[asterisk-users] How are you using Asterisk at Home ?

[Greg Woods]

On Tue, 2007-10-09 at 09:55 +0200, Michiel van Baak wrote:
> On 17:54, Mon 08 Oct 07, D4rk F1ber wrote:
> I am just curious about what
> > others feel are useful uses for it within the home, and what others
> > get excited about regarding it all.
> 
> What did the trick for me is integrating it with MythTV.

I have tried to get MythPhone to work without much success so far; maybe
it's time to give it another try, because:

> When the phone rings my tv pauses, and starts recording on
> the harddisk. Once the call is over my wife has 15 seconds
> to go back to her seat before the tv resumes.
> 

...this is exactly what I want.

I originally started with * because when I upgraded my home server to
new hardware, I could no longer use my ISA modem, and I experienced
literally months of frustration trying to find a PCI modem that wasn't a
Lose Modem (erroneously called Winmodem :-) or one that had a driver
that would actually work with the vgetty+sendfax-based answering machine
I had. I read an article in Linux Journal about * and decided to see
what I could do with it. I also had a lot of time at home recovering
from surgery and this gave me something to do.

Now, using * and a $300 Digium card as an answering machine is massive
overkill, so I assumed there would be other things I could do with it. I
was right. One thing it does permit is the use of VoIP phones in the
house, so I could install phones in places where there was network
wiring but no phone wiring. Also soft phones on my laptop and desktop.
It permits using the house phones as an intercom. It allows my wife and
I to have separate voice mail boxes, plus one for a political
organization we are involved with. We can have our voice messages
e-mailed (very handy when we are on trips). I can program it to prevent
my wife from lapsing into old habits and making long distance calls on
the house line (and activating a monthly fee) when we have prepaid long
distance on our cell phones. We can record calls. We can access the
answering machine from any phone in the house. It will automatically
route incoming faxes to the machine with the fax modem, so there is no
need for a separate line or always having to make special arrangements
for faxes. At some future time, having the ability to receive calls over
the Internet via services such as FWD will come in handy (when that
becomes popular enough to be more than a fun toy for geeks).
 
There are enough advantages that, even though the phones may be a bit
more difficult to use now (you can't just pick up another extension, you
have to initiate a conference call or transfer the call), she has warmed
up to * (and MythTV) because of the additional features it offers over
an old-fashioned answering machine.

--Greg