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Fading Skype

Some people in Tas wanted to talk to me but didn’t want to shell out mobile call rates if they could avoid it, & this house has no land-line (the ADSL is “naked” — ooh!) so they urged me to install Skype, which I did.

Skype provide a Mandriva RPM, which went on straight away & worked ferpectly.

This morning, Tas crew called in, which also worked ferpectly... but after maybe 10 minutes, the caller faded to near-inaudibility. We broke & re-made the call, which went exactly as before.

I suspected that some setting in my shiny new installation was wonky, but the caller Skyped another (to her) local, & got the same effect.

Ah, the munders of wodern technology! (-:

Comments

Anonymous said…
if you want a real number with voicemail, pennytel do them (voip) for $5 a month, includes $4 of free calls. 12c per call anywhere in au, us, uk, untimed. mobile calls are 11c/min (or there abouts)

cheapest handset is a softphone. I use my mobile, which has wifi and a sip client.
13 February, 2008 11:04
Anonymous said…
would you please tag your blog posts so that your vapid-thought-of-the-moment posts don't end up spamming the planet linux australia RSS feed?

out of the 101 entries in http://planet.linux.org.au/rss20.xml, 10 of them (just under 10%) are from you.

Leon Brooks: Fading Skype
Leon Brooks: Credit cards are weird
Leon Brooks: Cooking with log tables
Leon Brooks: Oh, noticed on the way out...
Leon Brooks: Yaknow, 2 days is a looooong time...
Leon Brooks: Classic tech support in pictures
Leon Brooks: Hot food?
Leon Brooks: Fluffy comets - not!
Leon Brooks: Wormholes in space?
Leon Brooks: Next stop on the Perthwards trek
Leon Brooks: Wireless rechargeable high-intensity reading light for $23.75


NOT ONE of these is linux related. only one of them is even slightly tech related (and even then is unlikely to be of any interest to linux geeks).

the occasional non-linux/non-tech post would be tolerable. lots of people do that. you, however, make a habit of posting whatever irrelevant rubbish pops into you head. several times per day. fine, it's your blog, you can post whatever you want to it. but tag the crap so it doesn't end up spamming the PLA feed. and subscribe a linux-only RSS feed to PLA.
13 February, 2008 13:35
Leon RJ Brooks said…
Grumble, grumble, anonymous, mutter, mutter... nevertheless, the comment does make actual sense (a fairly random event for anonymous comments) so I’ll examine the tagging & filtering options more anyway in coming days.
13 February, 2008 18:59
Anonymous said…
The fading could be a bug in Skype's automatic mixer level control to manage the volume. In the Skype Linux beta client, there's an option to 'automatically manage my mixer levels' in the preferences. Additionally, it also supports V4L2 for video calling, which is sweet.
13 February, 2008 21:00
Anonymous said…
i post anonymously because i don't and won't use services like openid, or a google account. commenting with a name/URL requires javascript and, according to NoScript there are 22 mystery scripts on your blog waiting to run if i allow it...that's just not going to happen.

which leaves anonymous.

but, anyway, thanks for deciding to look into tagging.
14 February, 2008 05:14
Leon RJ Brooks said…
thaytan (O beloved of Scientologists?): no such effect seen with other conversations, but I found & switched the gain thingo off, we’ll see what happens next time. A narrow eh-Skype?

Thanks for the hint. (-:
15 February, 2008 10:56
Leon RJ Brooks said…
ominous: I’ve started tagging posts intended for PLOA, & am chatting with the Planet supers about their options for filtering. Wait & see, I guess.

Leon Brooks: enRAIDing by remote control
15 February, 2008 10:59
Leon RJ Brooks said…
thaytan: sorry, should’ve linked to a reference for the Scientology mention.
15 February, 2008 11:03
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