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So Apple released a new Intel Mac Mini today. And they use Intels GMA950 for graphics. How stupid is this? So this machine is a no-go for me. I’m so disappointed.

I just received a mail from a user of JackenIAX. He’s running a patched version of Mac OS X on a generic PC, and now the program works on his machine. Cool! So now I guess JackenIAX is working on Intel Macs as well. Debugging via proxy (I don’t have an Intel Mac) is not the way to go. You could press the Donate button on this page, and I promise to buy a Intel Mac for debugging. Nudge Nudge…

I’ve added a couple of new features in JackenIAX. Added a symbol to indicate when you got new voice messages in your Asterisk server. Rewrote all of the code for the indicator symbols. Nothing you will notice, but I feel good about it. Now the codec selection actually work. Input validation of all preferences.

As you may know I recently released my new program for VoIP for the mac. I have written instructions on the home-page how to get a free account at FWD Free World Dialup to test. It seems they have a lot of downtime, so I get a lot of bug reports. I really need another free IAX provider to recommend. Anyone knows about one?

So it’s finally time to release my IAX softphone for Macintosh. It’s still very much in beta, but I need feedback on how everything works. There’s a lot of stuff that I’m adding that didn’t make it into this release. Have a look here.

I just need to write rudimentary install instructions, finish the simple homepage for downloading and I’m in business. So any day now… If you are in a hurry, mail me at info@jackenhack.com and ask if you can join the beta team.

I used to be fascinated by the idea of a voice interface to the computer. That was until I actually used one. It feels awkward and it’s slow. Yeah it has some use in specific applications, but for general use, I think it will never be. Back in 1983 Hewlett Packard released a computer called HP 150 that used touch-screens. My boss thought that I needed to go though their authorization courses to learn about this new revolutionary computer they where going to sell. So I was excited (this was before the mac). It was kind of fun to see that the attendees was fascinated and used the touch-sceen for the first fifteen minutes, but it was just to slow and uncomfortable to use, so everyone, including the teacher, started to use the keyboard. So I just wrote that computer off. And I’ve been skeptical about touch-screen input ever since. Until I saw this and was blown away! If a tablet computer had something like this I’d sell my body to science to get one. And science would probably reject the body and demand a refund. But then it’s to late, I’m dead and I have a tablet computer! Muhahahaa!

Building the venerable CMoy DIY Headphone Amplifier The last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking of building a small headphone amplifier. I want to tap into the line-out of my iPod to get better sound. I also have a problem with my headphone jack on my pod. After fighting with my friend Hermans dog, he managed to get his paw entangled in my headphone cables and destroyed the cable jack. So I have searched the net to try to find a good amplifier to build (I don’t have the money to buy one right now), and I found the Cmoy headphone amplifier. But I used another build page that has some upgrades to it. Unfortunately I could not find the bread board they used, so I had to make my own design. So after a couple of hours of soldering and using a drill it was time to try it out. And it worked! No debugging or anything. This must be a first. ...

So I finally got my 100 mbit internet connection. Yay! But after testing the speed through my WRT54G router/firewall, I could not get higher speeds than around 20 mbit/sec. After assembling an old 300 mhz pc with three Ethernet cards and the SmoothWall linux firewall I get around 70 mbits/sec. I will probably try to overclock the poor old pc to 400 mhz tomorrow. To try everything out, I downloaded the XCode 2.2.1 development image from Apple. It’s around 800 mb and it took just a couple of minutes. I could get used to this.

Still having problems with looping echo on my Powerbook G4 15" There’s a new website about the problem, so go there and sign up if you experience this problem. It’s incredible that Apple has chosen to keep this problem quiet. Instead of admitting that they have a problem with the latest 15 and 17" Powerbooks. Instead they give lame excuses and tells the customer that they can only run one audio program at a time. But even that doesn’t work. Give it enough time, and this could become a PR nightmare for them. If they just admitted that they have a problem and that a fix is on the way, but right now no one even knows if they are going to fix this. ...