Finally – The Shed
Jan0
It was almost certainly a mistake to build the house first, although I have been assured that if you do build the shed first: You never build a house.
Either way – the dream is becoming a reality. Toby and the esteemed super-builders Karl Boomsma and Ben have been going hard the last few weeks and the roof is getting close.
The construction is Typical Kiwi Shed. But the intention is to go off track a bit and infill the walls with a lightearth straw/clay mixture. Giving us all year round – cool in summer, warm in winter – comfort for…building crazy things and fixing them later on.
We designed it as it was a bit far from the norm for a kitset, I drew the plans (just squeaking in under the certification radar I think). The local engineers, BMC, detailed it, including the steel truss Toby is hopefully making as I write this, which gives us some clear span and the ability to hoist heavy things up and move them around.
More photos will surely be coming soon.
VOIP in the small business – update… 3
Mar2
Phones are boring, until they don’t work or get GPS or something. If you’re not interested in the crazy way the phone systems are changing in regard to calling over the Internet skip this post and come back from something more exciting (baby pictures?) soon.
After my post in November last year on the successful upgrade of a Asterisk PBX at Wanaka Wastebusters a lot has happened.
The reason I installed a local Trixbox server in the first place was to take advantage of cheaper calling, have more lines and to make administration of the system easier. At the time the local Voip Trunk providers (who all seem to resell the 2talk service) did not have a good multi extension feature. Our trial with Kiwilink never gave us a solid way of transferring calls.
Our Trixbox setup was good, but I was not happy with the possibility of failure with the laptop it was running on. So we invested in a IP01 embedded box from Nicegear. This solution worked ok but we had repetitive problems with incoming calls dropping. I’m sure one of the 200,000+ settings in Asterisk could have been tweeked but damned if I could find which one.
Soooo…in the meantime 2talk had a better implementation of their line manager and I decided if we could manage all our lines and features from one login a hosted service was the way forward – into the cloud we went. I decided to invest in a bunch of Linksys SPA942 deskphones to get some continuity in our endpoints, set them all up and sat back with fingers crossed sweating.
I should mentioned I also doubled up our broadband connection with 1 x wan through hd.co.nz and one through netspeed.co.nz with a fail over at the router level. I figured the extra $60 a month would pay itself back easily through saved calling costs.
The result has been, so far, excellent. We’ve had failures on both internet connection, fortunately not at the same time so nobody but me know. Perfect. Calling has been of high quality and transfers, auto attendant and voicemail to email have all been seamless.
The only comment I have is that the 2talk web interface for the line manager is buggy and badly designed. I couldn’t change the caller id for the lines from it and the email for voicemail setting there didn’t seem to work. I’d love the job of redesigning the interface – actually I’d like to do the 2degrees one as well, but that is another story :-)
Loopcase Stiglitz Wallets … Progress …
Nov0
I have had these cruising around in the deeper part of my brain for months and they are now a reality. Wallets turn out to be quite an interesting design challenge, so small, so personal. Simon Williams has just taken some great shots of the latest efforts – Check em out – http://www.siwilliams.co.nz/?p=379 – teaser below.
I like a wallet you can throw across a room without it garage-saling everything out. Also one that can handle a friendly interaction with the ground when the inevitable skateboard or bike crash happens. These beauties are 99% recycled seatbelt, bike inner tube and advertising banners. They have pockets for cards, coins and a bill fold for the crisp cash.
I have named them the ‘Stiglitz’ wallet after a personal hero, who is also keen on keeping cash safe.
A strangely enjoyable computer purchasing experience
Nov0
I recently had to purchase a few new computers for the Wanaka Wastebusters office. I was resigned to having to go the Dell route due to their aggressive pricing but having had two excellent Thinkpads in the past (an R50 and my current T61p) I checked the Lenovo site just to see what was going on with Lenovo in NZ.
When I bought my T61p from the USA i could bring it in at around half the price of the same machine online through Lenovo NZ. So it was with surprise that I saw really competitive pricing on the NZ site. Yeehaaa. Dell has astonished me in the past with their (lack of) customer service, especially with a XPS Merle had which had well documented design flaws they refused to take responsibility for. If you know you’ve made a bad mistake in a product surely the length of warranty should be extended?
I was even more impressed that during ordering online I rang the 0800 number with a technical question and got a very helpful woman, I think in NZ or maybe Aussie, who obviously knew the product inside out.
Ontop off all this when the laptop arrived it had excellent low key, recyclable packaging (see below). Which considering the machine is to be used in a packaging campaign is very apt.
Lenovo laptop packaging, simple, elegant, recyclable.
More phone craziness – ATCOM IP01 Asterisk PABX
Nov1
A few months ago I installed a digital Pabx here at Wastebusters. It was an old Toshiba laptop running the opensource Asterisk/Trixbox CE mix. Since then it has mostly worked well apart from some hiccups at the beginning, and some occasional loss of internet connection which takes down the phones.
From the beginning it is has been obvious that relying on an old laptop has its disadvantages, mainly as if the power goes out it does not boot up automatically. It also relies on the laptop hardware and hard drive, which when (not if) it fails is fairly catastrophic. A server grade bit of gear with a UPS would be nicer.
The world of computers is ever changing and this year it looks like the age of the embedded system on cheap, but powerful, processors is here. Below is a ATCOM IP01, it is effectively a mini computer (from Nicegear) running a 400mhz Blackfin processor which as it turns out is ample to run a linux/asterisk stack ~ cost $295nzd. What does this mean? You can now replace a cabinet sized PABX with a low power box the size of a calculator. No surprise I guess when you look at an advanced mobile phone.
ATCOM IP01 Asterisk Applicance
The experience setting it up was mostly good, the gui is ok (some contrasting colours separating feature groups would be good) and my experience with Asterisk generally came in handy.
So now the little guy is churning away handling 10 extensions, an auto attendant, voicemail to email and all the goodness. It isnot over though – unfortunately we have a very sporadic call dropping issue which I am hoping is almost fixed.
The next mission, depending on how our internet connection reliability goes, is to add a normal phone line to the IP01 so if the net is down it has a fall over. The other option would be to add a GSM trunk so the fallover was a cellphone ~ I need to start looking for a economic SIP->GSM widget that could plugin as a trunk. Hmmm….
Illustration with Inkscape and Ubuntu in the office
Sep2
The last few days I have been working on a poster for the Wanaka Wastebusters 10th Birthday. I have been waiting for a project like this to really test out the rapidly improving open source program Inkscape, I have been using Inkscape for a while for design specifications etc but haven’t done an offset print job. The new 0.48 release seems to have solved a number of the bugs that stopped me using it more.
Inkscape is excellent. Once you get used to the key commands and find the necessary tools it is just mind bogglingly good for this sort of thing. I find the gradient editor to be better than Adobe and the path smoothing and triangle in/out is great. The Gui – especially for text spacing, on path isn’t as sweet as Adobe – but it does everything I need.
Also this week I installed a couple of work stations at Wastebusters. I have been fighting pretty hard to get Ubuntu in here as I believe it aligns with the Wastebusters values and seriously save some money over time. After a year or two I finally gave in and did my first ever POWERPOINT presentation, well actually done in Openoffice. This bored everybody into submission and I got my way, wow those presentations really work!
Using Ubuntu has allowed me to sneek in Openoffice as standard and lower ths cost of hardware over Windows 7. I got a couple of Lenovo M52 high quality dual core desktops for $250 each. So far both people using the workstations are very happy, Ubuntu feels like a real step up from Windows XP and stability has improved.
I’ve been saying it for years but I think we are just round the corner of some widespread adoption of some of this software. As more business computing heads into the clouds all you really need is a solid internet enabled PC and Ubuntu excels, ontop of that you get all the growing goodness of free software on Linux – Inkscape, Openoffice etc etc.
Disclaimer: I am not by any means an illustration guru, and only use the most basic features of an application. Most of my work in the past has been in Freehand or Illustrator.
Finally – erection day!
Sep4
Wastebusters Guardians - finally in place
What you see here are two ‘Guardian’ gateway sculptures I designed two years ago from old power poles.They were erected in the south end of the Wanaka Wastebusters recycling yard, this freaked the council out who demanded a resource consent for presence (interestingly the safety of the structure was secondary in their mind).
I applied for consent as part of a broader site consent I was preparing and in that process the ‘Landscape’ department demanded that the colours in the intended flags which the structures were to carry be replaced with muddy tones. Our design was intended to reflect the above horizon colours in this area, white/blue/brown, but the local ordnance seems to have settled around toning built structures out of sight as opposed to making them an intentional part of the landscape.
Finally last week with Brendan Holloways (excellent local builder) help we Hiab’ed them back into place. It is the frst time I have seen them up as last time I was out of the country, the photos I was worried their height (around 7m) wasn’t enough to have the intended impact. But in the fleh, I think they are successful.
Design stage
I hesitate to call them ‘art’, mainly to avoid the plague of controversy ‘public art’ enjoys. I see them as an extension of the products which are sold in the yard and shop which they protect.
I like to think of them as a symbol of opportunity and the serendipitous nature of the Wastebusters experience. What you find is often not what you expect, maybe something you didn’t know you needed. Wastebusters, as do all recycling shops, holds a special place in my heart – for me they are a library of things, where I can take things home experiment with them and return them.
They also exist primarily for the staff, the people who work in often trying circumstances and – as environmental heros – deserve symbols of ownership to the place. The structures act as an unexpected anchor in an industrial yard.
Of course they’ll meet with (already have) disapproval as well as approval. I am, of course, willing to debate their necessity in a public forum at any time.
The pair juxtaposed across the entrance
Some more Loopcase action
Jul0
Some late night and weekend time (the new fan heater makes it possible) in the workshop has resulted in some more Loopcase experiments and prototypes. Winter fun.
The first is a set of three custom bags for Sisu Software in Wellington and their Dell 5500 laptops. These have custom printed panels with their logo, are padded and have a bicycle inner tube reinforced corners. They came out really well and now I just need to find some time to make one for me.
While sitting at the sewing machine I had an epiphany about a new design using the “Loop” for a wallet from seatbelts (have been trying to find new seatbelt uses for a while). The photo shows prototype #2, I think #4 or #5 will be useful and #6 or #7 perfect :-)
Merle and I have also been tapping away at the Loopcase site – it almost has enough stuff in it to warrant a new theme I think…or at the very least a tidy up.
The path of most resistance – home insulation with no building science
Jun0
I just met up with a fascinating French skier over in Wanaka for the season. Fred has been working in a building consultancy in Switzerland using some Swiss software to do building performance analysis. It is now mandatory in Switzerland to build to a minimum thermal performance and with the cost of energy high economically advantageous to go higher – they have a successful performance indicator called “Minergie” which offers benchmarking for thermal qualities as well as air and I think environmental impact of material used.
He showed me through the software he uses and it looks a little like the Australian Accurate. What is astonishing is the fact that people in, at least his part of, Europe are lapping up the idea of doing the science before proceeding on a costly build or refurbishment. Pretty much the opposite of my current experience in installing insulation in Wanaka through the Clean Heat and EECA schemes, people have a price point and beyond that their eyes glaze over. It isn’t that astonishing given his company expected to save people “at least 75% of their energy bill“. 75% !!
I have recently become conscious that in building and insulation details is everything, and that our perceived best practice in New Zealand lags that of Europe even further than I thought. Freds software has advanced wall and roof system modeling which includes structural timber/window frame thermal bridging which allows efficiency focused design I haven’t yet seen in any buildings around Otago.
Ideally as part of my work at Energyhouse we could offer a comprehensive model for people to base their insulation and heating investment on. To investigate this further we have commissioned Fred to do a study of the Wastebusters shed and office/staffroom to provide a benchmark from which to make future spend decisions. I have talked ad nauseam for ages about insulating the shed walls with recycled corrugated cardboard and the roof with NOVATherm – maybe now we’ll have a way to make a real, scientific, decision.
Asterisk / Trixbox digital PABX in real world use
May3
What this looks like is a old Toshiba laptop sitting on a shelf. Which is correct except right now it is handling up to a few hundred phone calls a day as a digital PABX running a Trixbox build of Asterisk+Linux software .
What does this mean? Well…Wanaka Wastebusters, where it is installed (please do not steal it :-), has one phone number people can ring in the normal phone like way. That phone number has been parked at a service provider and there enters the internet. Over the interweb thingy this laptop talks to the provider and can conduct up to five simultaneous calls. At Wanaka Wastebusters there are ten extensions that each have voice mail and are available through the IVR (a recorded message you get when you ring the number) – all of these features are running off the laptop. People can dial within each others extensions and transfer calls etc and generally be productive hopefully.
Nice – but why? Well it saves a few hundred dollars a month on line charges for extra phone lines with Telecom and means we can add users and features as we need them. We can also make use of cheaper calling rates and eventually peer directly hopefully with other businesses using SIP which is the glue like protocol making all the VOIP stuff happening. It is an acronym world.
Pretty cool use for an old computer huh. I’m not sure how long a laptop will last always on but it has been working for 5 weeks no problem and because it has a battery even has its own UPS built in. We might have a sweepstake on what gives up first – the power pack I’d say.
In case of failure or hacking I am building another one on a old IBM Pentium 4 which could be plugged in as a replacement. What I would really like though is a few Sheevaplugs, amazing 5w super computers. That is ‘super’ as in awesome not as in a Cray – although they are probably faster than most Crays ever built… maybe one day …
Clients
