So, contrary to previous marketing, Windows 10 will not be the last release… there’s at least one more. And yes, all the mis-features like requiring an Internet connection and the insistence on cloud services, they’re turning it up to 11. I give you…
DISCLAIMER: This cartoon is satire and is not in any way an allegation that marriage was terminated by an illegal act from either side. Marriages can fail for a multitude of reasons, and I wish Bill & Melinda Gates all the best in their post-marital negotiations.
So, this is not really news… for the past 12 months or so, the scammers have been busy. They’ve been calling us long before we moved to the NBN, and of course we’ve just hung up the moment they started their spiel. The dead giveaway is the seconds of silence at the start of the call. Dead silence.
Of course, it’s not just the NBN, we’ve had “Amazon Prime”, “Visa”, “Telstra” and others call. Far and above all others has been NBN-related scams.
The latest on the NBN front is they claim your connection has been “compromised” by “other users”, in a British accent.
This is the call I received this morning. You can hear other callers in the back-ground. This is not a professional call-centre, this is a back-yard operation!
The home number recently moved from the PSTN to a VoIP service, so this actually gives me a lot of scope for dealing with this. For now, it’s a manual process: when they call, put them on hold. If I put someone on hold on this number, you better be a Deborah Harry fan!
Long term, I’ll probably look at seeing if I can sample the first 2 seconds of call audio, and if silent, direct the call to a voicemail service or IVR menu. In the meantime, it’s a manual process.
Thankfully we get caller ID now, something Telstra used to charge for.
There’s three big considerations with music on hold:
Regarding point (3) always test your music choice! Try different CODEC settings, and ensure it sounds “good” with ALL of them. Asterisk actually supports transcoding, but will choose the format that takes the least effort. RIFF Wave files (.wav) can be used too, but they must be mono files.
I slapped a CD-quality 44.1kHz stereo version in there, and wondered why it got ignored: that’s why — it wasn’t mono and Asterisk won’t down-mix.
Signed 16-bit linear is a pretty safe bet: effort of going to that to PCMA/PCMU (G.711a/G.711u) isn’t a big deal, but to anything else, you’re at the mercy of the CODEC implementation. Using G.722, things sounded fine, but I found even with Speex settings cranked right up (quality=10 complexity=10 enhancement=true), my selection of audio sounded terrible in Ultra-wideband Speex mode. I wound up with the following in my MoH directory:
vk4msl-gap# ls -l /usr/local/share/moh/
total 8280
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 527836 Aug 29 17:02 moh.sln
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1055670 Aug 29 17:02 moh.sln16
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 2111342 Aug 29 17:01 moh.sln32
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 104793 Sep 5 12:17 moh.spx
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 177879 Sep 5 12:34 moh.spx16
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 184617 Sep 5 12:16 moh.spx32.sln* is for 16-bit signed linear, the 16 and 32 suffixes refer to the sample rate, so 16kHz (wideband) and 32kHz (ultra-wideband). These should otherwise be “raw” files (no headers). Use sox <input> -r <rate> -b 16 -e signed-integer -c 1 <output>.sln to convert..spx* is Speex: Here again, I’ve got 8kHz, 16kHz and 32kHz versions. These were encoded using the following command: speexenc --quality 10 --comp 10 moh.wav moh.spxThere are various other CODEC selections, but right now, I’ve just focussed on signed linear and Speex since the latter is what needs careful attention paid. I tested between my laptop running Twinkle and the ATA on my network, and when I placed the call on hold from my laptop it sounded fine there, so I figure it’ll be “good enough”.
So, had “Visa” call me this morning… this too, is another scam. Anonymous caller. Bear in mind I do not actually have a credit card. Never have had one, never will.
They didn’t stick around, seems their system just drops the call if it hears a noise which isn’t a DTMF tone.
Interestingly, both this call, and the previous one were G.711u (µ-law PCM). Australia normally uses A-law PCM. America uses µ-law encoding. What’s the difference? Both are logarithmic encoding schemes. µ-law encoding has a wider dynamic range, however A-law has less distortion for quieter signals.
Almost the same structure as before. Audio CODEC was G.729 this time.
At the last federal election, we started seeing this meme floating about the Internet…
Of course, we in Queensland can do memes too…
That said, one hopes Victoria can get over their COVID-19 issues and come join the rest of us. This isn’t the (Dis)United States of America, this is Australia, we’re one country, and it’s our problem collectively to sort out, so let’s just put our differences aside and get on with it!
Well, it’s been a while since we’ve had a cat in the house. Our establishment has been home to many pets over the years, mostly dogs and cats.
Our last was a domestic moggy named Emma, who we had as a kitten back in 1990 and past away in 2008 a few months short of her 18th birthday. A good innings for a feline!
Recently, my maternal grandmother passed away. She had been living alone since my grandfather had to move to a nursing home, and making a red-hot go of it, but bleeding on the brain eventually caused her demise. She was looking after a cat there, a 5-year old Russian Blue / domestic short-hair cross named Sam.
Just before my grandmothers’ passing, I had raised concerns about his welfare, since no one was in the house looking after him. Apparently he was getting occasional visits to re-fill bowls and take out cat litter trays, but it wasn’t ideal. There was a definite concern that he could be “forgotten”.
My two uncles on that side both have pets that Sam likely would not get along with. My mother has twice as many cats as she’s theoretically allowed. My sister’s husband dislikes cats. Most of my cousins are in rental accommodation. I was one of the few in the family that could take on a cat.
Not ideal for us, because we do go away for WICEN events occasionally and the people we’d have left Emma with are now either passed away or in palliative care. So we’ll have to figure something out when the time comes. But, at least here he’s got human attention, he’s got food, he’s got a clean litter tray, and a bigger house to run around in.
For now, he’s in my name for welfare purposes… the estate isn’t worked out yet (there’s 6 months delay in case someone “contests” the will). I can transfer ownership of him to the person officially inheriting him, but smart money is that’ll be me anyway.
Of course one fun thing is that thanks to a little gift from China, I’m working from home. Right now, the task at hand is developing a Modbus driver, so my “workbench”^W^Wthe dining room table has my laptop, and an industrial PC that’s pretending to be a Modbus/RTU device.
Sam has discovered jumping on the keyboard gets instant attention:
Yeah, why am I reminded of the FVWM Cats page?
So today, the US’s head of state suggested this little gem for handling COVID-19…
My suggestion for Trump: you first. You try it… then report back to us!
Disinfectant might work well on hard surfaces, but injecting it into one’s bloodstream is an utterly reckless and stupid thing to do. Yes, it may kill the virus, but it’ll likely kill a lot of other things, including the patient!
Updated: I realise the comment was made “sarcastically“… however I cannot get this image out of my head now! (Update 2022-11-17: and it seems nor can the Murdoch Press)
I’ve had this stuck in my head all day…one sorta has to pronounce “Corona” as “Crona” to make this work… Apologies to John Carter and The First Class…
Do you remember back in olden day, (wo-oh-oh)
when everybody lived a care-free way (wo-oh-oh)
whatever happened to the boy next door,
now sneezing, hiding behind the bathroom wall!Remember dancing at the high school hop
The dress I ruined with the soda pop?
Quarantine didn’t mean a thing
Hundreds of people getting in the swing!Corona baby, Corona baby, give me your hand
let me share what I can remember
Life as before we all got caught
in the lock-down.
Corona baby, Corona baby, you can’t understand
why society was so quick to dismember.
Days in the sun, to lyin’ on our bum every day!
So we’re all working from home at the moment with COVID-19 wreaking havoc… and of course the toilet humour has been flowing like a fountain…
Sounds like a great start-up… of course the idea has only been around about 400 years. 🙂 Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
I got this pair of text messages today…
Before I answer, I have 3 questions of my own:
I do have a SIM card that is an Optus pre-paid, that’s installed in the Kite, along-side a Telstra pre-paid. I haven’t turned that phone on in a good month or so (I should fire it up just to keep the battery fresh though).
I’d never install that Optus phone in this phone however: pretty sure the phone I received this SMS on is locked to Telstra so it wouldn’t get a service if I tried.
Given you can’t get my name right, and you clearly haven’t checked your records properly, let me finish with this: Why would I recommend you?
Humpty Dumpty built a great wall… Off of which he'll have a great fall… All the world's leaders and all the world's men… will not want him together again!
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