If you’re new to all of this, here’s the bottom line. SMS messages are delivered to VoIP trunks or DIDs. SMS messages are sent from VoIP extensions or users. Thus, it becomes the job of the PBX platform to map DIDs to extensions and to map extensions to DIDs in order to reliably send and receive SMS and MMS messages.

Our personal favorite for SMS messaging with Incredible PBX is the Clearly IP offering coupled with the Incredible PBX SIP Trunking platform because of its seamless integration with FreePBX and its User Control Panel as well as the Clearly Anywhere softphone. Once deployed, you can send and retrieve messages from your desktop PC by logging into the User Control Panel or simply calling up the Clearly IP softphone on your smartphone or desktop PC. Complete deployment tutorial is available in the Incredible PBX Wiki.

A close second place goes to VoIP.ms with their extremely flexible SMS/MMS offering which lets you redirect incoming messages to your email address, another SMS number, an SMS SIP account on VoIP.ms, and the VoIP.ms SMS/MMS Portal. We have previously documented and recently updated the Incredible PBX setup procedure to both receive and send messages as well as to deliver the messages to SMS-enabled SIP phones. Email replies to incoming SMS messages are automatically delivered to the original sender. And, of course, SMS replies on your SMS-enabled SIP phone also are delivered to the original sender. Complete Incredible PBX deployment takes only a few minutes.

A third alternative for messaging is our Platinum Partner, Skyetel. As with VoIP.ms, we previously have documented the setup procedure so we won’t repeat it here. The complete deployment tutorial is available here.

Finally, we would direct your attention to the BulkVS messaging tutorial on the VoIP-info.org Forum. It will walk you through the setup procedure using that provider.

Originally published: Wednesday, September 1, 2021

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Blink Cameras: The Travelin’ Man’s Dream Come True

Monday, July 12, 2021 / 3 Comments on Blink Cameras: The Travelin’ Man’s Dream Come True

Okay, I’ll admit it. Our family has morphed into a band of traveling gypsies. We’re spreading our time between four cities and four "homes." Not many folks are that crazy, but many of you have vacation homes thanks to Covid. And one of the first things that pops up on your to-do list is how to secure your residences when you’re not at home. Yes, you can pay a monitoring service in every location a hefty monthly fee to do little more than call the police if someone breaks in. We had a better idea, and it’s also saved some of our neighbors and us a hefty monthly bill. Here’s our hands-on review.

Some of you may know that Amazon bought a little company called Blink in 2017. They made some cute little WiFi cameras that do almost everything the cameras of the big security company’s cameras do. They monitor for motion. They listen for noise and can let you communicate with the burglars. And, most importantly, they send you email alerts and record 30-second video clips with audio. The good news is the indoor Blink mini retails for $35, or you can buy 3 for $85. Setup on your iPhone or Android phone only takes a couple minutes. Plug in the camera using the included adapter, fire up the Blink app on your smartphone, point to the QR Code on the back of the camera, enter your WiFi credentials, and presto. Your camera goes live. Give it a name and a location. You can set up multiple locations, and each can have multiple camera types: indoor, outdoor, wired or battery-operated.

You get 30 days to try out the cloud-based repository for your video clips after which you can sign up for a year of 60-day revolving storage. It runs $30 a year for one camera or $100 a year for unlimited cameras. If you’re a savvy shopper, try things out with a couple cameras and then load up when the cameras go on sale. We got 3 for $53 during the usual sale events.

You can monitor your cameras and recordings in a number of ways: use the smartphone apps, use any of the Echo Show devices with Alexa, use a FireTV-enabled Smart TV, or Fire TV Stick with your favorite television. HINT: Most of the Echo Show devices have an option to also purchase a Blink mini for almost nothing. If you look at our screenshot above, here’s how we get a first-hand look at the weather conditions in Vero Beach using any Echo Show device in our account: "Alexa. Show me the Sea Oaks Beach Camera." On your Blink smartphone app, you’ll note that the camera locations are listed at the top of the screen. You can tap on any location to reveal all of the cameras at that location, or you can scroll through the camera locations by dragging your finger across the locations. For each location, you can "arm" the cameras to enable motion detection and recording. And, with each individual camera, you can enable or disable motion detection. Whew!

Did we mention these cameras are amazing? Don’t leave home without them!

Originally published: Monday, July 12, 2021

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Amazon’s Polly TTS Returns for Incredible PBX 2021

Monday, February 22, 2021 / 2 Comments on Amazon’s Polly TTS Returns for Incredible PBX 2021

In a word, WOW! If you’ve previously used text-to-speech (TTS) applications with Incredible PBX™ or any other PBX, you fully appreciate the challenges of getting excellent voice quality from a synthesized voice. In addition to operating system quirks, you also had to scramble to find TTS software that had acceptable voice quality without breaking the bank. Well, it’s a new day with Incredible PBX 2021. Shortly after Amazon’s introduction of Polly TTS, we integrated it into the Wazo platform with Incredible PBX. However, because of Debian dependencies, we were unable to migrate it to CentOS. With RedHat’s recent decision regarding CentOS, we introduced Incredible PBX 2021 for Debian. And now is a perfect time to bring back Polly TTS as well. Polly TTS provides not only incredible voice quality but it comes at an unbelievable price point. Your first year is free for the first 5 million characters each month. After that and in subsequent years, it’s $4 for every million characters of TTS translation, and you only pay for the characters used. But, don’t take our word for it. Listen to this sample. The clip’s introduction uses the free Pico TTS voice. The Yahoo News headlines were generated with Polly. Can you say Night and Day?

[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/319736570″ params="auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="80%" height="414″ iframe="true" /]

The beauty of Nerd Vittles projects is it’s all about the freedom to choose rather than making do with choices selected by others. Today’s addition of the Polly TTS engine brings the number of TTS options supported with Incredible PBX 2021 to four. In addition to the free options of Festival and PICO, you now have two dirt cheap commercial alternatives that rival the voice quality of any available TTS application on the market. There’s IBM’s Watson which we are using for voicemail transcription. And now you have Amazon’s Polly TTS as well.

Stewart Nelson was kind enough to share his audio clip comparing the Top Four commercial TTS applications. You can judge them for yourself. The clips are played in the following order: Amazon Polly TTS, Google Translate, IBM Watson TTS, and Microsoft.

[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/320177552″ params="auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%" height="450″ iframe="true" /]

How New TTS Apps Will Work in Incredible PBX 2021. That’s only half of our story today. We also are introducing our proven TTS methodology that makes it easy to roll your own TTS applications and take advantage of the voice platforms already installed on your Incredible PBX 2021 server. In our new TTS design, there are three components. First, there’s a chunk of dialplan code that answers calls, prompts for input (if required), and then passes the call off for processing and generation of the TTS results using the desired TTS platform.

The processing and TTS components consist of two PHP/AGI scripts on Asterisk® servers. The results processing script actually obtains the data to feed to the TTS processing engine. For example, this could be news headlines or a local weather forecast. This script generates plain text suitable for processing by any TTS engine. Finally, a TTS script stores your user credentials (if required) and handles translation of the text results into an audio file using the TTS platform of your choice. It also plays the audio "results" to the caller. As you add new applications, all that is necessary is a short dialplan snippet and a results processing script to obtain the necessary text to feed the TTS processing script.

Here’s a sample Asterisk dialplan snippet for our Yahoo News Headlines application. Note that you need only change the pollytts line of code to switch TTS engines. Simple design!

;# // BEGIN nv-news-yahoo
exten => 951,1,Answer
exten => 951,n,Wait(1)
exten => 951,n,Set(TIMEOUT(digit)=7)
exten => 951,n,Set(TIMEOUT(response)=10)
exten => 951,n,AGI(picotts.agi,"Please hold while we get the headlines.",en-US)
exten => 951,n,AGI(nv-news-yahoo.php,10) ;  obtain latest 10 Yahoo NEWS Headlines
exten => 951,n,NoOp(News: ${NEWS}) ;  display NEWS in text format on Asterisk CLI
exten => 951,n,AGI(pollytts.php,"${NEWS}") ; pass NEWS to TTS engine for playback
exten => 951,n,Hangup
;# // END nv-news-yahoo

The picotts line (above) shows the syntax to use the Pico TTS engine instead of pollytts. The new line would look like the following. Doesn’t get much easier than this:

exten => 951,n,AGI(picotts.agi,"${NEWS}",en-US)

Getting Started. Here are the steps to get everything working with your existing Incredible PBX 2021 platform. First, you’ll need credentials from Amazon Polly after you create or sign in to your an Amazon AWS account. Enter "Polly" in the AWS dialog to add the service. Make note of your Amazon region while here. Then open your Security Credentials by clicking on your name and choosing My Security Credentials. Create a new Access Key ID and Secret. You’ll need these credentials as well as your Amazon region in a minute. Next, you’ll need to put the pieces in place on your Incredible PBX 2021 server to support Polly TTS. We’ve made this easy by bundling everything into a single tarball. Just log into your server as root, download the tarball, untar it, add MP3 support for SOX, run the included script to install the dialplan code, and edit the pollytts.php script to install your Amazon credentials. Install time: under a minute.

cd /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin
cp -p nv-news-yahoo.php nv-news-yahoo-orig.php
cp -p nv-weather-zip.php nv-weather-zip-orig.php
wget http://incrediblepbx.com/nv-polly-install.tar.gz
tar zxvf nv-polly-install.tar.gz
rm -f nv-polly-install.tar.gz
apt-get -y install libsox-fmt-mp3
./install-polly-dialplan-incrediblepbx.sh
nano -w pollytts.php

Once the pieces are in place and the editor opens, insert your Amazon key, secret, and region code. Then save the file: Ctrl-X, Y, then ENTER.

Now you can test things out by picking up a phone connected to your PBX and dialing 951 for News or 947 for Weather by ZIP Code. Enjoy!

NEWS FLASH: This new installer works great on the Incredible PBX 2020 Raspberry Pi platform as well.

Originally published: Monday, January 22, 2021

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

Sunday, February 14, 2021 / 11 Comments on Review: The 2021 Cadillac Escalade – Everything a Tesla Isn’t

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 interstates now has vanished even though Elon touted sleeping in the back seat while his Tesla drove him from California to New York. To juice end-of-year sales, Tesla even offered buyers a 90-day FSD subscription rather than making buyers fork over $10,000 for vaporware. In case you’re confused by Tesla’s new nomenclature, keep in mind that many vehicles have had most of these "FSD features" for years, but nobody else called it full self-driving much less charging $10,000 for it.

Which brings us to General Motors and the 2021 Cadillac Escalade with SuperCruise for an extra $2,500. Guess what? On all major highways in the United States, it offers hands-free Full Self-Driving so long as you sit in the driver’s seat and keep your eyes on the road. Does it park itself? Yes. Does it have Automatic Lane Change? Yes. Does it have a HUD display? Yes. Does it have Night Vision? Yes. Does the dashboard look like a glorified golf cart? No. In fact, the dashboard sports curved OLED displays measuring more than three feet in total width. Any commercial airline pilot will be drooling. Can it really drive itself without your touching the steering wheel? Absolutely. Is it perfect? Damn near. Will you ever buy a Tesla again? Probably not. This is especially true considering GM’s new electric Hummer EV is just around the corner and will also include SuperCruise.

Want to know more? Well, here you go. There’s a vertical wireless charging holster between the seats that works great with an iPhone or an Android phone. Apple CarPlay and Android Auto work perfectly without ever plugging in a cable. The Escalade dash now offers lots of apps and automatic updates. Welcome, Alexa. You now can say, "Open the Garage", or "Lock the Front Door", or "Turn on the Living Room Lights" from the comfort of your car. And our old favorite, Waze, works great to alert you to every speed trap on the road. Got a favorite radio station in a distant city? The Escalade has you covered with TuneIn. And Spotify and Pandora are as close as your dashboard. Every car these days has a backup camera. The Escalade has cameras everywhere, and you can view any of them from your dashboard. There’s even a zoom in and zoom out feature. The car has its own WiFi HotSpot, or you can connect to the Internet via a Personal Hotspot on your smartphone. And, yes, the car slams on its brakes before you hit something or someone in front of or behind your vehicle.

https://youtu.be/MDTmNBGvcUY

Finally, a word about Escalade fuel costs compared to Tesla Superchargers. If you’re planning to buy a Tesla to save money on fuel costs, DON’T. Back in 2016, Tesla touted that its superchargers would "never be a profit center." This may be Tesla’s biggest scam of all. Florida has some of the least expensive electricity rates in the U.S. Yet when you use a Supercharger in Florida, the cost is nearly 8 cents a mile. But that’s a mile according to the Tesla dashboard. Just because a Tesla shows 320 miles of range, don’t believe it. 320 miles of charge actually gets you about 240 miles of driving range at typical interstate highway speeds. When you factor that into the actual cost per mile, the number is closer to 11 cents a mile. For a vehicle such as an Escalade which can use regular fuel and still get 20 miles per gallon even by the EPA highway estimate, that translates into an almost identical cost per mile. Florida regular gas is selling for about $2.20 per gallon. While an Escalade is anything but fuel efficient, your actual cost per mile is nearly the same as driving a Tesla Model X using Tesla’s Superchargers for electricity. Funny how Big Oil has managed to make gazillions of dollars off gasoline sales charging the same prices as Elon’s "non-profit" superchargers.

For those that are wondering, would we buy the new Escalade? Absolutely. In fact, we already have. Put this car on your Bucket List. Or surprise your Valentine. It’s that good.

UPDATE: And now there’s this:

Originally published: Sunday, February 14, 2021 Updated: Wednesday, April 14, 2021

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