The Basics

The idea about Google Voice (formerly GrandCentral, which Google acquired) is this: lots of us have more than one phone, and it would be nice to have a single number to give out that will reach us on any of these phones.

So, when you sign up for Google Voice (I’ll call it GV for the rest of the article), you pick a new phone number. Then, you tell GV about your other phones. Whenever someone calls your GV number, all the phones you’ve associated with that number will ring. When you pick up at a given phone, you can talk.

As somewhat of a side benefit, you can place long distance calls to anywhere in the continental USA for free via GV, as well as call internationally for rather competitive rates.

This sounded like a great idea to me. I have a continuing problem with this. I have a cell phone, work phone, and home phone. My cell phone gets poor reception both at work and at home. Also, at home, I may leave it in the bedroom but spend most of the day downstairs, and not even hear it.

But a lot of people are confused by this. They call the cell phone only, assuming that it will reach me wherever I am. Sometimes no amount of saying “call work or home first” seems to get through, or if they do call one of those, they only leave a voicemail on the cell, which is just as bad.

So the promise of Google Voice seemed very helpful.

Voicemail

GV, of course, has to centralize your voice mail as well. When someone is transferred to your GV voice mail box, GV will record a message like usual. It has a “transcription” feature which performs speech recognition and thus presents the message in both voice and text form in various places. General word is that the transcription ranges from moderately successful to mostly useless; I haven’t had enough experience yet to weigh in.

In any case, you can get your GV voice mail in a number of places: from any telephone in a standard manner, on the website, or my email. GV will email you the transcription of the message along with a link to the audio file, if you wish. It can also send an SMS to your cellphone when you’ve been left a new voicemail at GV. In this manner, GV voice mail can be almost as tightly integrated with your mobile phone as its built-in voice mail.

Call Screening

If call screening is enabled, the first time someone from a given phone number calls you, GV asks them for their name. Then it rings you, and plays the name when you pick up, giving you the opportunity to accept or reject the call. It also remembers the name given the first time someone calls you, and never asks them for it again as long as they call from the same number.

You can turn call screening on for everyone, off for everyone, or on only for people that don’t present valid caller ID.

There are some big caveats with call screening though; I’ll mention them below.

Call Presentation

By default, when someone calls your GV number, GV presents the original caller ID to each phone. When you answer the call, you aren’t immediately connected to the person. Rather, GV plays their name (if call screening is on), then gives you a menu: press 1 to accept, 2 to send straight to voicemail, 3 to send to voicemail while you listen, and 4 to accept and record the call. (If you pick #4, both parties are informed that the call is being recorded.)

This serves both a practical and a functional purpose. Functionally, it gives you some nice options for picking up a call and restores the old answering machine feature of listening to someone as they leave a message.

Practically, it gives GV affirmation that it was a human that picked up, and not the phone’s voice mail.

You can disable call presentation for all callers, for only certain callers, or for only certain devices. However, if you do so, you run the risk that the voice mail on the device, rather than the GV voice mail, may answer.

Phones and Scheduling

You can associate as many phones as you like with your GV account. You can tell GV when to ring the phones. So, for instance, it won’t bother ringing your home phone when you’re at work. A “simple” schedule just has three options: always ring this phone, ring it only on weekends, or only on weekdays.

You can set up “custom” schedules. This lets you give specific time ranges to accept calls on weekdays or weekends. But you can’t set up, say, one schedule for Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and another for Tuesdays and Thursdays. Overall, it’s fine for me, but I can imagine that it would be rather frustrating for people that work nontraditional schedules.

You can temporarily disable receiving calls on a given device, or add a new device temporarily, but you can’t temporarily override the schedule and force a device to receive calls.

Adding a new device temporarily is done from a phone. It’s useful, for instance, if you’re traveling and want to receive calls at your hotel phone.

All other changes to these settings can only be made over the Internet.

VOIP

This may be their biggest missed opportunity for right now. The only VOIP support in GV is the ability to receive GV calls with a free Gizmo5 account. You can then associate devices to your Gizmo5 VOIP “number” with SIP. So, with GV, you can receive calls on any standard SIP device.

Unfortunately, you can’t call in to GV via SIP, so if you wanted to check your voicemail from Gizmo5, you’d have to pay long-distance to Gizmo to do so.

It seems to me that it would be cheaper for Google to let me dial in to GV via SIP than to have to accept those calls via POTS.

Problems with GV

These mostly fall into the category of “obvious features that aren’t there yet”. GV is still a very new service, so I’ll cut them some slack right now. Anyhow, here are some things I’ve noticed:

Once you’ve signed up for GV, you can’t change your GV number, ever. So if you move and want a local number in your new area, you’re out of luck. You’d have to create a new Google account, which could lead to maddening amounts of logging out and back in if you use other Google services such as Gmail on the account you registered GV to in the first place.

Moreover, you can only assign one GV number to an account. So, in our case, my wife and I would have to have separate Google accounts if we each got a GV number, even though many of our contacts are the same, and we share a home phone number.

Call screening is horribly broken for a common case: callers from a corporate PBX. Many corporations present the same caller ID for any of hundreds or thousands of internal phones. The first person from that company that calls you will record a name, and from then on, you’ll hear that name announced even for the dozens or hundreds of people at that company that may call you. There is no way to override this, tell it to forget the name, or any such thing. Even if you disable call screening for unblocked numbers, it STILL announces the name it first recorded. Jarring and annoying.

You can’t port an existing number to GV, though there is some indication you may be able to do so in the future.

GV won’t attach an audio recording of a message to an email; you just get a link to the audio recording in the email, so you can’t listen to your messages when you’re offline.

Conclusion

Overall, an interesting and useful service — I plan to try it out some more. But it obviously, to me anyhow, isn’t “finished” yet.

symphony beethoven loud choir german

I can’t figure out how to Google for this sort of feature because, well, the word “tag” is already taken for something else in the context of music.

I believe Amarok offers it, a bit, but Amarok has too many other serious flaws for me to be able to consider it.

Any ideas?

He really likes our digital piano (an oldish 88-key Roland model, complete with integrated floppy drive). He likes playing it a bit, but he likes experimenting with it more. It has some features where it can generate a beat or an accompanying tune in various keys, which he has throughly figured out. He also knows about the power switch, volume settings, and the like. Not bad for a 2-year-old.

The the real fun has begun since Terah got her SoundBridge Radio last week. I discovered the album 8-bit lagerfeuer (campfire), a free download on Jamendo. I played it in the kitchen on Terah’s player one evening. Jacob was doing something, and when he heard it play, he just froze. He was thrilled.

Now he’ll go over to the counter, and say “Hear 8-bit music, mom.” We’ll play it, and he’ll stand — still — listening to it, getting as close as he can. The first track is “Sad Robot”, and one of the refrains is “He’s a sad, sad robot.” The other evening, Jacob, out of the blue, said, “He a sad, sad robot, mom.”

Then I put on some orchestral music during dinner one day. One of the first albums I bought after I got a CD player was a compilation of some loud classics (Valkyries, the Anvil Chorus, 1812 Overture, etc.) Jacob loved it. His favorite part is the cymbals — every time he hears one, he’ll yell out “CRASH!” He can also usually identify violins, drums, trombone slides, and sometimes trumpets. He will request the “crash music” occasionally.

He doesn’t like quiet passages as well. At first when he heard them, he’d say, “Maybe it be louder again?” Now he knows that it WILL be louder, and he’ll comment, “It louder soon!”

The other night, we were eating dinner, talking about it. He was talking about cymbals and trombones, and I asked him what he heard now. There was a long pause, as he was picking apart a strawberry with his fingers. Then he said, “There lots of seeds in strawberry!” I guess Wagner can’t compete with dinner sometimes.

It arrived today, so here’s a first impressions review.

The Hardware

It’s very nice. A touch bigger than I expected, but still quite small. There’s a subwoofer aimed up at the back of it, which helps it produce quite rich sound. It feels solid and well-designed throughout. My only gripe is that the bundled FM antenna is a loose flimsy wire type instead of a telescoping rod type, but it plugs into a coax jack, so I figure I can replace it if I want.

Initial Setup

It was really pretty easy. Select country, timezone, wireless network, enter password. After that, it rebooted and immediately saw my Firefly server, which I had set up over the weekend. It Just Worked on the very first try. Played music like a pro. Radio works. It was great.

User Interface

They obviously put a lot of thought into it. It has selectable font sizes, to help you either see things across the room, or fit more onto the screen. It will let you browse albums, artists, streming radio stations, playlists, genres, composers, etc. from a DAAP/UPNP server. It also has a large streaming radio directory that I haven’t looked at.

The browser works pretty well, even if you have thousands of albums. The left and right arrow keys select a letter of the alphabet to skip to albums starting with that letter, and the up/down keys scroll through it. You can assign any FM or AM radio station, track, album, streaming source, playlist, or arbitrary queue of songs to one of the physical preset buttons on the unit (so far I’ve only done that with FM stations).

It syncs time over the Internet — I presume via NTP — so there is no need to ever adjust the time on the device. It has two built-in alarms, which can wake you to music or a buzzer — and will sound through the speakers even if headphones are plugged in.

The sound quality was excellent as well.

Openness and geek factors

This is amazing for a $200 appliance, and I haven’t even scratched the surface. I count no less than three ways to remotely control and interrogate the device: via telnet to port 4444, with the SoundBridge Remote Control Protocol (RCP), and via the UPNP control protocol (I forget its name). With RCP it is even possible to write clients that completely duplicate its interface. All of these, plus even the IR signaling used by its remote, are conspicuously documented on the Roku website. The users manual that comes with it even has a “Geeks — read this” section documenting port 4444.

I haven’t looked, but the firmware itself doesn’t seem to be Free Software, which is the only drawback to it.

gupnp-tools discovered the SoundBridge right off and showed the stuff I can control via UPnP/RCP.

Annoyances

There are only a few. One I already mentioned (the FM antenna). Another is that there appears to be no way to seek within a track. I don’t know if this is a limitation of UPNP/DAAP or a firmware limitation on the device. The bright/dim room light sensor also doesn’t seem to do anything. But these are pretty minor.

Conclusion

Overall, a very nice device, and well worth $200. Yes, Terah likes it too, of course! Thanks to Julien Blache and Dead Sas for recommending it to me!

Amarok

• Version 1.4 can’t sort an iPod’s library by genre. Oh, and any version less than 2.x isn’t supported upstream anymore.
• Version 2 has mysteriously lost: the ability to see an iPod’s playlists, the ability to store a playlist in an m3u file and automatically keep it up to date, the ability to sync the Amarok statistics to an iPod, and more. Reminds me of the Gnome print dialog fiasco. “We’ve removed features. It’s better! Really! Oh, and we won’t support the old version either.”
• The entire Amarok 2 interface is very slow and sluggish.

So just as I was about to post about how nicely Amarok’s playlist saving works with Firefly, here I’m instead posting how I can’t use Amarok because it can’t even do what Rhythmbox does with an iPod anymore.

Banshee

• Can’t play most of my iPod tracks due to a long-standing case sensitivity bug.
• The only player other than gtkpod that groks iPod advanced playlists.
• No way to tell it where to put tracks copied from iPod to PC.
• Strangely thinks that every track is a different album with some albums.

Listen

• Now does actually see the iPod and seems to play it well.
• When you try to copy tracks from the iPod to the PC, it appears to work and gives visual cues that it’ll work, but silently does nothing.
• Strangely thinks that every track is a different album with some albums.
• Strangely doesn’t let you sort when you’re looking at a playlist.
• Doesn’t let you set a rating.

Rhythmbox

• Doesn’t see an iPod at all if it’s in fstab.
• Won’t play much of my iPod’s music due to a long-standing case sensitivity bug (since August 2008).
• Won’t let me sort anything when viewing a playlist.

Conclusions

I’ve renamed some of the directories on my iPod so they work with Banshee and Rhythmbox. I’m going to try Banshee for awhile and see how I like it.

Nothing like that appears to exist.

So here are my reviews of some of the Linux-based music playing systems. I am not all that happy with any of them. Actually, these aren’t reviews so much as they are wishlist (or more serious) bug lists.

Amarok

Last looked at it just before KDE 4.

• Copied tracks to iPod OK, but couldn’t put them in a playlist on the iPod.
• Poor sorting of stuff on the iPod. One giant list of albums, and no sorting of the playlist.
• Did seem rather stable.
• Showed album art from local collection only — not from the iPod.
• No apparent actual syncing; just copying back and forth.

Banshee 1.4.x

• Claims to sync with the iPod, but doesn’t actually document what it does anywhere. Messed up my iPod when I tried it.
• Mysteriously can only copy tracks from PC to the iPod; can’t copy tracks from iPod to the PC.
• Rescan library wouldn’t remove missing tracks. Not sure if it did anything at all.

Listen

• Couldn’t ever get it to even see the iPod. Complex interactions with hal. Numerous bug reports with complicated workarounds — or not. Fail.

Exaile

• Bug in the box that asks where the iPod is. Couldn’t get it to see the iPod.

Rhythmbox

• Doesn’t actually delete iPod tracks. Moved them to /ipod/.Trash-1000. Caused my iPod to fill up until I noticed that.
• Doesn’t update the iTunes DB at all, rendering new tracks invisible to the iPod.

gtkpod

• The best, most fully-featured iPod support out there. Far better than iTunes even.
• Docs claim to have some sort of iPod-to-PC syncing, but it is poorly documented and appears to break if the absolute path to the music on the PC ever changes — and doesn’t support more than one PC because it writes the paths to a file on the iPod.
• No built-in player, but can send tracks to xmms, xine, audacious, or the like.

Other

I have had brief experiences with the popular proprietary software such as iTunes. The one time I tried iTunes, it ironically scrambled most of the metadata on my iPod, especially the playcounts and the data that said whether or not I had listened to the podcasts. I am none too enamored with other Windows software either, and of course all this stuff is proprietary.

So, I guess music players are like mail readers. They all suck. Some just suck a little less.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1052-the-quest-for-a-decent-music-player/feed http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1048-buying-a-soundbridge-radio http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1048-buying-a-soundbridge-radio#comments Sat, 06 Jun 2009 16:46:00 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=1048 A day or two ago, I asked for suggestions for a tabletop MP3 player. I got lots of good ideas — thanks! The two most common were the Roku SoundBridge Radio and the Nokia N800.

I’ve ordered the SoundBridgeRadio. I spent some time looking over its website, and it really impressed me for several reasons:

• It’s one all-in-one device with Wifi, FM and AM tuners, speakers, even an SD card slot and atomic clock shortwave receiver.
• It has explicit support for Linux. Roku actually sponsors the Firefly Media Server (package mt-daapd in Debian), which will serve up music to this and other devices. They also can stream from SlimServer. In general, it supports any UPnP AV server.
• They publish specs for just about everything: the TCP-based Roku Control Protocol that lets you control the SoundBridge remotely; user-editable localization files; even detailed IR specs for the remote control. The only other thing I could wish for would be the firmware on the device itself being Free.
• Their manual has a “Hey geeks, read this!” section describing telnetting to a port. People are doing some fun stuff with it.

The N800 is also a good suggestion. It has an FM tuner built-in, and of course is capable of streaming media files. I have an N810, and I just don’t think a device this size would be capable of playing loudly enough for a kitchen. So I’d have to get external speakers, and then we’re into a mess of wires and stuff — making it less portable to other rooms in the house.

One person also suggested a Chumby. It sounds like an awesome gadget, but I couldn’t find anything on their site that indicated that it could stream music from my own server. From the Internet or an iPod, yes, but not from my server.

Thanks to everyone for your ideas. I’ll post a review of the SoundBridge Radio when I get it.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1048-buying-a-soundbridge-radio/feed http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1046-looking-for-tabletop-mp3-player http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1046-looking-for-tabletop-mp3-player#comments Wed, 03 Jun 2009 23:34:07 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=1046 We’re looking for an MP3 player for our kitchen. Ideally, it would be a standalone device that can browse and play music from our server using Wifi. It should have its own speakers and a reasonably small footprint. If it has an FM tuner, that’s a plus too.

I’ve tried searching, and found things such as the Squeezebox. But ones that are decent at this task seem to be in the $200-$300 range. That’s trange, because TV devices that do this are actually cheaper!

I’ve tried Googling, and can’t seem to craft good search terms.

Any ideas?

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1046-looking-for-tabletop-mp3-player/feed http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1042-free-software-enforcing-drm http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1042-free-software-enforcing-drm#comments Sun, 31 May 2009 00:14:06 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=1042 So I just recently switched to KDE 4 (still using it with xmonad, of course) and I just now ran into my first really big annoyance.

I just downloaded a PDF, and tried to copy and paste a bit of text from it. I used the selection tool, and Okular (KDE’s document viewer) offered to speak it to me, but said “Copy forbidden by DRM.”

pdftotext was able to convert the entire file to text format in an instant.

Why are people intentionally adding code to KDE to remove my freedom? This is crazy and nuts. Nobody should be doing this, least of all in Free Software!

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1042-free-software-enforcing-drm/feed http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1034-review-in-the-beginning-was-the-command-line http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1034-review-in-the-beginning-was-the-command-line#comments Sat, 23 May 2009 03:53:21 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=1034

A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement.

- Neal Stephenson, “In The Beginning. . . was the Command Line”

What a fun read. It’s about technology, sure, but more about culture. Neal takes a good look at operating systems, why we get emotionally involved with them, and why Windows is still so popular. He does this with a grand detour to Disneyland, and a hefty dose of humor. The above quote was from near the end of the book, where he imagines hackers creating big bangs from the command line.

He starts out the book from some anecdotes from the early 1970s, when he had his first computer class in high school. His school didn’t have a computer, but they did have a teletype (the physical kind that used paper) with a modem link to some university’s system. But time on that system was so expensive that they couldn’t just dial in and run things interactively. The teletype had a paper tape device. You’d type your commands in advance, and it would punch them out on the tape. Then when you dial in, it would replay the tape at “high speed”.

Neal liked this because the stuff punched out of the tape were, actually, “bits” in both the literal and the mathematical sense. This, of course, led to a scene at the end of the schoolyear where a classmate dumped the bin of bits on the teacher, and Neal witnessed megabytes falling to the floor.

Although the book was written in 1999, and needs an update in some ways, it still speaks with a strong voice today — and is now also an interesting look at what computing was like 10 years ago.

He had an analogy of car dealerships to operating systems. Microsoft had the big shiny dealership selling station wagons. Their image was all wrapped up in people feeling good about their purchase — like they got something for their money. And he said that the Linux folks were selling tanks, illustrated with this exchange:

Hacker with bullhorn: “Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!”

Prospective station wagon buyer: “I know what you say is true…but…er…I don’t know how to maintain a tank!”

Bullhorn: “You don’t know how to maintain a station wagon either!”

Buyer: “But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music.”

Bullhorn: “But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!”

Buyer: “Stay away from my house, you freak!”

Bullhorn: “But…”

Buyer: “Can’t you see that everyone is buying station wagons?”

That doesn’t mean that Stephenson is just a Linux apologetic. He points out that the CLI has its place, and has a true love-hate relationship with the text-based config files (remember XF86Config before the days of automatic modelines? Back when you had to get out a calculator and work some things out with pencil and paper, or else risk burning out your monitor?) He points out that some people want to just have the thing work reasonably well. They don’t want control — in fact, would gladly give it up if offered something reasonably pretty and reasonably functional.

He speaks to running Linux at times:

Sometimes when you finish working with a program and shut it down, you find that it has left behind a series of mild warnings and low-grade error messages in the command-line interface window from which you launched it. As if the software were chatting to you about how it was doing the whole time you were working with it.

Even if the application is imploding like a damaged submarine, it can still usually eke out a little S.O.S. message.

Or about booting Linux the first time, and noticing all sorts of cryptic messages on the console:

This is slightly alarming the first time you see it, but completely harmless.

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. . .

Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer–i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed–emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish. For page layout and printing you can use TeX: a vast corpus of typesetting lore written in C and also available on the Net for free.

I love these vivid descriptions: programs secretly chatting with us, TeX being a “corpus of typesetting lore” rather than a program. Or how about this one: “Unix. . . is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.” Yes, my operating system is an oral history project, thankyouverymuch.

The book feels like a weird (but well-executed and well-written) cross between Douglas Adams and Cory Doctorow. Which makes is so indescribably awesome that I can’t help but ending this review with a few more quotes.

Because Linux is not commercial–because it is, in fact, free, as well as rather difficult to obtain, install, and operate–it does not have to maintain any pretensions as to its reliability. Consequently, it is much more reliable.

what really sold me on it [Debian] was its phenomenal bug database (http://www.debian.org/Bugs), which is a sort of interactive Doomsday Book of error, fallibility, and redemption.

It is simplicity itself. When had a problem with Debian in early January of 1997, I sent in a message describing the problem to submit@bugs.debian.org. My problem was promptly assigned a bug report number (#6518) and a severity level (the available choices being critical, grave, important, normal, fixed, and wishlist) and forwarded to mailing lists where Debian people hang out.

That should be our new slogan for bugs.debian.org: “Debian’s interactive Doomsday Book of error, fallibility, and redemption.”

Unix is hard to learn. The process of learning it is one of multiple small epiphanies. Typically you are just on the verge of inventing some necessary tool or utility when you realize that someone else has already invented it, and built it in, and this explains some odd file or directory or command that you have noticed but never really understood before.

I’ve been THERE countless times.

Note the obsessive use of abbreviations and avoidance of capital letters; this is a system invented by people to whom repetitive stress disorder is what black lung is to miners. Long names get worn down to three-letter nubbins, like stones smoothed by a river.

It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or “honoring diversity” or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing ) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities.

The stone tablets bearing the Ten Commandments carved in immutable stone–the original command-line interface

Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it’s explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.

Unix has always lurked provocatively in the background of the operating system wars, like the Russian Army.

Available for free online, or as a 160-page book from Amazon.

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