Month: February 2017

When I heard about the Enhanced Voice Service (EVS) codec for the first time a couple of years ago I was a bit skeptical. After all, the AMR-Wideband Codec just went live in a number of networks back then and its sound quality compared to the traditional AMR-Narrowband was just stunning. So I thought that EVS could not raise the bar by much. In the meantime a number of network operators have launched EVS in their VoLTE networks and when I recently made my first EVS end-to-end call I was stunned at how much better it was even compared to a good AMR-Wideband call.

Continue reading EVS Speech Codec Experience In The Wild – Forget AMR-WB…

Back in 2013 I discovered SqueezePlug and used a Raspberry Pi to stream music from an online service to my 25 year old Hifi. It worked great at the time on a Pi-1 for a long time until the SD card gave out. Unfortunately time had moved on and I couldn’t get the latest software version run smoothly on a Pi-1. Yes, I could have replaced it for a faster model. However there were other things that needed more attention so I never got around to it. Fast forward a year to the present and I was still stuck with no audio streaming to the Hifi when a friend told me about Volumio by Michelangelo Guarise and how well it ran on his Raspberry Pi 1 connected to his Wifi. Easy to install and easy to use, just flash the image to an SD card, he said, and you are good to go. Could it really be that easy?

Continue reading Volumio Re-Connects my Hifi to the Internet

When it comes to SIP, getting things to work is usually not straight forward. The more I was surprised when I recently wanted to connect a SIP software client running on Linux to my fixed line network operator’s IMS system.

Continue reading Using a SIP Softphone With Your Operator’s Fixed Line IMS

Reading stock exchange IPO prospectuses is probably not the first thing that comes to your mind when you want to learn something about computing history. This article by Hansen Hsu recently published on the blog of the Computer History Museum will convince you otherwise! In his article, Hansen discusses how NeXT, the company founded by Steve Jobs after he was ousted from Apple in the mid-1980s helped to shape the transition from a static to a dynamic web. His research is based on a draft S-1 filing for a potential NeXT IPO which was recently donated to the museum.

Continue reading NeXT, Steve Jobs and the History of the Dynamic Web

When I’m using the command line on Ubuntu it’s often for very repetitive tasks for which I would have typed in the same endless command a thousand times if it weren’t for the CTRL-R search function that let’s me execute commands from the history list quickly by typing a part of it. There is one tiny drawback, however. There are some commands which are a subset of others, such as logging into a server via ssh to get a shell or to automatically execute a job on the same serer. Here’s an example:

ssh martin@xyz.com 

ssh martin@xyz.com '/home/martin/xyz.sh'

Both commands are identical at the beginning so as a consequence I sometimes have to type in CTRL-R a number of times before I get to the shorter one. There must be a better way to do this! And indeed there is as a colleague of mine recently showed me.

Continue reading Linux: Adding Your Own Bash Shortcut Functions

Back in 2014 I had a post on how to cross compile tcpdump for Android to record all network traffic from cellular and Wifi into files for later analysis for Wireshark. I’ve known for a while that it’s also possible to use adb and tcpdump to pipe all network traffic from the smartphone over USB to Wireshark running on a PC for real time tracing. I didn’t really follow up on this since then because most dumping data into a file on the device and later transferring it to the PC was good enough for me. Recently, however, a more real time approach was required and I was actually quite surprised how easy it is to set this up once tcpdump is on the device.

Continue reading ADB and tcpdump on Android for Live Wireshark Tracing

Back in 2014 I came up with a solution to share a single hotel Wi-Fi connection to all devices I have with me and so so in a secure way with a built in VPN tunnel. Over the years the project has evolved a bit and I’m happy to report that with input from echaritos on Github the solution now also supports the Raspberry Pi 3 that has a built-in Wi-Fi interface.

Continue reading The Secure Hotel Wi-Fi Sharing Pi Solution Now Supports the Raspberry Pi 3

Earlier this week, the EU parliament reported that they have reached an agreement with the European council on the final piece of the puzzle for the abolishment of roaming charges in the EU by mid-June this year: Wholesale prices. This is good news and it’s interesting to take a closer look on the compromise that was reached.

Continue reading EU Roaming – The Final Word On Wholesale Caps?

One big advantage of ‘alternative’ voice solutions such as Skype and many others is the use of much better voice codecs that make a huge difference in practice. Many mobile network operator voice systems have been upgraded over the years to support Wideband-AMR. In practice I get a lot of WB-AMR calls while people use the same mobile network as I do. The rate of adaption is quite good as people quite frequently get themselves new devices that support the feature. The fun stops, however, as soon as I call someone on another network. For years, nobody thought it a priority to add gateways that support wideband codecs. A bit of a shame.

Many fixed line phone connections have also been converted to IP over the years and usually also support a wideband codec. The problem here is that in order to enjoy the speech quality of a wideband codec, not only the line but also the fixed line phone has to be upgraded.

Continue reading The Uptake of Wideband Speech Codecs in Fixed Line Networks Is… Glacial