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| Monday, September 1, 2003 |
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Alive and thinking 
Blog du jour
| | Bandwidth spiffs is Scott Mace's new bloglet (a blog category that also serves as a whole blog) devoted to free public wi-fi. The subtitle: |
| | Despite the cost, some private entities are giving away bandwidth to the visiting public . ISPs ignore this at their peril; meanwhile, visitors and surrounding communities benefit. |
Phone hail
| | So we're trying to find a phone system for our new house. Since my wife and I both work at home and take a lot of deliveries, we like having four phone lines and an intercom to the front door that also allows one to open the front door by pushing a key on the phone. |
| | Last time we did this with a Panasonic small "hybrid" PBX system. While the system worked quite well, it was impossible for a human to program, cost a pile and lacked such handy conveniences as headset jacks. |
| | We're looking for something cheaper and more usable next time. After lots of searching through annoying and customer-hostile Web sites, our crosshairs are trained on the Panasonic KX-TG4000B, a cordless multi-line system that can be had for less than $400. Reviews are generally positive. I've seen it, and it looks like it's programmable by ordinary humans, even if it does have a few of the customary annoying features (such as intercom calling that isn't possible if you pick up the handset first, an activity that defaults to picking up an outside line). But after searching around the Web all weekend (apparently no suppliers are open for calls on weekends or holidays, even if they sell stuff on the Web 24/7), we still don't have answers to our doorphone questions: Can it communicate with a door phone? and Can it open a door latch? Or, as we fear, do those features require a PBX of some kind? |
| | Maybe with something like this Doorbell Fon (sic) system, a visitor would press a button that calls a home phone, where the answerer would open the a latch by pressing a key that sounds a tone that says "open latch" to the latch. Should be do-able, no? My wife just pointed this one out and likes it because it features "an understandable diagram". |
| | One more question: Does operation on the "2.4 MHz band" mean a cordless phone system might interfere with wi-fi? That would be a deal killer for us. |
discuss
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