Jeeze – that was unexpected!

But it makes sense I think – at least in our situation.  It seems that there is a bad black hole for Rogers and Wind at my wife’s’ office.  Bell has installed a repeater in the building where we wish to use the phone primarily, but why does this matter for PCT?  They are simply just a reseller of Bell.  The Bell Mobility network is pretty well built out – so it works outside the building and around the house too, perhaps not as well as Rogers – but good enough.

It was great to give old Rogers the – “I’m done with you now!”  call.  They really don’t have an response in the CSR answerbook when it comes to – you don’t have coverage, I can’t use your service.   They stumbled with – “We can give you a rebate on your text messages, or a free month of service”, but when there is no coverage – it just doesn’t matter.  Clueless!

Presidents Choice also supports the phone as well, as far as support for the correct frequency – cool!  Since PCT is really just a Bell reseller – I’m also one-level removed from the nonsense and silliness of Bell.  Good!

We found the SIM cards at the local Loblaw store (which by the way – are practically hidden on the side of their phone kiosk) .  Oh yeah – don’t ask an employee where to find the SIM cards  – “Sim Card!, Sim Card?, hmm,  Oh – I don’t think we have anything like that…”.  The staff at the call centre were helpful though.  I provided my IMEI for the BB Curve  9300 to them, and he suggested that it looked like an LG phone.  I didn’t disagree with him, since I didn’t want data features (or a hard time about using a Blackberry) – just a phone that has a good keyboard for text messages. We were active within about 10 minutes!

So for a second phone, PCT looks like a winner.

You see, Rogers – or Robbers – imho,  is pretty good at giving their customers the gouge.  As a customer, I’ve decided that I’ve had enough.  Time to look at my options for a low cost, second family mobile phone for personal use, some text messages with a low-usage dataplan if the price is right.

The carriers that I have excluded due to principle (I’ve really had it with their – you’ll pay through the nose, since we have some friends over at the CRTC and we pretty have the prices rigged anyway) :

(Results are in alphabetical order)

• Bell CDMA/HSPA1900
• Rogers GSM850/1900 HSPA850/1900 LTE 1700

The carriers that are (still) in the running (which may be a second or third tier offering of the above, or may be a entirely separate entity):

• Chatr (Rogers Tier 3) GSM/HSPA
• Fido (Rogers Tier 2) GSM850/1900 HSPA850/1900
• Koodo (Telus Tier2) CDMA/HSPA1900
• Mobilicity (DAVE Wireless) HSPA/1700
• Presidents Choice (Loblaws/Bell) CDMA/HSPA1900
• Public Mobile (Own) – CDMA only
• Telus (Own) CDMA/HSPA
• Virgin (Bell/Bell) CDMA/HSPA1900
• WIND (Globalive and Orascom) HSPA1700

So for my clarity of mind (and not really wanting to invest in yet more hardware, here is the good bad and ugly), which you will see that they rule themselves out for hardware alone.  We’re not talking about price yet.

The phone I’d like to use is a Blackberry Curve 9300 – Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900MHz.  Don’t confuse this phone with a Curve 9300 Tri-band UMTS  (800/850)/1900/2100 MHz or 900/1700/2100 MHz.  What – there is 3 or 4 Curve 9300′s!? – RIM (are you listening?) – WTF?

I’m not really interested in going backwards and getting a CDMA phone at this point, it’s either GSM or HSPA – or both.

• Chatr (Rogers Tier 3) GSM850/1900 – No data service available – $25/mo 50 txt or $35/mo – 100 txt
• Fido (Rogers Tier 2) GSM850/1900 HSPA850/1900,  Prepay has number CID included in monthly rate.
• Koodo (Telus Tier2) CDMA/HSPA1900 – Would work if I swapped my Bold 9700 with the Curve 9300 (IMEI Lookup)
• Mobilicity (DAVE Wireless) HSPA/1700 – No Coverage in my area
• Presidents Choice (Loblaws/Bell) CDMA/HSPA1900 – $25/100Min/Unlim txt
• Public Mobile (Own) – CDMA only – No GSM or HSPA
• Telus (Own) CDMA/HSPA -  Would work if I swapped my Bold 9700 with the Curve 9300 (IMEI Lookup)
• Virgin (Bell/Bell) CDMA/HSPA1900 – Should work according to their website (IMEI Lookup)
• WIND (Globalive and Orascom) HSPA1700 – won’t work – new phone required… not the end of the world – if the monthly rate is right..

Part 2 will deal with rates and features…  Let the best man win!

So – it’s a happy day today!  I told Cogeco to get stuffed. Well not in those words exactly.

Since Marknmel.com operates from Burlington Ontario, Canada we have a pretty good selection of OTA (Over the Air) television channels from both Canada and the USA.   These days – most broadcasters in both countries are broadcasting in Digital HD.  There are a few local exceptions at this point – TVOntario, and CKVR Barrie.  The USA has undergone the DTV (Digital TV) migration and Canada is slated for completion on August 31, 2011. (See http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/info_sht/bdt14.htm).  Many Canadian DTV stations in my area are already operating, albeit some at reduced power output, or on a temporary channel.

My configuration consists of some basic components;

• Channel Master – 4221 HD Antenna – Attic mounted (approximately 15 foot elevation from ground level)
• Channel Master – 7777 Amplifier
• About 50 Feet of 75Ω  co-axial RG-6 cable

We get the following channels:

05-01 CBLT-DT
09-01 CFTO HD
11-01 CHCH-DT
41-01 CIII-DT
57-01 City HD
66-01 CKXT-DT
49-02 Cool TV
36-01 CTS HD
64-01 OMNI 1
44-01 OMNI 2
02-01 WGRZ-HD
02-02 WGRZ-US
02-03 WGRZ-RT
04-01 WIVB-HD
07-01 WKBW-HD
17-01 WNED-HD
17-03 WNED-TH
23-01 WNLO-HD
29-01 WUTV-HD
29-02 TCN

Note: Excluded channels from this list – SD sub channel of WNED, and CBLFT – french language.

Here is the TV Fool reference for Burlington – http://www.tvfool.com/?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=29&q=id%3d81a3c00046583b

20 channels over the air for the one-time price of equipment (well under $200), seems like a good deal.

I’m not sure why I was giving Cogeco about $60/mo to get the home shopping network….  I stopped the tv tax!

Hi there, CBL here!

As the lurker in the lab at Marknmel.com, I’d like to discuss what this lizard has done with a Motorola VT2442.

First – let me give a background to what a VT 2442 is.

• TI MIPS S-o-C  (System On Chip) running at 163MHz
• 16 Megabytes RAM
• 8 Megabytes FLASH
• 5 Network Ports – (4 LAN, 1 WAN)
• 2 VOIP SIP FXS ports for 2 analog phones
• PSPBoot (Bootloader and Firmware)
• Operating system – Montavista Linux

You may ask – why would a lizard care?  Most wouldn’t but I believe that VOIP devices should be owned by the end user, and not by the telephone companies.  This brings us to Vonage.

The VT2442 (and other VOIP adapters) are part of the Vonage business model.  “Buy our device”, we will give you a rebate for our service.  The issue here is – you never really “own” the device. It remains locked to the provider despite you being a Vonage customer or not.  Now I may be picking on Vonage, but this is pretty common in the VOIP space.  Being a opensource, opensystem kind-of-lizard, it should be possible to unlock these devices for reuse for internal asterisk systems or voip BYOD (bring your own device), provided that you have fulfilled your contractual obligations to your VOIP service provider. (Disclosure – We  do not use Vonage as a VOIP provider, however we use a BYOD voip provider)

It is possible to find these adapters on your local freecycle, kajiji or ebay on the cheap.  This is because – they have become boat anchors.  These cannot be re-provisioned on the Vonage network (must be due to corporate policy I suppose), so they are basically a wired ethernet NAT router for home use.

You can open the device by removing the four rubber feet, and removing the four phillips screws.  The indicator panel on the front will just “fold” as you open the case and return back to shape as you close the case.

There are two ports that a lizard could get interested in here.  The first is a eJTAG port.  The second is a 3.3 volt serial port.

The serial port has been rendered “locked” by PSP boot.   By simply reading the first 128Kb memory with a ejtag device, the firmware could be read and altered, by changing the console setting from locked to unlocked.  This needs to be completed in two places.  Once the firmware has been altered, this can be written back to the device through the ejtag cable.  Once this has been completed, the console port is now open for business.  You can point your serial terminal at the port.  Speed is 115200 8N1.

pin 1 … 3.3v
pin 2 … GND
pin 3 … xmt
pin 4 … rcv

Now, as I said – the serial port is +3.3volts rather than RS-232 which is +5.  You need an make an adapter in order to not to let the magic smoke out of the console port on the vt-2442.  I used a MAX232 chip, but this requires +5 volts from ….somewhere.  Somewhere just happens to be from a nearby USB port.

The next installment will detail how I built the modular eJTAG cable, and the MAX232 console adapter.

• Festival (open source)
• Flite (open source – derived from Festival)
• Cepstral – (commerical)

They are all high quality and quite good.  The Cepstral engine seems to be the best of all three however.  To test this I downloaded the Allison 8K (voip) voice.  The Allison voice will seem quite familiar to most Asterisk users since it’s a digital synthesized Allison Smith.  Allison kindly provides the system sounds for the asterisk source distribution.

Once the Cepstral engine was working, I was able to have (a somewhat annoyed) Allison speak to me.  If the “voice” is not registered, you will get a “Please register me or a go to www.cepstral.com blah blah message”.  This is ok though – since the licence cost is about $30  per voice, per connection – it’s pretty inexpensive.

Now that I have that working – I will venture into the Asterisk AGI (Application Gateway Interface).

From time to time, we at Marknmel.com will have a guest reporter, the Cardboard Lizard. (left)

He will be posting details that I don’t feel that I should post.  These reasons are many and varied but it may be technical disclosure or political, or just plain dumb IT stuff that would bore most people to tears. You will know a Cardboard Lizard article, as he will post his picture, much like this article.

I think the Cardboard Lizard’s last position at $WORK was to be part of an advertising campaign by one of the Canadian mobile phone companies.  Now he lives and hangs out at the lab at Marknmel.com, mostly offering lazy excuses like – “Sory – I didn’t back up your work because I was napping” or “Since the disk was full, I just deleted your files – They weren’t important were they?”

Look for upcoming articles from him on:

• Building a reusable jtag connector
• Implementing a MAX232 for TTL level serial communication
• Looking inside a Motorola VT2442 VOIP Router
• Creative excuses for data loss
• Virtual Desktops around the home – for fun, not profit.

I went around to the alligator exhibit.  In that part of the world, a ‘gator is hardly exotic, but to a Canadian – lets just say I don’t see many up here.

While observing the alligator two things came to mind:

Alligator and a Croc

1. Where did he get the Croc from?
2. Where is the small child that belongs to that footwear?

Strange….

I arrived back at my hotel in a bit of a stupor.  It’s always hard traveling.  It’s even worse when a customer is really on your back.  It’s really only the former here.  The folks here have been pretty nice. I’m just a bit tired, and missing my family at home.

I’m dozing a bit, and noticed it getting late enough that perhaps I should wake up for a while or I’ll never sleep. I propped myself up in bed a bit and I thought my eyes were playing a bit of a trick on me .  This little sucker went screaming across the room.

"That phone is for me, I'll get it..."

Ok, I helped him get up onto the phone, but I thought the hotel address in the background was a nice touch.

If I turned over this sucker at the front desk, would have got a free breakfast.  I tried to get free breakfast for the duration of my stay, but that didn’t work out for me. (Sorry Brian…)

I figure I’ll just share….

Email is a very personal kinda thing around marknmel.com.  I really dislike it when people invade my personal space.  In this context it is a virtual space but space that belongs to me nonetheless.

I run my own mailspools for the two of us, plus some others for close familly.  Quirky!  Some folks are just content to have their email hosted via POP-3 at the ISP. That doesn’t do it for me at all. I’m more of an IMAP kinda guy.  Sure I could run a local IMAP, and fetch with fetchmail – but I’ve got my own domain name. Why would I do that?

To facilitate this, I run OpenSolaris.  I have a zone inside the opensolaris instance that handles my email.  The cool thing about email in a zone, is the fact it is like a modern day demilitarized zone (DMZ).  I treat the zone as “crash and burn”, meaning if a foe was to compromise the zone, I could simply close the zone – roll back the filesystem to a known good point – restart the zone and update the attack vector so it could not happen again.

Since I like a reasonable level of performance with IMAP, I have the mail spools on a compressed ZFS filesystem.  This means that there is minimal need for the system to read a few hundred megs off disk at a time. In this environment the system can read…uh less, uncompress it into memory, and let the client have it.

I’ve always been curious on how some people get spam, how others don’t.  I cringe when people send me greeting cards, or send to my email directly from a web page.

So, below are some of the methods I use for mostly clean and shiny email.

1. reject all email from IP addresses behind the Great Firewall of China.  I don’t know anyone there, and I don’t want Chinese spam. Really!
2. reject a few other TLD’s, by name.  IIRC .de, .mx, .pl. Again – sorry if you live there.
3. use RBL’s (abuseat, sorbs, uceprotect, spamcop, spamhaus, etc)
4. spammers like fast email servers.  Slow it down.  I added FEATURE(`greet_pause’, `5000′) to my sendmail mc, and rebuilt the sendmail.cf This really messes with the ill formed scripts and crap-ware they use.
5. run spamassassin. ’nuff said!
6. run sa-update periodically
7. run sa-learn from my spam bucket periodically, to take advantage of the bayes facilities of SA.
8. run Mimedefang!  It’s a great tool to hook perl into the middle of your mail flow. It’s better than a global procmail!
9. did I say procmail?  Ya – this is how I sort and mangle my email upon delivery to my account.
10. use uribl. URIBL is a blacklisting service based on message content (urls that are present inside an email message). Since spam is generally advertising, this seems to be a great way of adding a few (enough) points to a message score.

These are the key things I do with my email.  Perhaps they will be useful to you.