My 15 megabytes of fame
A few years ago, while my wife and I were working out if we should have more children (we have 2 now) , I read that one in every 5 people in the world is Chinese.
As there are already 4 people in the family, I didn’t want to have a fifth because none of us speak Chinese and it just wouldn’t be fair on the new child.
On the other hand however, I also saw on the television you can feed some people for $0.30 per day so it would be quite economical…
How are we supposed to decide ?
Photography back drop(s) are something I haven’t liked using much. They always seem to make the photos less real in a way that actually looks less real.
A little while ago, I wanted to learn how to shoot models and spoke to a friend about how to shoot them, we went to a local pub to save having to use a photography back drop. In the pub, there were lots of bottles, barrels and other such things. The lighting for the photography was very poor because of the dark timber used on the walls and also the owners of the pub insisted on smoking.
Anyway, from this little adventure, I’ve learned a few things. Firstly don’t shoot where you cannot control the environment (including the air !) and photography back drops in a studio probably aren’t that bad after all.
Heres some photos from the shoot in case anyone is interested.
Trixbox has what i consider to be a strange behaviour where an extensions Outbound CID will override the trunk CID.
Using engin, i wanted to supress caller id on all outgoing calls. This is easy, i hear you say just by prefixing numbers with 1831. For engin, this works for everywhere but an 07 number. I called them about it and they told me that its not a problem at their end. This seemed strange to me as other Australian numbers worked perfectly. Anyway, i discovered that if you use a PAP2T or a SPA-3000, and supress caller id with them, the CID sent to engin is “anonymous”.
I now knew how to supress it but had trouble getting trixbox (or FreePBX) to actually use it. I decided that I could use the “Emergency CID” field in FreePBX Extensions and only mark engin as the emergency route. Then on the outgoing routes, tick Emergency for the numbers you want to supress caller id on.
I know its a bodgy solution but it works and i would present a normal CID for emergency calls anyway.
Using engin I was having trouble as all incoming calls from switchboard numbers were appearing on my primary number.
This was annoying as I wanted more control in the inbound routes of trixbox. The following extensioins_custom.conf contect worked for me.
[custom-from-engin]
include => ext-did
exten => _X.,1,SIPGetHeader(Var_TO=To)
exten => _X.,n,Goto(ext-did,switch${Var_TO:5:10},1)
As you can see, the SIP header contains a TO header which can be looked at. I simply add a Custom app inbound route for the main number like “custom-from-engin,${EXTEN},1” and using the above context, it re-routes the call back to the inbound contect (ext-did) with thenumber called with a “switch” prefix.
Then its just a simple matter of adding inbound routes like
switch0297990000 and making them do as you like.
When using my new Nokia E65 and dialing out with asterisk, it would often fail as i couldn’t dial a + (international option).
using Trixbox, the + character is reserved in outbound routes so i had to use extensions_custom.conf to make the following changes…
[from-internal-intldial]
exten => _+61XXXXXXXXX,1,Goto(from-internal,0${EXTEN:-9},1)
exten => _*X.,1,Goto(from-internal,${EXTEN},1)
exten => _X.,1,Goto(from-internal,${EXTEN},1)
This allowsย my saved phone entries witha + to work.
Obviously, unless you live in Australia,ย you may want to change the +61 to something else.
Also, even though asterisk doesn’t appear to list + as a dialplan option, it works.
Tested in asterisk 1.2.4 and 1.2.5