The Fruits of my Labour » Technology

Business Equipment Leasing Tips

Mango — Sun, 16 May 2010 16:10:57 +0000

Mango runs the IT department at his day job, which involves evaluating business equipment for purchase or lease. Here are a few tips that we would really like everyone to know. Or if you don't care about leasing but like making fun of sales people, you can just skip to the bottom.

Find out the Purchase Price
Every salesperson we have spoken with has required massive amounts of convincing to reveal the purchase price of a piece of equipment. We're not sure if it's because they don't want us to get sticker shock, or if they're on commission from the leasing company. But here's an example of why the purchase price is something very important to know: maybe it's far cheaper to purchase than to lease it! We currently have a printer on lease that cost an astonishing FORTY-FOUR PERCENT more to lease than it would to purchase. (Mango hastens to add here that he was NOT the one who made that deal.) At this rate, it would have been cheaper to even put the equipment on a credit card, or better still a line of credit.

ALWAYS negotiate a buyout.
Here's another advantage to purchasing equipment: when a typical lease ends, you get...nothing. If you've negotiated a buyout, you can purchase the equipment for often 10% of its original value. Then you have the option to actually own something after paying for it for five years.

Myth: If I purchase equipment, the company's service contract won't cover me.
Not always. Sometimes, the service contract is separate from the lease, and completely optional. You can purchase the service contract separately, not at all, or on an a la carte basis.

Girl, you've got nothing but time.
Maybe that's lyrics from a Sara Evans song, and maybe you're not a girl, but you still have nothing but time. Don't be taken in by promotional pricing that they can "only guarantee until the end of the quarter". These people want your business. Every time we've said, "well, we can't do a deal until after the quarter, but we like that price," they've said "...well...ok."

Could you outsource?
If you're doing a lot of production in-house, consider outsourcing it. We considered replacing a very old and decrepit folding machine and were dismayed by the prices we were quoted. Then we investigated outsourcing all our large volume mailing. As it turned out, after we factored in staff time, we discoved that we could pay to the outsourcing company exactly what we currently paid to do the work ourselves. It was a bonus not to have to do the work, and as an additional bonus, we didn't have to replace expensive equipment.

Is it really worth it?
Maybe not. Why not divide the monthly cost of the equipment by the number of times per month you expect to use it?

Could you live with home office-grade machines?
We find it very economical and convenient to do our own colour laser printing. We were offered some very large and very very expensive colour laser printers by various office equipment companies. We ended up purchasing a Xerox colour laser printer online for an astonishing $30 + toner! Off-brand toner is approximately half the price of OEM toner, and in this case the image quality looks exactly the same. This brought the cost of an average page with 50% coverage (we think figures based on 5% coverage are worthless) to an appealing $0.09 - exactly half the price of the cheapest local print shop. True, it's a much smaller machine than what we were offered by the office equipment companies - in fact, it sits on a desk - but it did come with a year of free on-site service, and is more than up to the task of printing several hundred pages in a day. We used eBay saved searches to find excellent deals on extra paper trays, a duplexer, and spare parts that we will one day need to replace.

NEVER do pre-authorized payments.
Why? Because every leasing company we've ever dealt with never stops them on time. It's true that writing a cheque every month is time consuming, but convincing them to give back two or three payments AFTER your lease expires is MUCH MORE time consuming. Dealing with them suddenly starting payments again THREE YEARS after you no longer have the equipment is even more time consuming. If you do have a pre-authorized payment, and you request that your bank block future payments, spend the extra $5 to have them block payments of any amount, not just the typical amount. Sometimes, if the bank declines a payment, the first thing the leasing company will do is subtract $0.01 and try again.

Put the expiry dates of leases on your calendar, in advance if you need to.
We do this, and we also have a sticker on each piece of leased equipment that states when it expires. The reason is: sometimes, the contract states that the lease auto-renews itself for a year (or five!) if you continue to pay for it. Sometimes it states that the lease must be cancelled at least three months before the end of the term. To get around this, we simply submit a letter at the time we sign a lease stating we wish to cancel the lease at the end of the term. (It qualifies as "at least three months"!)

Read the contract. Read every single word.
We needed to replace a mailing machine. Fortunately, there are only three companies in Canada licensed by Canada Post to manufacture postage meters, so research was relatively simple. We were intrigued by a machine offered to us by Pitney-Bowes...but dismayed to find the contract was four pages long and written in positively microscopic-sized font. Buried on page two, in the middle of the section about obtaining service to the machine, was: "PBC may change the services, the terms pursuant to which the services are provided to you, or terminate such services, upon written notice to you." Wait, what?! They can decide that they don't want to provide service to us, on a whim? Oh, but it gets better! On page four: "After the first year of the initial term, PBC may increase the subscription and/or rental fees upon 30 days prior written notice."

Yes, you read that right. They can actually increase the rental fees of the equipment and there's nothing you can do about it!! We mentioned this to our salesperson, and her response was a shocking, "Well, it probably wouldn't go up by much, if at all." We asked how much it had gone up in the past, but were not surprised to be told that she was "not able to provide that information". We suggested that since it wouldn't go up by much, she wouldn't mind giving us a different contract without that provision. She told us she couldn't do that. We asked for permission to terminate the lease early without penalty if the rate went up. That too was shot down.

Needless to say, we didn't sign THAT one.

Find out what consumables cost.
Find out exactly what consumables cost, including shipping and handling, and whether or not you can get them from off-brand suppliers. (You'll have to figure out this last one on your own.) Find out how long a consumable will last in the real world. Toner cartridges for printers are often quoted by how many pages they'll print at 5% coverage. 5% coverage is about equivalent to a small logo in one corner of the page. If you plan to print more than that, and you almost certainly will, the cartridges will last for a significantly less number of pages.

On the other hand, maybe it's okay to have expensive consumables. If your machine is inexpensive enough that it offsets the cost of the consumables, perhaps it will even out. We had someone once tell us that their printer was the best because their cartridge lasted for 30,000 pages and cost "next to nothing". Perhaps it was true, for given values of "next to nothing", but their printer itself was nearly double the price of everyone else's. For our use, there was no possible way that total cost of ownership would have been cheaper.

Tips for specific types of equipment:

Copiers and printers
If you have to pay for toner, find out how the machine calculates how much toner is remaining. Some cartridges have a counter that counts up each time you print a page. A friend of ours has a Samsung printer that does this. But here's the problem: the counter increments whether or not you've used that colour! So if you print a few thousand pages of plain black text, your colour cartridges will be worthless, even though you haven't used them! Our favourite printers have bottles of toner instead of cartridges. These bottles have no counter; the printer simply uses them until they're empty. They're also very very easy to refill.

If you purchase a home office-grade printer, try and find one that can be connected to a network so that you can share it amongst a few computers easily. Also, consider a model that supports PostScript. PostScript is useful for many reasons. For example, if the printer manufacturer does not provide drivers for Linux, but the printer supports PostScript, it's often trivial to make it work.

Postage equipment
In Canada, Canada Post prohibits you from owning a postage meter. However, you can own a postage machine. One is completely useless without the other. Sometimes, the contracts for the meter and the machine are separate, so if you decide to cancel a contract, be sure to cancel both. Better still, choose a company that only asks that you sign a single contract. We investigated purchasing a postage machine and renting a meter. However, the meter rental was only a few dollars less expensive than renting the machine and the meter together.

We mentioned Pitney Bowes before. We've also used equipment from Neopost. It had a device to automatically seal envelopes, but we were never able to make it work particularly well. We had their technician come in a few times to service it, but with very little success. One day, we received two letters in the mail: one from Neopost, and one from the local Neopost dealer. The letter from Neopost was not sealed. The letter from the dealer was taped shut. After this stunning display of confidence in the company's own product, we gave up trying.

We currently use a machine from Francotyp-Postalia. It is a quarter of the price of the machine we used to have from Neopost with the only difference being that the scale is a few kg smaller.

Do you like the salesperson?
Finally, follow your instincts. If your instincts say the salesperson is honest, (and you have good instincts,) they probably are. Here's something to watch out for: if all the salesperson will do is tell you everything they can think of that's negative about their competitor's product, that's a bad sign. If they'll actually talk about their own product and tell you about everything positive about it, you're probably ready to do a deal. And finally, if you start hearing quotes like these...well...you have our permission to laugh at them and then write about it on the internet.

Him: "...and the competitor's model doesn't have an automatic feeder!"
Us: "Actually...according to their salesperson, yes it does."
Him: "Nope. I can assure you that 100%. It doesn't have an automatic feeder."
Us: "Ok, well, we won't argue with you about a product that's not yours, so--"
Him: "IT DOESN'T!!"
[We took the competitor's product. It had an automatic feeder.]

Him: "This is a GREAT deal! It's the best deal you're gonna get!"
Us: "You told us that with the deal you offered us yesterday, and the deal you offered us two days ago. But each time you've said that you've later offered us a better deal."
Him: "But this IS the best deal you're gonna get. You're just gonna have to trust me."
[Three days later, he offered us yet a better deal. We selected a competitor.]

Him: "You could go with [model A], or you could go with [model B] for just $30 more per month."
Us: "What's [model B] do?"
Him: "It's..." [shrugs] "...better. Better built."
Us: "So your [model A] isn't well-built?"
Him: "Oh, [model A] is well-built too."
Us: "What features does it not have that [model B] does?"
Him: "Not...really any. But it's better. In your case I'd recommend it."

[he wanted us to take a refurb]
Him: "You can tell it's been well-taken care of. You can just tell by lookin' at it."
Us: "It's...got scratches and dents all over it."
Him: "Yeah, but it it works well. Inside. You can just tell by lookin' at it."
Us: "Ok. How can you tell that?"
[We expected some sort of explanation for his claim. Apparently our question was not specific enough.]
Him: "By lookin' at it!"

Him: "Oh, a binding machine! When you want to replace that, talk to me! I know all about those!"
Us: "That's a paper cutter."

Him: "So, when you're thinking about replacing your machine, just give me a call!"
Us: "We doubt we'll be doing that. The current one breaks down all the time and it's terribly frustrating to use. It's also too expensive for the amount we use it."
Him: "Well, I'm sure you'll like our newest model. I could let it go at [price that's much more than what we're paying]."
Us: "That's even FURTHER from being cost-effective."
Him: "Well, we're not going to know that for sure, are we? Not until we come in and do a complete collective cost-comparison analysis!"
[We are NOT going to purchase anything from a salesman who can't even think of a buzzword for "analysis" that starts with a C.]

Change Back/Forward buttons to Previous/Next

Mango — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 03:06:02 +0000

Over the past few weeks we've been testing the Microsoft ComfortCurve Keyboard 2000 and we love it! Its keys are nice and responsive, it's comfortable to use, and its buttons are in very intuitive places. The best part is it's practically a steal - we've seen it for as low as $15. It has only one minor flaw which is that there are very few multimedia buttons. There are play/pause, volume up/down, and mute. But there are no buttons for stop, previous, or next.

There were however browser Back/Forward buttons. And we never use the mute button. For some reason, SharpKeys, which we've used in the past wouldn't do the job. The keyboard came with software called IntelliType but it used a great deal of RAM and, oddly, slowed down our cursor a great deal. No matter. This is an excellent excuse to point out again just how much we like AutoHotkey.

#NoTrayIcon
#SingleInstance force
Browser_Back::Media_Prev
Browser_Forward::Media_Next
Volume_Mute::Media_Stop

Disable Targus PowerPoint Remote Buttons

Mango — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 21:43:03 +0000

A company called Targus makes remote controls designed for use with PowerPoint presentations. They allow you to control your presentation from some distance away from the actual computer running the show.

While this sounds like a great idea in theory, in practice these remotes are BEYOND frustrating. The reason is that there are too many buttons, and pressing the wrong button at the wrong time will make the presentation quit working. And no matter how carefully we instruct the presenter to recover from such incidents, ("If everything stops working press this button labeled Magic Fix-It Button!") ostensibly they will forget. Every. Single. Time.

These buttons, they must be disabled.

We wanted to solve two problems. The first was the button designed to switch applications. It's an excellent idea, but for some reason it doesn't work properly. You can switch out of your presentation, but you can't switch back. The second was the button that suddenly blanks the screen. We are told that this button is coronary-inducing.

We wrote the following script using the excellent and free AutoHotkey program. It works like a charm, in both PowerPoint and OpenOffice.org Impress. If you don't have AutoHotkey, we used its compiler to make an EXE file. You may simply download the file to disable Targus PowerPoint Remote buttons.

; Disable Targus Remote Buttons - by Mango - http://www.toao.net/
#SingleInstance force
 
; First, disable Alt+Shift+Tab.
!+Tab::Return
 
; Next, disable Shift+Alt, a byproduct of disabling Alt+Shift+Tab.
+Alt::
 
; If a window is active named "PowerPoint Slide Show", disable the 'b' key as it will blank the screen.
#IfWinActive, PowerPoint Slide Show
 {
 b::Return
 }
 
; Disable the 'b' key in OpenOffice.org Impress.
#IfWinActive, ahk_class SALTMPSUBFRAME
 {
 b::Return
 }

Free Tools for Windows

Mango — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 01:13:08 +0000

Everyone seems to have their list of free Windows applications they can't do without, and here's ours. All of these are free for the download and their authors deserve a serious hat tip for all of their excellent work. We list them in alphabetical order:

AutoHotkey
AutoHotkey is the quintessential keystroke and mouse automator that you really must try to see just how powerful it is. You can automate almost any program by sending it keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can remap keys on your keyboard or mouse. One of our favourite features is that you may compile your finished script into a single EXE that may be run on any Windows computer.

ID3-TagIT 3
ID3-TagIT 3 is excellent software for bulk editing of ID3 tags in MP3 files.

Media Player Classic Home Cinema
This is our favourite media player. It plays a wide variety of media formats, is simple to use, and best of all, it uses just a few megabytes of RAM.

Notepad++
Notepad++ is our favourite text editor. It's fast, colour-codes many languages, supports collapsing of code, and has plenty of other very useful features. Be sure to get the NppAutoIndent plugin.

PuTTY
PuTTY is an excellent Telnet/SSH client. If you currently use the Windows Telnet program, you will no doubt consider PuTTY a breath of fresh air.

SUPER
SUPER provides an excellent user interface for popular audo/video converters. Their developers state, "SUPER does for FREE what other encoders CAN'T do for money!" This is absolutely correct. There are no codecs to install because everything you need comes in a single EXE file. Their website is very difficult to navigate, so here is a link to download the setup file.

SmartRipper
SmartRipper is an excellent tool for ripping MPEG video from DVDs. We found it difficult to find a free program that would rip the original MPEG video into a single file without transcoding. SmartRipper does. Unfortunately, its author no longer offers it for download but it is easy to find with Google.

T.38 Plug-In for Microsoft Fax
Without a fax machine, and a phone line, and need to send a fax? This plug-in is for you. Get a Pay Per Call account from Callcentric and send faxes with the Microsoft Fax printer driver for just pennies per page. (To clarify, the software is free; Callcentric charges a few cents per minute in termination fees.)

Windows Grep
Ever need to search through a large number of files for some specific text? Windows has a built-in tool to do this...but it doesn't always work. Enter Windows Grep, the Windows version of the popular Grep tool. It even supports regular expressions.

WinSCP
WinSCP is a great companion to PuTTY and is the best FTP/SFTP client we've ever found.

XYNTService Project
With the XYNTService Project, you may start any program (including PHP or AutoHotkey scripts) as a Windows Service. It has more features and is easier to use than srvany.exe!

Zoiper
The free version of this excellent softphone supports up to three SIP accounts.

Low Cost Internet Faxing for Canada

Mango — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 21:26:15 +0000

With the growing popularity of VoIP, more and more homes and businesses do not have a POTS (plain old telephone service) line. VoIP is excellent technology for voice calls (hence the letter "V" in "VoIP") but that's about all it's good for.

Finding a reliable fax solution was interesting to say the least. Most people we asked for advice told us, "Faxing is archaic technology. Forget that and use e-mail instead!" We certainly rarely send faxes, but as long as our customers wish to fax in orders, we are going to need a reliable way of receiving them. Fortunately, we've found several!

Just the Fax, ma'am.

If you want to use a customary fax machine, you should select both an ATA that supports T.38 and a T.38 provider. T.38 is a protocol that relays fax data over a network such as the Internet. Because the data is not converted into an audio signal and compressed, faxing has a much much higher chance of working. T.38 is also relatively capable of dealing with minor packet loss.

It's true that it is possible to fax over VoIP at very low speed such as 9600 bps without using T.38 but we would not rely on a VoIP fax setup for anything more than a couple of faxes per year. If you really want to try it, Future-Nine has a good set of tips.

Some ATAs that support T.38 are the SPA-2102 and the SPA-3102. (The PAP2T does not support T.38.) Some VoIP providers are also T.38 providers. We can only recommend two: Callcentric and AcroVoice. Shaw Cable's Digital Phone service also supports T.38.

When shopping for a T.38 provider, ask if their carrier delivers calls to them over TDM or T.38. It may be difficult to find this information, but calls delivered to the provider over TDM or T.38 rather than G.711 can increase the reliability of faxing. The connection between your T.38 provider and their carrier is (hopefully) much less susceptible to packet loss and jitter than a residential-grade internet connection so G.711 between your provider and their carrier is not a dealbreaker. However, for example, Callcentric's toll-free DIDs are always delivered over TDM. Their residential DIDs sometimes are. So in this case, why not take a toll-free DID?

Caveat emptor

Shaw Cable recommends setting fax machines to 9600 bps and turning off ECM/error correction mode. This is bad advice. Perhaps this was necessary with the old Motorola modems, but with the new Arris modems, 9600 bps is not necessary. Our fax works perfectly fine at high speeds. ECM should not be turned off for the simple reason that if a fax fails, the machine may report a successful send if ECM is turned off. You will have no idea that the fax actually failed, and the receiver may have no idea that you attempted to send a fax. So if your fax doesn't work with ECM turned on, it's time to find another fax provider. Turning off ECM is not a solution!

(Note that Future-Nine's tips that we linked to above suggest turning off ECM. This probably is necessary to make faxing over VoIP work, and is one of the reasons we do not recommend faxing over VoIP.)

One other fact that is interesting to note is that we cannot fax on line 3 of our 4-line modem. We have no idea why, and unfortunately not surprisingly, neither does Shaw.

Some users report faxing success without a POTS line only when they place the fax behind an ADSL filter. We have not found this necessary but include it in case it helps anyone.

Faxing with a PC

For sending faxes without a fax machine, we have had good success with FaxBack's T.38 Plug-in and Callcentric. We have tried other T.38 software such as T38Modem and Zoiper but try as we might we have not been able to make it work. We were not able to receive faxes with a Callcentric DID and this plug-in. (The error was: "An invalid fax number has been detected". Anyone know how to fix this?)

Callcentric has a feature that will convert incoming faxes to PDF and email them to you. For us, this worked well in testing, but we were disappointed to discover it incompatible with some of our customers' fax machines. After we reported the issue nearly a year ago, the feature was marked as "unsupported" and that is still its status at the time of this writing. Some users report success with it and some don't.

In our situation, we needed to receive faxes without a fax machine, and we wanted to port an existing local number. It was very difficult to find a company that could port Canadian DIDs and was not SIP-based. We tested a company called UFAX.NET and we were hopeful because of their salesperson's impressive volume of knowledge. Unfortunately, as soon as we signed up, the salesperson inexplicably refused to respond to our emails and phone calls. Their technical support was very slow to respond to queries and was not helpful. We do not recommend UFAX.NET.

And about time, too.

Fortunately, we found MyFax. They are not SIP-based. Their packages start at $13 per month which includes 100 pages out and 200 pages in. It took plenty of encouragement to get their salesperson to answer questions, but eventually he did. They did successfully port our Vancouver DID. We have been using them since August 2009 and astonishingly have been problem-free. MyFax's technical support is absolutely phenomenal. They happily escalated an issue we were having up three levels of support, and then to their carrier. (The issue was that MyFax could not receive faxes from Shaw Cable; MyFax could receive faxes from anyone else and Shaw could send faxes to anyone else.) We ended up solving the problem ourselves - it was largely due to an issue with Shaw's equipment. However we were very grateful for the help that they offered in spite of the fact that the issue was not their fault because it gave us valuable information with which to solve the problem.

So why shouldn't you just send or receive a fax over a regular VoIP line?

Trev from AcroVoice kindly explains why:

"Despite the G.711 codec being lossless, it still suffers from jitter or dropped packets that will cause a fax machine to get confused. These devices rely on precise timing. When a packet is dropped or not received in time, the PSTN gateway will use an algorithm called PLC - packet loss concealment. This is a wonderful thing for us humans as we'll hear an approximation of what the algorithm estimates would have been in that time slot. Without PLC, we would hear drop outs which are much more annoying. With good PLC you probably wouldn't even notice if 2% of packets were being dropped. Faxes rely on receiving every sound as it is sent. When the sound is estimated based on voice patterns, it will confuse the fax machine. Further, if the jitter buffer attempts to enlarge itself, a PLC algorithm would be required to stretch out the sound over a small period of time so the buffer can grow. Not good for faxing."

Conclusion: Absolutely possible.

Currently, for business faxing, we use Shaw Cable and MyFax for outgoing and MyFax for incoming. For personal faxing, we use Callcentric with FaxBack's plugin for outgoing. We are currently helping to beta test a new Canadian VoIP provider based in Victoria that supports T.38. If it works as well as we anticipate we will be thrilled. Stay tuned.

Google Calculator Rocks!

Mango — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:58:38 +0000

We always seem to want to convert various forms of measurements to some other various forms of measurements. We used to have bookmarks for every conversion necessary: one for distance, one for weight, one for currency, and so on. Then, Mango discovered Google Calculator. Google has outdone itself and created the easiest conversion tool we've ever seen. You simply write your conversion in plain English into the Google search box. And with Firefox, the Google search box is just a CTRL+K away.

Examples follow.

You can convert distance, volume, currency, and even volume of data.

But, oh! It gets better! You can convert multiple units of measure at the same time!

And now, for the grand finale...

Google Calculator is cool. Period.

How to Solve Two Four Encore CS3 Quirks

Mango — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 17:30:30 +0000

Recently we were attempting to build a DVD with Adobe Encore CS3. Due to Encore's oddities, it took two days to figure out how to do it. We look forward to the day when Adobe's video editing software will reach the same caliber as its industry standard Photoshop. Perhaps at this point mentioning "I use Premiere" at a professionals' meeting won't be met with stifled giggling.

Until then, here's how we solved two most notable quirks. The first was an error message that occurred upon build that went along the lines of: PGC "xxxx" has an error at xx:xx:xx:xy internal software error : %0, line xxxx - PGCINFO: name= xxxx, ref=BPGC, time=xx:xx:xx:xy

This error referenced a point on the timeline approximately one second from the end of the clip. The last second wasn't significant so we simply trimmed the last second from the clip. The error then referenced a point on the timeline TWO seconds from the end of the clip. This was frustrating.

Google produced a great deal of posts from all kinds of forums with people having this issue. At least we weren't alone. Unfortunately, there seemed to be many causes of the error, and equally as many solutions. And there were some people who couldn't reproduce the error if they tried. The cause of the problem for us was that Encore was not able to build a DVD with files it had transcoded. (!?) We solved this by using SUPER and MEncoder with the following settings: mpg / MPEG-II / AC3 / 720x480 / 16:9 / 29.97 / 7776kbps / 48000 / 2 / 192kbps.

This created another problem. The error was: The aspect ratio of this file is not supported by DVD. As it turned out, we could use the Interpret Footage feature to select any aspect ratio except 16:9. Cleverly, we configured SUPER to encode the footage as 4:3 instead. Only then did Encore allow us to interpret the footage as 16:9.

We file these solutions under the category "simple but strange".

We edit this post to add two more quirks.

We finally got our DVD to build. But then, we discovered that the timelines were all in the wrong order. The Adobe Forums tell us that timelines are written to the disc in the order in which they were created. And, there is no way to change that. You had better create the timelines in the proper order the first time, because if you don't, you're going to be deleting and rebuilding them.

Okay. Idiotic, but we can do that.

But wait! You can't copy and paste assets into the new timelines! All Adobe has to say is "This behaviour differs from Encore 2.0." Fortunately, we discovered that you can copy and paste entire timelines so that after that, all we needed to do was reconfigure our buttons. However on the third day of what should have been a 20 minute project, Mango feels compelled to add the following:

ADOBE ENCORE CS3 IS A STUPID PIECE OF OVERPRICED CODED BY INCOMPETENT PROGRAMMERS WITH GARBAGE FOR BRAINS.

!!

We note that Adobe is not helping Mango's resolution to quit swearing.

Linksys SPA921 IP Phone Review

Mango — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 17:46:02 +0000

We got so excited setting up the VoIP system at my office that we decided to set it up at my home, too. We didn't have a PBX to worry about so could choose pretty much any hardware we wanted. We decided on a Linksys SPA921 IP phone.

In the world of all things wireless, it seems that corded phones are marketed at those who can't or don't wish to afford a cordless phone. Thus, to keep prices low, quality is often low. For ages, we've wanted a really nice corded phone...but we haven't been able to find one, until now.

Firmware upgrade

The first thing you need to know is that this is a HOT-looking phone. We got it out of the box and were sold right then and there. We were disappointed when we tested it out though. There was echo. Echo. Plenty of it. It. So much that it made the phone unusable. Unusable.

Dammit.

Dammit.

We played with various settings including turning down the gain on the handset. This didn't help, and even one person on the other end complained about echo when we talked loudly. We decided to do a firmware upgrade, even though the notes mentioned nothing about echo cancellation. After the firmware upgrade, the echo left, completely. WOOHOO!

Nifty features

Now that we had voice quality at an acceptable level, we could start playing with all the features the phone had to offer. Scrolling through the menus, we discovered we could set a ringtone. We tried them all, hoping everyone else in earshot wouldn't mind. Now, here's the best part about this phone. The very last ringtone was the CTU ringtone from '24'!!! Now I can pretend to be Jack Bauer. Send that to my screen, would you please?

The SPA921 has a voicemail button on the phone which is programmable with the access code of your voicemail provider. Unfortunately, as far as we know, there's no way for it to pause for a few seconds and then automatically enter your password.

We tested out the speakerphone and found the sound quality to be above average.

There were buttons for Call Forward, Do Not Disturb, Transfer, and Conference within easy reach. Additionally, a Missed Call shortcut appears if any calls have been made to the phone that I did not answer. The phone also has a Mute button, a Hold button, and a button for enabling the headset, which we have as yet not tried.

Default settings

Much of our PAP2T Review also applies to this phone as well. Unlike the PAP2T, we've had the most success leaving the Handset Input Gain on the SPA921 at its default of 0. Ring1 Cadence on the PAP2T is known as Cadence1 on the SPA921; the other ring settings do not apply. Other than that, the settings for Dial Plan, Daylight Saving Time Rules, NAT, Codecs, and RTP Packet Size are common to both units.

Missing features

In another review that we read, the author complained about the SPA921's LCD not having a backlight. This is true, but the contrast of the LCD is very easy to see as it is, if there is ambient light in the room.

One other feature that exists in the PAP2T that we miss in the SPA921 is the ability to forward specific calls to specific locations. It would be great if this could be added in a firmware upgrade at some point.

We had trouble with the DNS client on this phone. Occasionally, it fails to perform a DNS lookup and an outgoing call will fail. We haven't been able to solve this issue, so instead we use the IP of our SIP server instead of the hostname.

And finally, in case you're all anxious to hear Mango's beautiful voice...

Here's a recording of Mango himself talking on the SPA921, if anyone's interested in hearing the audio quality.

The missing features we have mentioned are really nothing to worry about. Call quality is of course most important and this phone couldn't perform better. At some point we hope to test some Aastra phones as we are very intrigued by their XML browser. Imagine - a VoIP phone that can be programmed! We drool just thinking about it.

Linksys/Cisco PAP2T VoIP Adapter Review

Mango — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 05:14:27 +0000

A company that we deal with has been using VoIP for ages and loves it, so we decided it wouldn't do for us not to have the same shiny toys. The thought of saving $100 a month made things even better.

Looking for Mango's recommended PAP2T settings? Scroll down.

For those of you who are just joining us, the PAP2T is known as an Analog Telephone Adapter or ATA. It allows you to use any standard telephone or PBX and route your calls over the Internet using VoIP. VoIP is typically less expensive than a typical phone line because a VoIP provider does not have to deal with costs of infrastructure such as running phone lines to customers.

The provider that was recommended to us was DigitalVoice.ca. (Edit: Due to subsequent service quality issues, we do not recommend this provider any longer. We still recommend the PAP2T very highly.) We bought a PAP2T to test them out and were pleasantly surprised. We had a horrific experience with a different provider called Primus a few years ago, and we expected quality loss at the very least. Call quality with PAP2T using the G.711 codec was actually better than an analog phone line!

The reason we like this device is that it can be configured to do practically everything but card tricks. For example, the Linksys/Cisco dial plans are the best we've seen on any ATA.

Nifty Things to do with a PAP2T

We've discovered a few nifty things to do with this adapter that we haven't seen widely mentioned, so we decided to mention them:

You can call forward specific numbers to specific locations. We have made a list of telemarketers' numbers and forwarded them to a special extension we set up with our PBX that plays "not in service" tones.

Calls can be made to another VoIP device without either device even having a VoIP provider, both on your LAN and through the internet...absolutely free. (I foresee future geeks asking girls out like "Call me sometime! My number is fabio@174.120.227.135:5060!") You could even configure this to support station-to-station calling for a small office or an IP-based intercom over any distance.

You can set up special rings for specific callers, so that you can tell who's calling from across the room.

The device can be configured to match the regional settings of many different countries. The documentation for some of these settings is lacking, but plenty of good examples may be found online.

The PAP2T will talk to a syslog server and send it all kinds of information for ease of troubleshooting. Additionally, one could use this to do fancy things such as search for a customer's record based on their phone number, and have it appear on an agent's screen.

Settings We Changed from the Default and Think You Should, Too.

The first thing we would recommend you do is upgrade the firmware of your PAP2T. We noticed that upgrading to the latest version of firmware dramatically reduced echo. If you do not have echo problems, you can skip this step if you like.

Most of these settings may only be set using the Advanced Administrator login. To access this, navigate to http://[PAP2T_IP_address]/admin/advanced.

Let's start with the System tab. Why not set an NTP server so that the date and time is always correct? You may do this on the System tab. Try 1.pool.ntp.org and 2.pool.ntp.org.

Let's move on to the SIP tab. You may wish to set Reg Retry Long Intvl to 120 so that your device recovers quickly if it fails registration.

The default RTP Packet Size is 0.03. For the most popular codecs, G.711 and G.729, the optimal setting is 0.02. (0.01 results in even less latency at the expense of using extra bandwidth, IF your provider supports it.) The default setting of 0.03 will likely cause very choppy voice with G.729 and slightly choppy voice with G.711.

On the Provisioning tab, we set Provision Enable to No as we wanted to manage the settings of our VoIP device ourselves, rather than having our provider do it.

Next, we move to the Regional tab to configure the PAP2T to properly match our region. You may want to set the Dial Tone to 350@-19,440@-19;20(*/0/1+2) so that the user has 20 seconds with which to begin dialing instead of the default of 10.

We decided to change the Reorder Tone because unless one is listening closely and knows the difference (two beeps per second for reorder and one per second for busy) the Reorder Tone sounds a lot like the Busy Tone. We set our Reorder Tone to 480@-19,620@-19;10(.125/.125/1+2) which plays four beeps per second and is easier to identify. Obviously this is not a true reorder tone but for our purposes it is useful. The reorder tone is the tone that will play when you dial an invalid number or your VoIP provider is unreachable.

The PAP2T we received shipped without a North American ring. We were able to achieve a "normal-sounding" ring by setting the Ring1 Cadence to 60(2/4), the Ring Waveform to Sinusoid, and the Ring Frequency to 20. We're told that these settings are standard Bellcore settings, though we've also had reports of specific telephones that respond better to a Trapezoid Ring Waveform. Try Sinuoid first, and if your phone doesn't ring properly or you have Caller ID issues, try Trapezoid instead. You may also need to set the Ring Voltage to 90.

You may want to set the CPC delay to 10 and the CPC duration to 0.5. With the default settings, our phones had to be on the hook for an inordinate amount of time before it would actually end the call.

Because of the new North American Daylight Saving Time rules, PAP2Ts by default calculate DST incorrectly. Also on the Regional tab, set your Daylight Saving Time Rule to start=3/8/7/2:00;end=11/1/7/2:00;save=1 and your time zone appropriately for your region. (Trivia: 3/8/7/2:00 translates literally to "The Sunday that is on or after March 8th at 2AM." The second parameter is commonly misunderstood as the week, however this is not correct.)

The default gain on the PAP2T is typically too high and can cause echo. We adjusted the FXS Port Input Gain and FXS Port Output Gain, one at a time, in increments of three. We found that -1 and -11 eliminates echo entirely and produces appropriate conversation volume. However, we've had reports from people who have used these settings and found the volume too quiet. You may need to play with these until they suit you.

Let's move on to the Line tab. As we planned to place our device behind a router, we turned on NAT Mapping and NAT Keep Alive.

Update: We used to configure the proxy to the IP address of our VoIP provider's server as a workaround to a firmware bug that occasionally prevented the user from making calls. Now, thanks to some excellent help from users in the VoIP Tech Chat forum, we have a better solution. If you hear a reorder (fast busy) tone occasionally when you attempt to make calls, it is likely because your VoIP provider does not respond to the ATA's SIP NOTIFY message.

Here's a better workaround than using the IP address: set NAT Keep Alive Msg to KeepAlive. (The default is $NOTIFY). However, you should only do this if you have the symptoms described above. For more detailed information about the bug and why it occurs, check the link to the VoIP Tech Chat forum above.

If your proxy is an IP address, you should now use the hostname instead. The reason is that the VoIP provider can use DNS failover to ensure your device stays running if a server should become unreachable.

You should also set Register Expires to 300 to avoid "phone doesn't ring" issues. Among other things, this will let your VoIP provider know within five minutes when your ISP changes your IP address. You can also set Proxy Fallback Intvl to 60. If your VoIP provider's server becomes unreachable and your PAP2T fails over to a backup server, it will retry the primary server again in 60 seconds.

We configured the Preferred Codec to be G.711u because we had the bandwidth available and were very pleased with its quality. (Trivia: Though G.711 is a 64Kbit codec, it actually uses about 90Kbit/sec due to overhead.) We tested a few codecs and have samples available comparing G.711 vs. G.729 and also VoIP sound quality vs. an Analog Phone.

The dial plan that ships with the PAP2T isn't particularly useful. This causes many a forum post that goes something like, "whenever I make a call, it takes ten seconds to start ringing!" Our favourite dial plan is described on the Linksys/Cisco Dial Plan Tips and Tricks page.

The SIP Port on Line 1 and Line 2 should be different. Try 5061 on Line 2. Sometimes it will work if they are both the same but there are certain situations when it will not, so we just change the Line 2 SIP Port to something unique as a matter of course.

Other Stuff

We called our internet provider one day to have them make a change on our account. We used the VoIP line, not thinking that in order to make the change, they would need to reboot our modem. Which they did. Which caused every device on the floor to lose its internet connection. But when the modem came back up, our call was still connected, and we finished the conversation. Colour us impressed.

The technique for setting up Visual Call Waiting is somewhat involved. Here's how to do it: On the Line tab, be sure that "Call Waiting Serv" is set to "yes". Next, go to the Regional tab. You need to set up four activation codes. If they're already set up, then that's fine, just make a note of them. If there is no code listed, make one up (that is not already in use on that page) and type it in. The four features that require activation codes are: "CW Act Code", "CW Deact Code", "CWCID Act Code", and finally "CWCID Deact Code". Note that these codes must all be different. We used *56, *57, *58, and *59. It doesn't matter what you use as long as you remember it, and as long as the code is not already in use for some other feature. Save your changes and wait for the device to restart. Pick up your telephone and dial your Call Waiting Activation Code. Wait for the dial tone and then dial your Call Waiting Caller ID Activation Code. Visual Call Waiting is now ready for use.

So far, we've only found a few features that this device lacks, although one really can't complain when considering the price of the PAP2T. It can't sustain more than one G.729 conversation at one time. But, since we use better quality G.711, (and recommend you do too) that isn't a problem for us. The PAP2T also does not support T.38 for faxing, though faxing may be done over G.711 if one's internet connection is very stable. Note that there are a great deal of references online that say that the PAP2T can in fact sustain two G.729 conversations, and supports T.38. We have no idea where this information came from; we only know that both of ours definitely cannot.

The other feature that this device lacks is the ability to use a backup set of SIP credentials. It would be great to be able to automatically fail over to another provider if one was unreachable. We can fail over to another server but we do not know of any way of using a different username/password for it.

This is our favourite ATA. We like it even better than other Linksys models that have routers included. We find the performance of these routers to be sub-par. Besides, an ATA such as the PAP2T should work perfectly fine behind a (decent) router without even any port forwarding, as long as your provider is NAT-aware. The only other ATA we might consider is the SPA2102 if you require T.38 support.

Happy VoIPing!

OV2Tools not working? Let us explain three confusing things.

Mango — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 22:27:22 +0000

Mrs. Mango and I have a diesel Smart car, which I just absolutely love. He holds a surprisingly large amount of cargo (such as enough equipment for a two-camera video shoot along with the operators), he's all kinds of fun to drive, and as a bonus he's cheaper than the bus. We've even named him. Affection aside, I made a Google map with locations of all the Diesel Stations in Vancouver, BC that I could find. This of course required going to the computer and looking up the map any time we needed gas in an unfamiliar area. So when I got a TomTom GO720 GPS, I thought it would be a grand idea to create a POI list of the Google map.

As it turned out, this was VERY much easier said than done.

TomTom has released set of tools called OV2Tools. These tools convert to and from ASCII and the TomTom OV2 format. At first glance, these tools look easy enough to use. Of course, I've long since learned that software with crucial design flaws seems to magnet itself to me.

Let's use the coordinates (49.26386, -123.15296) as an example. If you enter this into Google Maps, you'll come up with the Shell station at Broadway & Arbutus.

You can't actually enter a minus sign into the TomTom, and the TomTom doesn't display it when you're browsing its map. So already we have the issue that if we got these coordinates from Google and tried to plug them into TomTom, it just plain wouldn't work, and if we got coordinates from the TomTom and plugged them into Google, sans minus sign, we'd end up in northern China. But here's the first confusing thing. When you're creating your text file for OV2Tools to read, you do want to use the minus sign, à la Google.

Here's the second confusing thing, which is not only confusing, but I think royally insane. The text file doesn't go Latitude, Longitude, like every other set of coordinates ever written, including those displayed on the TomTom itself. It's backwards. It goes Longitude, Latitude. Though the instructions that come with OV2Tools mention this, the mention was insignificant enough that I missed it. And the only error that the program gave me said "Invalid coordinates", but it didn't specify anything further so I had no idea exactly what was invalid.

Here's the third confusing thing. You must have a blank line at the end of your ASCII file. This one was NOT covered in the instructions.

Here's the working files for TomTom POI list of Diesel Stations in Vancouver. It includes the OV2 file, the ASC file that I made it with, and the little icon.