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Thursday, December 18, 2003 |
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I ordered Vonage service last week and received my phone adaptor (The new Motorola VT1000.) the day before yesterday. I haven't connected it permanently, yet, since our phone number hasn't been transferred, but I did try it out. It took at bit of work to get my Linksys router configured to let the right ports through, but that was primarily due to user error. Vonage notes that "The DMZ host does not perform as expected when applied to the Phone Adapter." I'd forgotten that I'd configured a DMZ host some time ago, and it just happened to be for the IP address the phone adaptor picked up via DHCP. When I straightened that out, everything worked fine. I'd say the sound quality was as good as our land line, but my wife's reaction will be the real test. She is really more critical than I am and less likely to make concessions for cool technology.
Reviewing the installation notes over on the Vonage site, I realize now that I should have configured my setup with the phone adaptor connected directly to my cable modem rather than behind my Linksys router. That would have eliminated the port configuration hassles and allowed the adaptor to apply QoS to network traffic. I'll do that when I install it permanently. |
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PVRBlog pointed me to the JavaHMO project. If you are a hacker with a TiVo Series2 and Home Media Option, you should get this. I was terribly disappointed to find the official TiVo Desktop Plug-in SDK to be C++/Windows-specific. JavaHMO looks like the perfect open alternative.
Though support for Mac OS X is on the wishlist, I got it installed on MacOS X last night. It was MacOS X 10.3.2, Java 1.4.1_01-27, and Java Advanced Imaging DP2. The JavaHMO site claims it requires Java 1.4.2. There is a Developer Preview of Java 1.4.2 for Mac OS X, but I decided not to install it, and JavaHMO seemed to work fine with 1.4.1. I probably should have installed the released version of JAI, but I saw the DP release first. I didn't install the Java Service Wrapper stuff because SourceForge was down last night, but I'll probably do that today. I hacked up the run.cmd script to convert it to a shell script and started the server that way. I only tried Weather, Cinema, and My PC, but they all worked. I had one crash while viewing weather, but all-in-all it seemed pretty stable and very cool.
Maybe I'll work on packaging an installer for Mac OS. Ultimately, a native configuration interface would be nice to have, as well. |
Last update: 11/2/04; 6:14:59 PM .
