Posts made by bnrstnr

We cut the cord 3 or so years ago... We first tried sling.tv on an original FireTV Stick and it was a horrible experience; interface was super slow and the buffering was bad. We also had a Roku 3 that it worked great on, but the Roku was otherwise useless IMO. We had slingtv for about a year until they cancelled on us just recently (I think it was a billing glitch because we were never actually charged after the 7 or 10 day trial, whatever it was). Ultimately the service was solid if you had a semi-decent device to run it on. The bad part for us was that we were already so far removed from zombified channel scanning habits that most of the time we never even thought to switch on slingtv.

@gjacobse It's a community extinguisher lol.. It always hangs there on the wall, I just happened to push this table next to it when I setup here.

Here's my temporary desk in the shop when I have an electrical panel to build or a machine to program/commission (Controls Engineer is my main role, IT is only 20%ish of my time). I'll have to post my regular desk once I move back in the office.

@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:

This picture totally reminded me of this old meme...

@scottalanmiller We do use the slightly higher end model SIP-T46G though... Our ROI switching to VOIP was like 6 months, so I sprung for nicer phones than we probably could have gotten away with. Additionally, to make them function exactly like our old system we needed more line keys than the lower models had.

@bigbear said in FreePBX:

VOIP Supply actually ships a lot of Yealink from Texas as they are just reselling another distributors inventory. Because of that they arent the best price I have seen out there either. Baltic is probably better.

Just looked and the phone we use is $14 cheaper on Baltic than it is on voipsupply

@brianlittlejohn We used voipsupply.com

They had everything we needed and the price seemed right. If you create an account and login you'll see the better, non-MSRP, pricing.

@dashrender said in Comcast just told me to call WOW:

It might be on Sling.. now I have to manage a DVR thing though..
Does the DVR manage the sling box itself?

I think you may be confusing this with the Sling boxes that would replicate your physical cable box connections to other devices/apps.

This SlingTV is a live (and some on-demand) content service that carries popular cable channels (TNT, ESPN, etc.) You bring your own connection and device, and it gives you access to whatever channels are in the package you subscribe to.

We have been using WOW for like 5 years now. They used to be much more customer service oriented... The past couple times I've called it's been like talking to Comcast (maybe not quite as bad, but still...). I've been considering switching to Comcast because of promotional pricing.

Any chance he has a Synology NAS? The DS Photo app does exactly this. He can move his pics to specific directories and allow or disallow access to specific people. He could share his vacation photos with his wife and kids and keep the surgery photos private. Each user could have their own login info, and no reason to ever hand his unlocked phone over.

I've had pretty decent luck with Zoom modems. The Ubiquiti routers are also solid and have a good reputation around here, the ERLite-3 should be more than enough for home use (unless you're saturating a gigabit connection).

@rojoloco I don't disagree with this either, I'm just saying that it's not a prerequisite. Especially since he may have asked how to download illegal movies before lol.

I used a VPN service for a couple weeks when the first talks of the ISP garbage came up just to check it out, but I have since stopped using it because it wasn't worth the hassle of gmail telling me about suspicious activity every time I switched servers. I wasn't doing anything that I wouldn't normally do just because I was hidden.

The threat of having ISPs be able to sell personally identifiable information is enough for some people I know to want VPN... If there is nothing in it for me other than more spam, why would I want them to be able to see ANYTHING that I do? Something nefarious to hide definitely isn't a prerequisite.

@lakshmana Static IP from your ISP should not be a factor at all... If anybody is able to detect your IP address, then TOR/VPN has completely failed.

@dashrender I basically just threw the Xero name in as a place holder, it could be anything. He does print checks so, yeah, Xero is definitely out.

We are a tiny shop with only one bookkeeper, the (obviously bad) accountant pushes him to use QB... Sounds like this is about the only semi-acceptable scenario. If the bookkeeper doesn't mind QB is it really that much of an issue?

I have zero knowledge of bookkeeping whatsoever, so if he likes it, I guess who am I to tell him otherwise anyway. I could say "hey, you should check out Xero one day. You might like it better than QB, it's supposed to be far superior."

To top things off I'm pretty sure his old fraternity bro is the accountant. Same reason we were paying $400/mo. for our POTs lines 3 years ago; a different fraternity brother was totally exploiting his "friend"

@lakshmana It is possible. If you only wanted one computer to use the VPN service, you would only install the client on that one computer.

It sounds like he's looking for a VPN anonymization service like Private Internet Access or NordVPN, etc.

Most have clients that include a killswitch if your connection is compromised... Not sure exactly how much you could trust this, but many people do.

You could also setup your router to route all traffic on your LAN through the VPN.connection

https://xact.spiceworks.com/u/gen/Jun2017/Cisco_Meraki_4th_of_July_Contest_Sweepstakes_Rules_2017_0619_10f0904e9536980cda43b82fcb0c8979.pdf

"Prizes are non-transferable and may not be sold, redeemed for cash or otherwise substituted except as provided herein. "

He mentioned something about budgeting for XOA, do the XO people only support XOA or do they also support XS issues as well?