Smoke from the “Station Fire” infiltrating Las Vegas
Those pesky Californians are at it again. Now they’re invading our airspace with their smoke! And I thought they were environmentalists…
Those pesky Californians are at it again. Now they’re invading our airspace with their smoke! And I thought they were environmentalists…
Forgive the picture quality…

What’s the point of bringing a helmet if you’re not going to wear it? Read more…
The wind here in Las Vegas has been pretty strong the last couple of days. It’s often windy here (deserts are like that), but we’ve seen particularly strong gusts for the last day or two.
Besides intermittent cable TV and internet service, another (often overlooked) casualty of such winds is the wildlife. Read more…
I’ve implemented greylisting on my mail server, and I have to say that the initial impact is quite dramatic.
Greylisting is a relatively simple mechanism for defeating spam. Read more…
A friend of mine asked whether or not I could create a service like MapLoco. They log the IP addresses of your visitors and create a nifty little map showing where they come from.
I told him that as long as I could get the latitude and longitude for a given IP address, I could very likely do it. Half an hour later, I had created a simple proof of concept example. Read more…
Using the line-in port with Trixbox or PBX-in-a-Flash (PiaF)
Asterisk is a fantastic piece of software. You get world class PBX functionality for free, in a package that you can reliably run on a desktop computer.
One area that Asterisk isn’t as world class in is Music on Hold (MoH). Sure, it’s there and it works, but it starts playing a file from the beginning whenever someone is placed on hold. If you have customers who call regularly, they’re hearing the same part of the same files all the time – not ideal.
What I wanted to do was use my MP3 player as a MoH source Read more…
Each night, starting on Halloween, I’ve been taking photos of the patch of sky containing comet Holmes. I’m using the photos to create an animated GIF which shows the comet’s movement across the sky over a period of time. Read more…

DPH-541 WiFi VoIP Phone
First Impressions
My first impression of this phone was that it’s attractive looking, with a stylish cellphone style flip design. Read more…