thebottle Blog

I recently switched from Verizon Wireless to the VoIP service CallWithUs. I realized that I didn’t use my phone enough to justify paying $50/month. CallWithUs costs me $6/month to get a phone number which includes 2000 incoming minutes (33.33 hours) per month. You put money on your account with your credit/debit card or you can use Google Checkout or Paypal. Outgoing calls cost me $0.011/minute or $0.66/hour anywhere,  anytime. The nice thing about CallWithUs is that if I put $50 on the account this month and I only make 4 hours of outgoing calls over the next year then I will still have $47.36 in my account. There is no monthly fee unless of course you get a DID number from them which as I stated is $6/month.  It is possible to get free DID numbers, but I wanted to make sure that my number was reliable so I went through CallWithUs even though they will support a DID number from anywhere. One thing worth looking into is GrandCentral which was taken over by Google and promises, “One number for life.” I am currently signed up but have not had a response. GrandCentral comes with many great features like call screening, call blocking, call forwarding, etc. Since I don’t have a GrandCentral account yet and I would still like to use all of these features I setup an Asterisk server.

Asterisk is an open source PBX and it lets you do whatever you want with your phone lines. There are many different ways you can install Asterisk. You can install it on your computer or on a router that supports OpenWRT firmware. Initially I set it up on a WRT54GL router but the router didn’t have enough system resources to run all the applications that I needed. The next thing I did was install trixbox which is a package of Asterisk running on CentOS on an old computer (PIII 500MHz, 256MB RAM) that I bought for $20. There are a few other options like AsteriskNOW and Elastix, but I tried trixbox first and it worked. Here is how I setup trixbox to work with CallWithUs.
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I recently bought a WRT54GL to install Asterisk on because I wanted to switch to a VoIP provider. Initially I bought a WRT54GS because it has a faster processor and twice as much flash and system memory, but I didn’t know that after version 3.0 the system specifications changed. Something that I wish I would have discovered before making my purchase. You can see a list of the specifications of all the WRT54G series routers on Wikipedia. As you can see the WRT54GS version 2.1 has the best specifications.

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I don’t have cable television, but I’m still able to watch TV shows and movies from the comfort of my couch by using uTorrent or SopCast or TVAnts to get the shows, and MFXStream along with Xbox Media Center to stream the videos over to my television. Read the rest of this entry »

PSO (Poker Source Online) is a necessity for the online poker player. It greatly increases the expected value of your play, especially if you are a marginal winner or a break-even player. PSO offers many options to increase your expected value in which I will go into detail. Read the rest of this entry »

I find myself displaced once again; I find myself in a redneck bar all alone. The music is good, Chuck Berry, Tom Petty, Supertramp, oldies and classic rock are the majority in this bar. I may be able to enjoy the night with this music. The bar is packed, 6 cougars sit across the bar from me facing my direction, all of them with white hair. An older couple sits on the end enjoying a large meal of fish and fries, and later a man and 2 women come in from the patio and sit next to me, but for now I sit alone. Read the rest of this entry »