A few years ago when first travelling overseas I spent $10 on a SIP-to-landline calling service, Diamondcard, that would allow me to use Ekiga on my laptop to make phone calls while in the UK to the US. It works well, and it’s cheap.
Nowadays I have a T-Mobile G1. Using Sipdroid and any available data connection, I can now make calls on Diamondcard from my phone.
How to:
- Buy a Diamondcard account. Yes, click the giant red SIGNUP NOW link. Put ten bucks into it. You’ll end up with two distinct pieces of authentication:
- Website login username & password: these aren’t used to connect to the SIP server.
- Account ID (mine’s five digits) and PIN number (mine’s 12 digits). These are for SIP authentication.
- Download and install Sipdroid. I recommend grabbing the version off the site as it supports connections over 3G, which is not available in the market edition.
- In Sipdroid go to Menu -> Settings -> SIP Account Settings
- Authorization Username: <your Account ID>
- Password: PIN number
- Server: sip.diamondcard.us
- Be sure the protocol is set to UDP
- You should see the green circle of happiness in the notifications bar (pictured above). If you see yellow or red, it’s failing to connect or authenticate.
- Make a test call. Dial *43 for the standard Asterisk echo test. Sipdroid shows latency and loss stats on screen, watch them. I recommend staying on the echo test for a few minutes to see how stable your connection is.
- Call people! I’m pretty sure you’ll need to be explicit about country codes so be sure to prefix numbers appropriately, such as +1 800-555-0123 or +44 20 7946 0123.
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I’ve recently made the jump to the latest ‘n greatest desktop, GNOME 2.22. Altogether I’m quite happy with the software. Not so happy with all the Gentoo bugs. But that’s another story.
One of my favorite bugs is the crashes that Xorg keeps causing, which has made my computing experience similarly enjoyable to Windows 95 where the computer is no longer logical, and likes to crash in a multitude of ways with no warning.
However onto the subject: Evolution’s new crash detection feature. I won’t debate the merit of this feature. Just the dialog box that I had to squint at over morning tea for a whole minute before I understood what the hell it’s prompting me for:
I get what this feature exists for. They’re worried that certain types of emails are crashing Evolution upon viewing, so we have a feature to disable the preview pane in the rare case that this is the issue. I suppose. I’ve personally never once had this issue. But what the hell. I’ll play along.
I’m annoyed by this dialog. When my software makes me think, it makes me unhappy. I don’t like to think:
- I don’t use the preview pane. Why am I seeing this dialog? There’s nothing to disable!
- “…appears to have exited unexpectedly…” — how the hell else would Evolution’s data files be in a state indicating crash? Be assertive in your dialog messages, as your users appreciate it! This should read “Evolution exited unexpectedly the last time it was run.”
- The text seems to indicate that “all preview panes will be hidden.” This tells me that the software will do what it says. But what options am I given? An Ignore and a Recover option. At this point in reading the dialog, I wasn’t expecting to be asked a question. I can make some assumptions about what these buttons do…but…what? I had to ponder about what button to push for a whole (admittedly sleepy) minute.
Bug 530345 filed. Hopefully not too grumpy in my bug report, I really do want this to get fixed. But it made me think so early in the morning so I’m allowed to be grumpy, right?