We sell Gigaset phones, to help us sell these back in February we registered the gigaset.co.nz domain and pointed it to our website. When we started selling Gigaset phones back in 2010 we were the only ones bringing them into the country and selling them. No local support from Siemens.

In July this year the AU/NZ manager for Siemens contacted us requesting the gigaset.co.nz domain for their own use. I (Hadley) responded saying;

"I'm happy to discuss gifting the gigaset.co.nz domain to you guys for use promoting the brand in New Zealand. Perhaps we could talk about a compromise such as a preferential link on your new site back to nicegear as an online retailer of Gigaset phones."

which I thought was quite reasonable. After many email exchanges Siemens eventually came back with this document prepared by their legal team in Germany. It involves some interesting things that we would have to agree to;

• Pay for the Siemens to transfer the domain name to their name.
• Waive all sorts of legal rights.
• Not talk about the agreement during and two years after it's existence.
• Siemens could terminate the agreement whenever they wanted (and keep the domain).

As you may have gathered, we didn't agree to the terms.

Consequently Siemens lodged a claim with the Domain Name Commissioner's Disputes Resolution Service in late September. Following through that process, at their cost of $2000, an expert was appointed in late November to decide the outcome. Last week the expert made their ruling stating that the domain name should be transferred to Siemens. There's a copy of the ruling available here.

All in all it's been an interesting experience. I'm not terribly concerned that the domain was taken, I don't personally consider it an unfair registration, we registered it to help people find Gigaset phones available for sale in New Zealand, not to hurt Siemens or mislead anyone.

Our regular Courierpost driver has taken ill, as such we've had a mix of temporary drivers over the last week or so. Courierpost have been great and things have kept moving along like clockwork. Unfortunately yesterday the driver forgot to make our last pickup of the day. This means that North Island orders will be delayed one day. South Island orders have been put on same day service and should hopefully arrive on time.

Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience.

A quick post so we've got a place to point people that ask. If you ever need to reset a Yealink phone without the admin password it's actually really easy - just hold down the OK button for 10 seconds and you'll be prompted to reset and restart the phone. Done.

Realising the need to spend time with our families nicegear will be in a limited mode of operation from Friday 16th December through Monday 9th January. Last orders need to be in by 3pm on the 16th for dispatch that afternoon.

Of course we will still be taking orders but just bear in mind that there may be a delay before your order is dispatched. We will be checking emails occasionally, so if you have something urgent send an email through and we'll look at it to see what we can do.

I would like to take the time to thank all of our supportive customers over the past year, we look forward to helping you all out over the course of the next year.

Happy holidays to all from the nicegear team!

We'll be closed this Friday on the lovely date of the 11/11/11. We're off supporting "The Undie 700" - a charity scooter ride from Timaru to Nelson, raising money for men's health.

If anyone is interested in donating funds to the cause you can do so online here or drop us a note here. Any money donated will go directly to the Movember charity - and we will match it dollar for dollar.

This does mean that any orders placed after final shipping Thursday afternoon won't be shipped until Monday. Our apologies for the inconvenience but I'm sure you'll understand that it's for a good cause.

Check out what our good customer Graham has been up to with his home built CNC mill he built from various purchased from us right here. Great work Graham;

Check out this great Introduction to Arduino in the form of a Comic from Jody Culkin, click through for the full PDF.

We had a repeat performance of this post here - a failed hard drive in the server. Once again everything is back up and running like normal this morning.

Why is this important? If we are using a 200mAh CR2032 20mm coin cell battery, we have a very limited
power supply. If you use 10mA, you'll get 20hrs of use out of your project (200mAh / 10mA = 20hr). If you
manage to reduce the power a little to 100uA, you'll get (200mAh / 0.1mA = 2000hr) 83 days of use - a huge
difference! Let's see just how low the ATmega328 will go.

Check out this great tutorial from Nate at SparkFun about making an Arduino use minimal amounts of power for battery operation

Also in the comments is a link to a useful looking Arduino sleep library for those wishing to save power but not go to quite the same amount of trouble.

Basically the same post as this time last year, so I'm going to copy and paste a lot of it.

I (Hadley) am heading off to an annual conference in Australia next week. Because nicegear is a small business and I do a lot of the day to day grunt work (including packing orders for the courier), orders placed next week (22nd to 26th August) may be delayed shipping out.

Whether your order is delayed or not depends on what you're ordering and where the stock is held. We keep most of the electronics equipment here at the office, this will be delayed. Although we keep a lot of the VoIP equipment here too, we've also got alternative suppliers from whom we can ship direct - these should have little or no delay.

Drop us a line and we can give you specifics. Of course we are still open and accepting orders, emails will be answered etc. Any delayed orders will be shipped by Monday the 29th.

Please accept my apologies for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

Like many of our products, nicegear were the first to bring the Siemens Gigaset IP Phones to the market in New Zealand. With our many great supplier relationships we've been able to keep a consistent supply of stock while others have had difficulty.

Siemens are now making a late entry into the New Zealand market and will finally be officially releasing their IP products here. In the coming months there are a couple of new products being released; one a high featured all-in-one desktop phone with optional cordless handsets, and two a new high end cordless phone with more features than the current models.

The current Gigaset IP products available in New Zealand are;

• Gigaset A580IP Base Station with Cordless Handset
• Gigaset A58H Additional Cordless Handset
• Gigaset C47H Additional Cordless Handset
• Gigaset E49H Additional Cordless Handset

The two new products being released in the coming months are;

• Gigaset DX800A All-in-one
• Gigaset C610IP Base Station with Cordless Handset

Following is some details on the new products. We'll have these available for purchase on the website as soon as we can get them from the distributors.

DX800A all in one

• Multiline desktop phone: fixed, IP and ISDN line
• Large TFT colour display and exceptional HD sound
• Up to 4 parallel calls and multiple handsets – up to 6
• Three answering machines – ideal for SOHOs

The high-end hybrid desktop phone for VoIP and ISDN or fixed line calling.

The Siemens Gigaset DX800A all in one is the professional multiline desktop phone for small offices and home offices. From its comfortably modern design to its large 3.5 TFT colour display, this corded phone has executive chic and the business-like functionality to match. Being a hybrid phone means the Gigaset DX800A all in one is truly flexible and can be configured to either IP with ISDN, or IP with fixed line. Because it’s a multiline phone it can support up to 4 parallel calls and expand with multiple handsets – up to 6 in total. Managing contacts is easy with up to 1.000 vCard entries. You can synchronise with your PC to access Outlook contacts and locate details easily with auto look-up. The Gigaset DX800A all in one has best-in-class hands-free for wired or wireless hands-free talking. And what’s more, every single conversation is heard in exceptional High Definition sound quality. With its range of energy-saving features and radiation-free mode, this telephone is better for the environment. And thanks to three integrated answering machines with a combined recording time of up to 55 minutes, the Gigaset DX800A all in one is equipped to support small businesses.

With its executive features, VoIP with ISDN or fixed line and large colour display, the Gigaset DX800A all in one is ideal for small offices and home offices. This multiline desktop phone is capable of meeting the daily demands of up to four professionals.

Because the Gigaset DX800A all in one is a hybrid desktop phone, it is a completely flexible Next Generation-ready solution and a real investment for the future. When you configure this telephone you choose between VoIP and regular fixed line or VoIP and ISDN, based on the needs of your small office or home office. And as the needs of the future change, the Gigaset DX800A all-in-one can be reconfigured as required. Being a multiline telephone means it supports up to 4 calls in parallel; ideal for busy environments and if you ever need to expand your horizons with multiple handsets the Gigaset DX800A all-in-one supports up to 6.

The Gigaset DX800A all in one manages your contacts professionally. As well as providing an address book for up to 1.000 vCards, this valuable multiline desktop phone links to your Outlook contacts. When someone in your small office or home office needs to locate the details of other businesses, the Gigaset DX800A all in one saves time with access to an online net directory and Yellow Pages search. With auto look-up it’s even easier to find the details needed. The online benefits of this hybrid desktop phone do not end there; get useful Gigaset info services direct to your large colour display – RSS news feeds, a weather forecast and more. Also receive email notification, showing details of the sender, subject, time and date. And with Link2Mobile Bluetooth® technology you can make and receive mobile calls from the comfort of the Gigaset DX800A all in one, whenever it suits you.

The three separate answering machines of the Gigaset DX800A all in one, with a combined recording time of up to 55 minutes, mean your associates will never be cut short, even when leaving detailed messages. This dependable multiline desktop phone does all it can to let you know when new messages are waiting, from notification on the large TFT colour display to sending an SMS. And for the convenience of everyone that uses your small office or home office, the answering machines of the Gigaset DX800A all in one can even record calls.

Environmental efficiency.
The Gigaset DX800A all in one has an energy-saving power supply, meaning it consumes less electricity saving you money and helping the environment. For further energy savings, a time controlled night mode switches off the display when not in use. When no cordless handsets are registered to the base station the DECT power is switched off completely. When handsets are registered, the transmitting power to the base station is variably reduced depending on their distance apart. You can also reduce the transmitting power by 80% by selecting the ECO Mode. Furthermore, radiation-free ECO Mode Plus turns off the transmitting power when the handset is in standby. Rely on the Gigaset DX800A all in one for professional energy-efficiency.

With its smart design, HD sound and flexible configuration – VoIP with ISDN or fixed line – the Gigaset DX800A all in one is a real investment for the future and the savvy choice for your professional small office or home office.

C610 IP

Smart communication

• VoIP and landline phone for up to 3 parallel calls
• HD sound (HDSP) for VoIP calls
• Access to your Email, Facebook, Twitter, and eBay accounts
• energy-saving ECO DECT

The internet and landline phone that brings communication to new heights with online features, parallel calls, and exceptional sound.

On the Gigaset C610 IP, you enjoy the advantages of choosing either internet or landline calls to suit your needs. Up to 3 online or landline calls can be made in parallel, giving you great talking flexibility. All VoIP calls reach you in exceptional HD sound with HDSP technology. Thanks to the internet connection, you can also access online information via the Gigaset C610 IP. And energy-saving ECO DECT technology makes this state-of-the-art internet phone an environmentally friendly choice in telephony. If you are looking for an elegant internet and landline phone, the Gigaset C610 IP is your solution.

The benefits of VoIP
The ability to make up to 3 parallel calls via the internet or landline makes the Gigaset C610 IP a truly exceptional communication solution. You can switch between internet and landline calls with ease. All internet calls are delivered in HDSP for exceptional HD sound – even when you talk in hands-free mode. Another major benefit of VoIP calling: telephone for free, worldwide, when you call other Gigaset VoIP phones via Gigaset.net. These VoIP bonuses and more on the Gigaset C610 IP bring your calling to a new level.

Smart online convenience
With the Gigaset C610 IP, you enjoy many intelligent online tools that truly bring telephony to a new level. An entire spectrum of online information are at your fingertips: news, weather, and horoscope are updated daily, and you can consult the translator, biorhythm checker, encyclopedia, unit converter in just a few button clicks. And if you own an account on eBay® , Facebook® or Twitter®, you can get instant notifications in your bids, friends and tweets®. The email viewer lets you check the latest status of your inbox without having to turn on your PC. Use the Gigaset C610 IP’s online phonebook to look up people and businesses (white and yellow pages).

more informations
User-friendly extras
Designed with an elegant look and for intuitive use, the Gigaset C610 IP provides state-of-the-art materials and features. Its large, high-resolution colour display makes reading and navigating the handset’s menu completely trouble-free and easy on your eyes. The address book holds up to 150 entries with VIP groups, so you can keep your favourite contacts and contacts groups within quick reach on the Gigaset C610 IP.

ECO DECT: Pure energy savings and radiation-free
The energy-saving power supply of the Gigaset C610 IP consumes less electricity, so it’s kinder to the environment, and kinder to your wallet. Like all Gigaset cordless phones, it variably reduces the transmitting power from the handset to base station depending on their distance apart. You can also reduce the transmitting power of the Gigaset C610 IP’s base station by 80% simply by selecting the ECO Mode. Furthermore, radiation-free ECO Mode Plus turns off the transmitting power when the phone is in standby.

The Gigaset C610 IP is the VoIP and landline phone for smart communication with online conveniences and parallel calls.

We were recently signed up with a third party security auditing company called Trustwave as part of the merchant agreement with our bank for credit card processing. Their job is to test for PCI-DSS compliance which is basically security regarding credit card processing.

Even though we don't store any credit card details, we still need to comply with these standards as part of our agreement with the bank which allows us to accept credit cards. This is because the card details are entered on our e-commerce site and transmitted to our processing gateway.

As well as a lengthy questionnaire about security practices, part of the process is a vulnerability scan on our website. Being the mostly technical group that our customers are, I thought that some of you may be interested in seeing the details of the report.

You can find the PDF Report on our site here.

There are a few information items (not errors or warnings, just informative) in the report regarding the website's SSL certificate. This appears to be because Trustwave's list of trusted certificate signing authorities isn't as complete as those in common browsers and operating systems.

Apart from the SSL information items, and a couple of other unimportant things the report is all clear which means the site responded well (as it should) to the security scan. This isn't a big surprise here as we already run security scans on the website ourselves as part of our general development practice. One useful thing that did come from the scan was we discovered that the 404 error page wasn't being cached as it should causing high load under an aggressive scan. This has now been taken care of and will make the site more responsive in these circumstances.

If anyone has any questions or comments please feel free to comment below or contact us directly.

The SparkFun SM5100B Arduino GSM Shield is a really neat device. Unfortunately there's not a whole heap of good documentation around, more unfortunately a lot of the forum blog posts discussing it are incomplete or actually wrong. There's a bit around on SMS functionality but when it comes to GPRS support things are even worse.

Recently John Boxall from tronixstuff has done a couple of getting started tutorials for the SM5100B which contain some of the best documentation around. He hasn't (yet?) covered GPRS though.

I (Hadley) have recently been trying to help a customer work through some issues with GPRS on the SM5100B Shield and made some time after hours to look into it. I thought I'd post my findings hopefully to the benefit of others.

I'm not going to provide code at this stage as I don't have a complete working solution, just a bunch of rough hacked together debugging code to see why things aren't working. Instead I'm going to post a check list of things that you might want to look out for. It is an area (one of many) that I'm personally interested in so perhaps I'll have time to write some more code in the future, if so I'll post an update.

So without further ado, a list of things to watch out for when doing GPRS on the SM5100B GSM Shield;

• It's been said before but it needs saying again. Make sure you have enough power! You might get away with sending an SMS with a 1A supply or even USB, but doing GPRS, you'll need at least 2A. I used a 2A supply and it wasn't enough, 2.5A did it. If you don't have enough power your module will randomly reset itself you'll see various +SIND: lines scroll past and things won't work. You need to plug the power supply into a pin on the shield, either VIN if it's 12V or the 5V pin if it's a regulated 5V supply.
• You need to use a hardware UART, unfortunate but true. NewSoftSerial doesn't cut it for receiving data base enough from the SM5100B module. It seems to work fine for reading responses from AT commands so you can use it for SMS etc. When reading the response from a network socket you'll get dropped characters and missing data. Because of this, you'll either need an Arduino Mega with it's extra UARTs, or use the single UART on an Uno and have difficulty uploading code and debugging.
• Leading on from the last point, you need to increase the SM5100B UART speed from 9600 to 115200. I haven't tried speeds in between but this is what I found worked. The SM5100B module spits out data quickly, if you don't keep up it will drop it and then it's gone. Even with a hardware UART I had to up the speed to keep up. The symptom of this is making an HTTP GET request and receiving only part of the response back from the server.
• The final note on the same subject, don't mess around when data is available from the socket. If there's data there start reading it off straight away, if not you'll run into the same issue with buffers.
• When sending data with AT+SDATASEND, you need to encode the data to HEX and set the correct length - of the HEX encoded data.
• When you send CTRL-Z, don't use Serial.println() - this will send extra characters such as a line feed which will confuse the module. If you can only do something once, such as send an SMS, open a socket etc. and after that continuously get "+CME ERROR: 4" this is probably the problem. Use "Serial.print(26, BYTE);" rather than println.

So that's my list of things I learnt so far while debugging GPRS on the SM5100B. There's certainly more to learn, as I said I haven't got a complete working sketch yet. If you've got any questions or comments please feel free to say so below.

As I previously posted, World IPv6 Day is today, right now, and running until midday tomorrow NZST. We've now enabled IPv6 access on the main nicegear.co.nz domain (as well as the existing IPv6 only ipv6.nicegear.co.nz. If your ISP provides IPv6 access for you then you will automatically be using IPv6 to access the website, if they don't then you should automatically fall back to the normal IPv4 site.

In some small circumstances your ISP or your hardware will not work at all, that means you won't be reading this. You also won't be able to reach Google today to see what's wrong. You should call your ISP and complain or replace the equipment that isn't ready for IPv6.

Google in the last few days released the +1 Button for general website use. After neglecting our social toolbox for a couple of years we've just got with the program and decided to add a few of these tools to our product pages.

We've now got the Google +1 button, the Facebook Like button, the good old del.icio.us social bookmark button and a Tweet button for sharing on Twitter. You'll find the little buttons down the left hand side of the product pages, below the price and other details. If there are any other services you use and would like to see on the site just let us know in the comments below.

As a little bonus for reading this short post you might want to check out the snom 320 which we've got on special today only for $50 off.

You may have noticed the website running a little slowly over the past few weeks with some "Gateway Timeout" HTTP errors. The 15 minutes downtime at 6pm this evening should have solved that issue.

nicegear runs on a KVM virtual machine (VM) on a dedicated server running Ubuntu which we lease from SiteHost here in New Zealand. On the host server we were seeing load averages spike from 5 to 25 while on the VM the load was running normally at less than 1. At first I thought the reason for the slow down was just high load from increased traffic to nicegear and other websites running on other VMs. This wasn't correct.

After some investigation it turns out that one of the disks in the main RAID volume has been failing. Normally you would see errors from either S.M.A.R.T. or other RAID monitoring services when you have a disk failing, in this instance I didn't spot the issue quickly as there were no errors, just very average write performance which was partially masked by the RAID system.

After some serious debugging I took the step of failing the disk out of the main array and falling back to a single disk. Immediately after doing this the load average on the bare metal host dropped from 15 down underneath 0.5 - which for a quad core system is very healthy.

SiteHost were kind enough to head down to the data centre this evening and replace the dodgy drive. The data is re-syncing across to the new drive at the moment and everything is back running at a nice speed.

World IPv6 day is on 8th of June 2011, it starts at 00:00 UTC which means lunchtime here (IPv6 day will run into the 9th by 12 hours here). So with a little over a month to go we've prepared our serves for it and started testing by serving the site at ipv6.nicegear.co.nz (Note this link will only work if you have IPv6 connectivity). When IPv6 day arrives we'll be serving the main site at the normal address dual stacked (both IPv4 and IPv6).

As we don't have native IPv6 transit yet we're currently using IPv6 tunnels from Hurricane Electric. Set up on our servers took very little time, just adding an interface and DNS records. The thing that took the longest was setting up things here at the office so we could test everything. Our old WRT54GL router was running a super old version on OpenWRT, it's now been upgraded to their latest "Backfire" release which includes a spiffy new GUI.

So let us know if you're using the IPv6 site or if you have any other comments/questions about it.

As the colder months set in we all naturally start to think about heating the house. Down here in South Canterbury, things are starting to get a little chilly lately.

Our family house has a log burner installed which, as well as being cosy, is an efficient, sustainable and cheap form of heating. For the past couple of years we have enjoyed the warmth of our fire in the living area but the temperature in the bedrooms wasn't quite up to par, especially at night.

Our living area is quite large (10m x 5m) with a chapel ceiling at 4.5m high, which makes for a large volume of heated air sitting around up there where no one can really feel it - what a waste! I've measured the temperature up there and with the fire going it quickly gets up to 35° - 40° C. To combat this wastage I recently installed a heat transfer unit which moves the air from the living space ceiling down to the bedrooms. This is a simple system, consisting of a fan mounted in the roof space, some well insulated ducting, and ceiling vents.

Now of course I could have purchased an off the shelf thermostat to go with the system but what fun would that be? It would also require a new 240V circuit wired up, with the associated electrical inspector fees. I decided to whip one up using an Arduino, a temperature sensor, and a Solid State Relay (SSR). To make things a little more interesting, I also added Ethernet capability.

To save the electrical regulation complications, I used the existing wiring from an old ceiling fan, this just required a replacement switch on the wall. I designed the unit to degrade gracefully, this means that if there is no network connection it will behave just like a normal on/off switch as people would expect. With the network connection though things get a little more interesting with the following features;

• Automatically start and stop fan dependant on temperature
• Ability to set/adjust on and off temperatures remotely
• Override automatic mode (force fan on or off)
• Send temperatures to a web server for logging

Here you can see a picture of the assembled unit, inside you can see the Arduino/Ethernet combo (bottom right), a 12V power supply to run it (top right), and the SSR (top left). Coming out each end is the ends of an off-the-shelf extension cord and out the side is the Ethernet and temperature sensor cable.

Here's a sample of the basic web page output from the Arduino itself.

Like any good project the code is open source. Like a lot of projects it was hacked together rather quickly and re-used various snippets, in other words it isn't that pretty. It's always better to release early than never to get around to releasing at all though right? You can find the code available on launchpad for now; http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~hads/+junk/heat-transfer/files

Although the code is a little messy it does have some good examples of storing configuration data in EEPROM, running a web server as well as a client at the same time, using the DHCP, DNS and DallasTemperature libraries. If anyone has any questions about getting it going, or better yet suggestions/comments/criticisms/patches, then by all means feel fee to comment below!

As well as a private server here, I've been uploading the data to the new ThingSpeak service, they have a neat charting API to visualise the output data;

In the very near future we'll have a new product from Freetronics, the EtherTen, which is an Arduino and Ethernet shield all built into one board. This is the perfect type of project for it and would allow you to save money on the components too.

I hope this is an interesting little project for you, I'll try and find some more time in the future to share some of the other home automation projects I've installed around our house - Hadley

Warning: This system involves mains (240V) voltages which can kill you. If you're going to try this at home please exercise caution.

We occasionally get asked what the deal is with the Power over Ethernet (PoE) on the PC Engines "ALIX" series of single board computers.

It's not the same as the PoE that most IP Phones, IP Cameras and network switches use. To save money on components so you can buy them at such good prices PC Engines decided to use "passive" PoE technology, which is basically sending DC power down the unused pairs of the network cable. The voltage can be anything in the range that the ALIX boards accept (7-20V) which is again different to the 48V that 802.3af PoE uses.

There's a couple of useful products to power the ALIX boards with; firstly the standard PC Engines injector which lets you just use the same jack that you would normally plug directly into the board, but remotely. Then there's the Freetronics 4-Channel PoE Injector, this is much the same thing, but will let you power 4 devices.

If you've already got a PoE Switch powering other things on your network then you can use this neat product from LevelOne; the "POS-1002" PoE splitter. This neat little box converts the 48V from your PoE switch to various selectable voltages and even comes with a selection of output jack sizes which will let you power all sorts of devices, including the ALIX boards.

Hopefully this gives some insight into powering the PC Engines ALIX boards with Power over Ethernet (PoE). To finish off, since we're talking about powering the ALIX boards, here's a neat article with a DIY UPS for the ALIX boards as a bonus.

Last night my (Hadley) phone, a Nexus One, prompted me to do an over the air (OTA) update to Android Gingerbread, the latest 2.3.3 version of Google's operating system.

After the update had completed the initial start up took quite some time, the phone was also pretty unresponsive for several minutes. I guess there was still a substantial amount of things going on in the background. Once left for a few minutes I had a quick flick through my normal applications; K9 email, the built in web browser, Google reader and Handcent SMS. Interestingly things do seems a little but snappier than before. Pages are rendering faster in the browser, application screens seem to be shown a little quicker than before and menu selections are acted on more instantly.

As you can see from the screenshots (these are of my phone) the theme has changed a bit, the top notification bar is dark instead of light, the phone/browser/web button down the bottom is squarer and a little green. There's also a nifty animation when you turn the screen of reminiscent of turning off an old school CRT TV, very cool.

As well as the speed improvements and new prettiness, there is one new feature that I've especially been waiting for. Built in VoIP.

As soon as I'd started up and had a quick play around I went straight into the call settings to find out how this VoIP thing worked. To test I registered the phone as an extension to our local FreeSWITCH VoIP server here, as you can see in the screenshot I've made it extension 806. Once I entered the SIP username, password and server address the phone registered and I could immediately place calls. Easy. I've also registered to a test account on 2Talk which appears to work fine.

The call quality is good, our FreeSWITCH server is set up to prefer the G722 wideband codec, then G711 (ULAW/ALAW), a few others and then GSM. When the GSM codec was listed, even at the end, the Android client chose GSM which isn't great quality and leaves a poor impression. After removing the GSM codec from the choices the Android client chooses G711 ULAW which although is bandwidth intensive, is good quality. If we had G729 available this may be a possibility for lower bandwidth usage. As G729 is a licensed CODEC and we have enough bandwidth not to worry, we just use G711.

I currently have the phone set to ask whether to place outgoing calls via VoIP or the mobile network every time, you can choose a preference here too. I can't see this replacing my desk phone as what I want to use every day - there's nothing quite like picking up a decent handset - but it's certainly useful when I'm not sitting in front of my desk.

Thanks to all our friends and suppliers who have sent messages of support. We're in Timaru which is about 150km south of Christchurch. We and all our family and friends are safe to the best of our knowledge.

If you would like to help the Red Cross have an appeal at www.redcross.co.nz/ (though it's not up at the moment). We have donated money to the ASB appeal (account 12-3205-0146808-00) and will be donating more money as we did for the last earthquake in September. Part of the profit from your orders will go to assist those just up the road from us.

We shipped out some orders and will continue to do so but please note that they may not get through for some time.

Our thoughts are with all those effected.

We just had the best email to say that some tweezers we sold over the holiday period helped Kiwi Birdlife Park hatch a kiwi chick!

After an assisted hatching on Sunday morning, the latest brown kiwi
chick to hatch at the Queenstown Kiwi Birdlife Park is showing all
the signs of growing into a healthy young chick.

Big congratulations Nic and the team and Kiwi Birdlife Park and thanks for making our day.

Read the full story in the Otago Daily Times

A common query for people implementing IP based phone systems is how to have a phone ring differently for internal (from within the office) and external (from the PSTN) calls. To do this you'll need two things; a phones that supports this - here we're using Yealink phones, and a VoIP server that supports the "Alert-info" header - many do such as the popular open source solutions Asterisk and FreeSWITCH. Other than that it's all pretty straight forward.

Firstly we will configure the Yealink phone. To do this go to the "Phone" tab and then to the "Ring" page under that.

Once there add an entry into the first set of boxes. Under "Internal Ringer Text" choose a short descriptive name for the ring, I've called it "Internal" as I'm going to use it to change the ringer for internal calls. Under "Internal Ringer File" select the ring that you would like to use. That's it as far as the Yealink phone configuration goes.

Configuring the VoIP PBX differs depending on the SIP server you are using. For Asterisk you need to add a line to the extension or incoming rule configuration such as the following;

exten => s,1,SIPAddHeader(Alert-Info: <http://localhost/>;info=Internal)

The "Internal" at the end of that line correlates to what was entered into the phone configuration. This can be added either directly into the configuration file, or perhaps through the GUI interface that your PBX provides.

For FreeSWITCH things are much the same with a slightly different syntax. Add a line to the extension rule such as the following;

<action application="export" data="alert_info=<http://localhost/>;info=Internal"/>

Again the "Internal" at the end of that line correlates to what was entered into the phone configuration.

This is all the configuration you need, you can set up as many different rings as your phone and VoIP PBX system allow.

Earlier this week the final version of Yealink's v60 firmware was released. This has been in beta release for a while and it's great to see it officially out now. The big news of course is IPv6 support. Also definitely worth a mention is Action URI/URL support; this allows you to not only control the phone via HTTP requests but also have the phone notify a web server on certain events e.g. incoming calls, outgoing calls etc.

The list of new features is pasted below and the full changelog can be found here [yealink.com]. I'd recommend everyone look at upgrading to get some great new features, enhancements and a few bug fixes.

• Added IPV6 support.
• Supported Action URL/URI.
• Added ACD function.
• Added LLDP support.
• Supported PushXML.
• Enable Broadsoft ACD synchronization.
• Supported Broadsoft Network Call Log.
• Supported Broadsoft Network Phonebook.
• Supported Zero-Sp-Touch.
• Enabled HuaWei ATS Conference.
• Added Watchdog function.
• Enabled transfer RTP package from PC port.
• Enabled optional of WAN and PC ports speed.
• Supported Send Sound of headset can be adjusted.
• Enabled user-defined of Button Sound and Send Sound.
• Enabled Registration Random.
• Enable calling out with no registration.
• Supported Hebrew input method and displaying from right to left function.
• Added Password Dial-up function.
• Enabled whether Use Outbound Proxy In Dialog configurable.

Welcome to 2011! Hopefully you all had a fantastic Holiday break. I know I (Hadley) did, just returning this weekend from a week at Terrace Downs - a beautiful golf resort. To all of you who ordered over the holiday break; thanks for your orders and your patience, everything will be shipping out to you today.

To kick of the year we've just added 30 new products to the site in the "Electronics Gear" categories. These include an Arduino "Power" shield which allows you to switch higher voltage/current DC than the Arduino can normally handle. This means with the SSRs we've now got AC and DC covered.

We've also got a range of electroluminescent or "EL" wire and drivers/controllers including an Arduino shield. This stuff is super neat, like small flexible neon you can DIY. Great for decorations, effects, Christmas and Halloween decorations etc.

There are various other bits and pieces too so if you haven't lately, head on over to the new products page and check it all out.

Thanks to all of you our great customers We had a fantastic year in 2010 and 2011 is going to be even better.