Landline

It appears we are joining the crowd of folks who do not have a landline in the house. Before we moved the phone sat there and kept the answering machine company.

Every once in a while we'd get phonecalls from telemarketers but that was about it. Both the wife and I carry cellphones everywhere and generally only call each other. So when we are at home no one is calling anyone. Even then I only had a landline because at that time it was difficult to get a naked DSL circuit.

So now I'm running TW cable broadband through a tasty-hacked WRT54GL linux-based router running OpenWRT. Functional Quality of Service manipulation in a $50 router. Awesome and geeky. Awesomely geeky. Which I've tuned for VoIP.

Which brings me to the current topic. I'm a latecomer to Skype, but it loaded and runs fine on my 1ghz linux box. I sprung the $3 for the upgraded version that lets you call US/Canada numbers for free. Neat.

Since the Dear Wife luvs her some old-style phones, I ordered a box off Amazon that appears to let you jack a normal phone into your Skype feed. I've got a cordless phone that we'll press back into duty. I'll let you know how it goes.