Despite being wedged into a packed couple weeks in my early summer calendar, I managed to get over to the Lancaster area to attend the 2022 Telephone Collectors International (TCI) show, something they haven’t had since before the pandemic.
Continue reading “Telephone Collectors Show 2022”Life Marches On
I always said that perhaps some, if not most of us Gen Xers are still stuck in our childhood. For us, nostalgia is STRONG, given the chaotic and uncertain times we’ve been thrust into recently.
Continue reading “Life Marches On”Summer Radio Silence
So yeah I tend to forget to keep the site updated with the latest goings on, so I figured I’d post up a quick update with real-life things. Many of my projects have been put on hold for summer fun, although it’s been so hot out that I haven’t really done much anyway. Here in Eastern PA it’s been in the 80-90 degree range for nearly 3+ weeks now, and we’ve barely seen any rain in the last 5+ weeks. I don’t think we’re alone; I watch some social media even from places like London who seem to be in the same boat. Yet some states down south seem to be dealing with a lot of flooding; go figure. I haven’t cut the grass in over the month, although recently we got enough rain to make it grow a little (in patches) so I guess I have to bust out the mower at some point.
I was going to say I haven’t done much, but I can’t really say that; since my last post, I’ve camped 3 times, attended Field Day with the Phil-Mont Radio Club (where I also brought a Teletype Model 32 back to life and got it on the air), had some out of town friends come for a visit, did up my front yard for the Shapiro Superhero Run, entertained a friend’s kid for a week, picked up some more nerdy bits and #Teletype junk, and got to go to the Telephone Collectors show as well as a couple hamfests.
Lately though things have calmed down to a crawl, which I’m not too fond of sometimes lol. Again it’s been too hot to get anything done outside to the cars or even ride the motorcycle, so I’ve mainly been messing around or driving around in the AC instead. Part of me is looking forward to the fall, but part of me doesn’t wanna give the summer up either.
Anyhow…I’ll try to backfill some of the events and highlight a few things, so look for some more posts in the near future.
ADT-233 Update – Coupler Connected!
Well that was…easy! Yesterday I posted about my unusual Teletype ASR-33, and mentioned that I saw an unused connector stuffed into the UCC…
Continue reading “ADT-233 Update – Coupler Connected!”Teletype ASR-33..er…Anderson Jacobson ADT-233
So yeah, after a 16 hour round trip last year to acquire a Teletype ASR-33 that has since been patiently waiting for me to drum up the courage to disassemble and fix the keyboard, I recently acquired ASR-33 #2, however although this one is more or less an ASR-33, its branded as an Anderson Jacobson ADT-233, and has an interesting feature…
Continue reading “Teletype ASR-33..er…Anderson Jacobson ADT-233”Aruba CX, IP Phones, and PC Ports, oh my!
I’m still getting used to the Aruba CX switches, as they’re definitely humbling me despite me not being a network “expert” per se. One interesting battle I had recently was trying to get the “PC Ports” on some Mitel IP phones to work. In my case I’m messing with Mitel 5xxx and 6xxx series phones, and while the phones themselves work fine, and the PC ports are enabled, they just…don’t do anything!
The PC ports on these phones are basically a daisy-chain port; they allow an IP phone and a computer to share a single network drop by basically daisy-chaining the computer through the phone.
Continue reading “Aruba CX, IP Phones, and PC Ports, oh my!”Microsoft Teams prompting for Sign-In Daily (Bad SSO) after Endpoint Manager/Intune Registration
In doing some searching for this issue, I see a handful of people searching for the issue with varying degrees of successful answers. Since I ran into this recently, I figured I’d post up my own experience with fixing this.
Continue reading “Microsoft Teams prompting for Sign-In Daily (Bad SSO) after Endpoint Manager/Intune Registration”Microsoft Bookings – No Staff Available
Sometimes trying to be on the bleeding edge (or just ahead) often means trying to get things done quickly, which can result in breaking things in new and creative ways. Some people never admit their mistakes, I’m humble enough to not only admit them, but to share them so other people pulling their hair out as to why their booking site isn’t working can learn from my mistakes. Especially when they’re kinda funny.
I was trying to set up Microsoft Bookings for a group of individuals, and no matter what I did, I just could not actually get it to work. The backend was all there – staff is there, availability is there, and I can even manually book a slot from the admin portal, but the customer portal just stays on “loading” for all staff and offered no availability.
It was me…I goofed it up, and an easy goof at that 😉
Under the service settings, there is a setting called “Buffer Time”. That allows you to specify how long of a gap to set between each booked slot, so the staff can complete paperwork, get coffee, etc. I wanted to default it to 15 minutes before and 15 minutes after.
In my infinite wisdom, I actually put the “15” in the hours box in the after area, as such, there would never be availability as 15 hours is longer than the user’s daily availability. Once I changed it to be 15 minutes after, the bookings site worked as expected.
Anyway, onto bigger and better screw ups!
Getting a full list of Exchange Online Powershell Commands
Again, I love to share things that seem to take a bunch of searching for, and in this case, trying to find a full list of commands when administering Exchange online/Office365 via Powershell. You won’t ever find a list really, because they’re changing all the time and may also be dependent on the type of tenant you have amongst other factors.
Continue reading “Getting a full list of Exchange Online Powershell Commands”Telephony Home Lab Part 2 – Mistakes Were Made
SO…buying any kind of old computer gear or technology can either be considered buying collectibles, or throwing money into a fire pit. In other ways its all about the experience; nobody is buying a $4k Altair to run Crysis; they’re buying $4k video cards. Since I’m not sure how collectible an old PBX will ever be, I’m considering it the latter, so the idea is to minimize the amount of spend as much as possible. That said, sometimes it makes sense to look at the big picture and try to find something that best fits your needs wants, instead of trying to find “the cheapest stuff possible”.
Why a Merlin PBX? In Part 1 I mentioned that I saw a ton of Merlin stuff get scrapped back in my childhood days, and the 1980s retro-futuristic (or perhaps space-age) look of the hardware has me on a nostalgic kick. In addition, after reading up on the Merlin stuff, I find it has some relatively interesting features, including the ability to “live behind another PBX” (like Asterisk), and handles a venerable plethora of connectivity, including POTS, T1/PRI, IDSN (including BRI!), and supports several generations of phones from the old space-age devices to 90s-rific Avaya 44xx series phones. So long story short, I wanted one for both nostalgic reasons, as well as even a few practical-ish ones. There are MANY MANY other PBXes, some of which may even fit all my actual needs (see my notes below regarding ISDN), but for now I just wanted a Merlin.
Read on to find out what I ran into buying/building an old PBX. These nuggets can be applied to other things in life as well, and I’m humble enough to admit my fumbles. Buckle-in as this is a multi-part…part.
The Devil is in the Details – Research EVERYTHING.
Telephony equipment varies a LOT when it comes to standards, and even devices that LOOK similar, from a similar era and even the same company, may not be compatible. For example, At&t made a variety of those space-age-looking phones, that while looking identical, some were not compatible with the Merlin systems; they were for the Definity family.