Category Archives: Technology

Analog Intercom/Buzzer stops working with VoIP – Future Nine [fixed]

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Quick post here regarding my Voice over IP provider, Future Nine, and the Analog Intercom/Buzzer at the front gate of my community. When someone dials-in from the main gate, I need to pick up the phone and press 9 to open it. It has not been working as of late, and the only way to circumvent the challenge was to reset the Linksys VoIP box. It would last a few minutes.

My current internet provider is AT&T U-Verse. The VoIP box is plugged directly to the U-Verse gateway.

Future Nine replied to my concerned and suggested to make these changes under the advanced tab (LAN port, default gateway IP – http://192.168.0.1/admin/advanced)

SIP Port: 15060
Proxy: incoming.future-nine.com:15060

I am currently testing the changes, and will update with results in the next few days.

Update 02/22:

The service is now working properly. It seems that AT&T blocks port 5060 for their own VoIP service.

Spotify does not play track links from Facebook [Solved]

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I never had a chance to figure out why I couldn’t play tracks  from Facebook or Spotify Play Button at home. After further research I found out that my DD-WRT flashed router had the “Deny DNS Rebinding” option enabled. Spotify needs to resolve *.spotilocal.com to 127.0.0.1.

In order to resolve it, I added this command to the DD-WRT startup options:

sed -i ‘s/stop-dns-rebind//g’ /tmp/dnsmasq.conf
killall dnsmasq
dnsmasq –conf-file=/tmp/dnsmasq.conf

Everything is good now, fortunately.

 

For the ones that think $9.99 a month is too much for Spotify

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This is an extract of one of the replies I wrote on a Techcrunch post.

I do not think $9.99 a month is ridiculous for unlimited streaming and caching of content @ 320 kbps OGG Vorbis compression. It is a heck of a deal for the quality offered and the quantity of music, including some rarities and remixes that are sold at over $1.29 per track on Amazon.

I undestand some people like to own and Spotify will not satisfy that requirement. However, it allows you to listen to all types of music, including new content that is published almost on a daily basis in high quality (that last is very important for me), and then you can decide if purchasing it for life is a good option (Amazon, GMusic, iTunes, whatever).

This is my take about purchasing music. First. Very limited content is available in loss-less format. If I am going to pay, might as well be for the best quality available. Second. You cannot resell digital content legally. You take the music with you until your next life.

I have playlists totaling over 5,000 songs in Spotify. I listen to them randomly anytime, anywhere. And continuously add new content. I would be out of my mind if I were to spend $5K in music. $9.99 a month sounds good enough. Good for 41 years worth of music service, and that is if I do not add more songs to Spotify. Unbeatable.

Convenience wins. iCloud you might say? Wrong. You can’t stream with iCloud. You need to have a local copy of the track on the device you will play back.

Comments?

Netflix on iPad/iPhone does not work when connected to a router running DD-WRT [Fix]

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I was pretty frustrated when I realized that for firing up my new iPad I needed to install iTunes to my desktop. On top of that, I needed to add a credit card number to download a free application from the App Store. I worked it around by generating a one-time number from citicards.

I decided to install Netflix and did not work, even tried resintalling and changing SSIDs. The only way to make it work was by using a backup SSID from the U-Verse router.

After researching I found out that the DNSMasq package from DD-WRT thinks that the connection from Netflix on the iPad looks like a DNS Rebinding attack.

There are a couple of workarounds:

  1. Use a different DNS server in the iPad/iPhone wireless configuration, like the one provided by OpenDNS: 208.67.222.222
  2. Add a startup rule to DD-WRT to stop DNS rebinding:
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killall dnsmasq
sed -i -e 's/^stop-dns-rebinding/#&/' /tmp/dnsmasq.conf
dnsmasq --conf-file=/tmp/dnsmasq.conf

I pursued the second workaround as it allowed me to keep the wireless connection “stock”. Netflix is now working properly on my iPad.

Stop DNS rebinding

Stop DNS rebinding