Ward Mundy s Technobabblelog
As you might imagine, we spend an inordinate amount of time wrestling with current cellphone offerings to find the best and the least costly options for the Nerd Vittles Fan Club. Today we ll tackle a new wrinkle that should be especially enticing for those that frequently travel to a variety of locations in the United States with dramatically different cellular connectivity metrics. For example,…
Today marks the one-week anniversary of Debian "trixie" 13.5 bringing critical security patches and some minor stability updates to this new operating system. It also addresses a major Linux kernel privilege escalation flaw (CVE-2026-46333) affecting default installs of Debian 13 as well as critical kernel patches. Debian 13 "trixie" will be supported for 5 years with three years of full, standard…
What a difference a couple decades make from the original iPod to today s Digital Audio Players. What was once a personal MP3 player is now a full-fledged Android device with functionality that was never once envisioned. Imagine a device for $50 that can not only play your tunes in virtually any format but can also stream music, audio, and video from all of the popular streaming services including…
Truth be told, our family is pretty much always on the go. I-95 and I-26 are our constant companions. So it s no secret that internet connectivity is important to us. While traveling, my wife does volunteer work with a non-profit organization that requires her to work in the car while I chauffeur. And, when we arrive at our favorite destinations in three different states, we need reliable internet…
In our previous article, we sang the praises of FusionPBX as the terrific GUI that was always missing from FreeSWITCH. Little did we know that a better mousetrap was hiding just behind the curtain. And today we introduce the third layer to our 3-Layer Cake, FS PBX. Some might call it a refinement of FusionPBX. We think it s more of an enhanced feature set of the already rich offerings in…
It s been almost seven years since we first looked at FusionPBX and FreeSwitch. So we ve spent the last couple months taking a fresh look at the platform and WOW! What a difference seven years make. We will hasten to add that FusionPBX is not a platform for folks that are new to the VoIP world or networking. For those users, the various flavors of Incredible PBX including the latest Incredible PBX…
We re two weeks late, but here s a belated Happy New Year 2025 with an all-new Incredible PBX release. And we re two days early celebrating the 20th birthday of Nerd Vittles. The good news is the hits keep coming thanks again to the yeoman s work of Joe McConnaughey, aka @kenn10. The new Incredible PBX 2025 offering incorporates the latest releases of Asterisk and FreePBX . Better yet, it offers a…
In case you missed it, Broadcom purchased VMware from Dell in late 2023 for $61 billion. While pricing for commercial licenses went up, the good news for hobbyists is that Broadcom immediately rebranded VMware Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro for Macs as free offerings for personal use. While open source virtual machine platforms have dominated the marketplace over the past few years, if you fall…
We ve put this Electric Vehicle Guide together for those just getting their feet wet in the EV world. But we think you ll find a few golden nuggets even if you re a die hard EV owner like us. Our EV adventure began in 2016 with the purchase of a Tesla Model S with Full Self-Driving (FSD) after Elon Musk s video was released showing his Tesla driving him to work hands-free and dropping him off at…
If you ve been searching for a free, open source provisioning system for your SIP telephones and you re using Incredible PBX 2027 or other FreePBX 16 platforms, your prayers have been answered thanks to the hard work of Bill Simon. What this buys you (for free) is a quick way to configure SIP devices from most of the major players shown above including Aastra, AudioCodes, Cisco, Linksys, CloudTC,…
For those with an existing virtual machine platform either at home or at the office, today is your lucky day. We have an Incredible PBX image for VirtualBox, VMware, Proxmox, Windows WSL, Mac UTM, and Linux Containers LXC that will have an Asterisk PBX with FreePBX up and running in less than 5 minutes. If you ve ever wanted to kick the tires on a fully-loaded, secure PBX that offers virtually…
In our last post, we catalogued the various ways to deploy an Asterisk PBX using existing Windows, Mac, or Linux desktop hardware. But that solution isn t ideal for everyone especially if you re looking for a cloud-based platform that provides redundancy and backups. So today we ll introduce some cloud platform Asterisk solutions, at least one of which can be deployed in under five minutes. Let s…
To say the New Year is ushering in a scaled back constituency for self-managed telephony systems would be an understatement. Much of this migration from Asterisk can be traced directly to the proliferation of cell phones coupled with the expansion of Zoom and Microsoft Teams deployments thanks to the COVID nightmare. Despite Sangoma s best efforts to commercialize Asterisk and FreePBX , we think…
If you want to continue to use SMS and MMS messaging on your VoIP platform, then today s navigation guide is worth a careful read. Suffice it to say, this is what happens when the feds shirk their responsibilities and leave it to the foxes to guard the chicken coop. The Golden Rule with all oligopolies is that he who has the gold makes the rules. And, make no mistake, there are stringent new rules…
Unless you ve been sleeping under a rock, you already know that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform every aspect of our lives. The reasons are fairly obvious. AI can process and analyze massive amounts of data in seconds that humans could spend months and years collecting. AI is being used to develop new drugs and treatments, diagnose diseases, and provide personalized care…
We ve been raving about Zorin OS 16 last month as the best desktop operating system available. And today we combine it with a $500 MiniPC to provide not one, but three, virtualization platforms with a single machine. You get LXC Linux Containers, VirtualBox, and the Windows 11 WSL platform all rolled into one dual-boot desktop PC. On the Linux side with Zorin OS 16, you can run multiple LXC…
As you may know, the introduction of Rocky 8, Debian 11, Ubuntu 22.04, and PHP 7.4 blew our HylaFax/AvantFax/IAXmodem faxing solution out of the water leaving all of the Incredible PBX 2027 builds with no fax capabilities. With some tips from our long-time contributor, Bill Simon, we are happy to report that an alternative solution is now available. It now provides BOTH incoming and outgoing fax…
In these inflationary times, it s always refreshing to find a technology solution that has actually decreased in price. To combat spam, hosting providers including Comcast and Spectrum have made it next to impossible to deploy a downstream mail server. So a relay hosting solution has become a must-have for VoIP server platforms including Incredible PBX. We re thrilled to introduce MXroute s $129…
If you re a user of Asterisk and FreePBX , the DEFCON 31 Conference in Las Vegas did not disappoint this year. It exposed not one but three critical, unpatched vulnerabilities in affected FreePBX-based platforms that can compromise your servers in under a minute. I would hasten to add that all of these vulnerabilities were disclosed to Sangoma months ago and remain unaddressed for months. What…
We introduced Zorin OS in our recent review of the latest Acer Aspire 5 notebook PC. If you ve never heard of Zorin, it s probably the best desktop operating system available. While it is Linux-based, it can look like any desktop you re already familiar with including Windows 11 and even a Mac if you spring for the $39 Pro version. It can be installed on as many PCs as you personally own, and…
If you re new to the VoIP world and want to kick the tires to see what you re missing, then today s one minute setup is for you. You can purchase a $1 a month phone number in your choice of area codes from CallCentric. Setup instructions here. If you decide VoIP is not for you, you don t have to buy anything else ever. And you can use almost any desktop computer you already own to bring up the…
We review lots of hardware and numerous operating systems, but none come close to this steal from Amazon for under $500. The Acer Aspire 5 comes in many flavors at many price points. But, if loads of RAM (20GB) and a huge storage capacity (1TB NVMe SSD) top your list of must-haves, nothing we ve found can touch this deal. The rest of its pedigree is equally impressive: a Ryzen 3 3350U 4-core…
As continued use of FreePBX becomes more and more precarious because of deprecated components and looming incompatibility with Asterisk 21, the appeal of 3CX and VitalPBX as a VoIP platform becomes increasingly compelling. Whether you re a home user, a small business, or a call center, VitalPBX provides a solution to meet your requirements. To make the transition a bit less painful, today we…
We ve been a diehard audiophile beginning with our in-person autograph from Elvis on a Sunday afternoon while he was playing touch football in the vacant lot beside his mother s home in Memphis. My first serious setup was a law school graduation present that included a McIntosh amp, preamp, and tuner with Bozak Concert Grand speakers in the early 70 s. From there we added Revox, Tandberg, and…