A number of months ago, I deployed a new SIP network using Grandstream GXP-1782 phones. For some of the folks that are always on the phone, we got a couple of Plantronics DECT headsets - which are specificially listed on the compatible headset list published by Grandstream.

The headset plugged into a APD-80 adapter cable. The Plantronics documentation states that a “85638-01 adapter” cable is required - although this is listed as an adapter to extend the APD-80 cable. When you look at the length of the APD-80 cable, this seems nuts - however the 85638-01 cable holds a secret.

Without the special 85638-01 cable, pickup and hangup of the phone was very unreliable. Lots of sites have this documented as a straight through cable - but it is not. The pins on this are actually reversed - ie:

See example photo:

Using this cable, you should find that the hangup and pickup functions work correctly without spending $15 per cable.

Credits to Michael Schneider for discovering this

A new year, a new blog engine.

While Wordpress is quite useful, its a heavy, hunking bit of software for those who just post occasionally and don’t really need any dynamic content at all. This is where Nikola comes into play.

Nikola takes posts in reST, Jupyter Notebook, YAML, TOML, Markdown or HTML and runs them through the theming engine to get plain, static HTML.

The benefit of this is almost zero load on your web server - as there is no dynamic data to process. Especially good for cheap VPS packages from the many online providers.

So far, I’m impressed!

After posting the last episode of the The Conversation Hour on the NBN, its been revisited.

This time with Tony Brown (Executive Manager, Corporate Media, NBN) and journalist Mark Gregory.

Enjoy.

Now we can use OpenVPN and the Yubikey + YubiCloud OTP service to do authentication for VPN connections.

Thanks to the OpenVPN team for fixing issues preventing this prior to v2.4.3.

More details on the page: OpenVPN OTP with a Yubikey

New guide up - right here.

My Xen servers main board didn’t have a second PWM controlled fan header to use with a PWM fan hub for the 3 case fans. Its a 4RU case - which has server grade 140mm fans that can draw up to 0.9A each and get up to around 3600 RPM.

So here’s how I used an ATTiny85 to generate a PWM signal from the variable ‘Speed Control’ voltage on pin 2 of the SYS_FAN header.