It’s amazing just how cheaply we can talk to each other now. The other day I had a two hour Skype video call with someone, later that same person phoned me using a cheap call service and it cost him zero pence per minute; so after finding out the name of this company and signing up I can also now make free phone calls during the day.

On Friday I needed to demo some software I’d created, and talk about some design ideas for it. After five minutes of attempting to talk through the stuff over the phone we both gave up and used XP’s Remote Assistance to great effect. I was able to speak on the phone (using the previously mentioned free call service) while waving my mouse around his screen. It was really productive and worked extremely well.

Today I received a letter from BT telling me my cheap mobile discount plan was due to expire, and unless I phoned them they’d start charging me for it. So I phoned them to cancel the plan as I never really got any benefit from it. While on the phone BT told me that I now have free evening and weekend calls to all BT landlines.

So now I can ring people for free, which is how it should be.

I find this all quite interesting since I am ploughing my way through the Best of 2600 book I bought earlier. Right now I’m at the part where the American phone system is being split up, resulting in loads of little phone companies, confusing dialling systems, long distance providers and the general confusion that arises when something like this happens. There’s a lot of articles from the 80s in this chapter of the book where people attempt to guess what the future will be like, and whether it’ll be just as confusing. Well 20-odd years on and it’s not as confusing in general - we can at least direct-dial numbers for most places on the planet now, but choosing just who should carry your calls can be a complicated and time consuming process.

While sitting downstairs chatting on IRC through my serial terminal, I thought it’d be great if I could also chat to people on Google Talk through it. I had a quick search of the web and came across Bitlbee:

BitlBee brings IM (instant messaging) to IRC clients. It’s a great solution for people who have an IRC client running all the time and don’t want to run an additional MSN/AIM/whatever client.

Just install the program and connect to the BitlBee server with your favourite IRC-client. You will be force-joined into the control channel where root (the bot, your assistant, the bee) will try to help you to get the program working.

A quick apt-get install bitlbee soon had it installed, and after working out I had to type /server +localhost into IRSSI I had a new channel open with me and the ‘root’ user. Telling the bee about Google Talk seemed fairly simple, but it didn’t want to connect, giving an error with the unhelpful “Connection Closed” message. A bit of searching came across a post that had some helpful wisdom on it:

account add jabber username@gmail.com mypasswd talk.google.com:5223:ssl

The important bit being :5223:ssl added to the end of the server string. Bitlbee now connects perfectly and I’ve been chatting away to my GTalk contacts as though they were on IRC.

Amy went off to visit some people in Doncaster today, leaving me at home to do some tedious school planning. We almost missed the train to Doncaster, me dropping her off at the station and saying “I’ll ring you in five minutes to see if you made it” and her running into the station.

I went for an amble around Maplin for a bit, coming out with a new A/V switcher for my various consoles. I rang her and got no answer, and a quick check at the station confirmed she must have made the train. Still, bit odd not being able to ring her. I continued home…

And when I went into the front room I found her phone on the settee… with 17 missed calls from the people she was going to visit. It rang another six times before a Doncaster number came up which I answered and discovered a slightly pissed off Amy on the other end. I was instructed to text the people she was meeting, explain the situation and get them to collect her from Doncaster station.

This I did, and she called back about ten minutes later asking me to ring them and ask where they were, she having now been stood there for at least half an hour in the cold and rain. So I did and received the news that the other people were “lost” and couldn’t find the station. This was duly relayed to Amy and was greeted with a certain amount of swearing

She said she’d ring me when she was coming home and I continued about my afternoon slightly bemused and wondering what was happening.

Later that afternoon I got a call from Amy saying she was at Doncaster station and about to get on a train back home. I made plans to leave after half an hour to meet her. Ten minutes later I got another call saying she was there, it seems trains go a bit quicker on Sundays.

After the day’s ordeal we sat down for some tea and watched Resident Evil before making a trip to my parents’ to drop off the dog.

I am currently listening to CB radio over it using the really cool WebSDR. I am listening to two people in Norwich talking to each other, and someone from Hanover. However I have no receiver, but am using the Internet and a receiver in Holland. Cleverly my computer is running a software radio receiver and doing all the frequency tuning and decoding. The system is really cool.

It’s like IRC, but the chatter mostly seems to consist of people talking about their kit, where they’re from and announcing their callsigns.

I want to buy a radio scanner now and hear what the locals are saying.

I spent a few hours this evening perfecting my soldering skills. I’ve created two ‘Y’ cables that split Cat5 cable into both ethernet and serial comms. I have one end plugged into my server and the other end is currently in my office. Between the two locations is the normal Cat5 wiring with no modifications. The serial connection is removed before the cable hits the switch and nobody notices.

Once I’ve tidied it all up I’ll do a writeup. I’m also trying to connect my Mac Classic to the rest of my house using a serial cable. Cleverly I’ve made a Mini-DIN 8 to DB9 cable and wired it backwards. It spews junk to my terminal and that’s about it. I’ll be fixing that tomorrow then.

I came across a really interesting hack to power, control and run a wireless access point, all from one piece of Cat5 cable. It relies on the way 100 meg ethernet only uses two pairs in the cable, leaving two other pairs unused (a fact exploited by some network admins who need to run more machines than they have cable runs for by using a splitter).

I don’t have a wireless access point on my roof that needs power, serial and data comms. However it got me thinking. Currently my serial terminal is sat on a table next to my server, which is a bit pointless. It’d be much more useful downstairs. I don’t want to run a long serial cable around my house though, the place has enough wire creatively hidden as it is.

So what I plan on doing is creating two ’splitter’ boxes; one end will have a standard RJ45 socket for a long piece of ethernet cable, the other end will have a short ethernet cable with plug, and a short serial cable with plug. Two of these devices, one on each end of a regular ethernet cable, will allow me to squirt serial and ethernet down a single cable run.

I’ll have to use software flow control though, and probably lower the baud rate to overcome any interference, but it should be good enough for a text terminal. If it works, I may build another pair to send serial comms into my office to hook my A1500 up to my server for file transfers.