Month: January 2006

I noticed that BBCA is showing the new episodes of Rebus, and the Tivo had an episode waiting for me tonight. They have changed the cast since the last version. I read online that Ian Rankin thought John Hanna was little out of character for rebus. This one is staring Ken Stott

Here is some info from the Scottish TV site

Rebus’ sidekick, DS Siobhan Clarke, is played by Claire Price (Poirot: The Hollow, The Whistle-Blower, London’s Burning) and Jennifer Black (Local Hero) is his boss Chief Super Gill Templar.

Set in the seedy criminal underworld of Edinburgh, the films are based on Rankin’s novels The Falls, in which a killer leaves distinctive clues by the butchered bodies of his victims, and Fleshmarket Close, involving murder in the immigrant population of the Knoxland Estate.

I have been playing with a couple new things over the last couple weeks. VMware released the vmplayer for free which allows you to run virtual machines on your computer. If you do a little digging you can also create new virtual machines. I started off with there borwser application which is based on the ubuntu version of linux. I then hacked it so all the volitile data is stored on encrypted disk.
I have also been reading up on VOIP, I installed a copy of asterix on a machine at work to see what it looks like. I am now creating a Virtural machine for my home network. If I think it is going to be usefull then I may dedicate a machine to it. I also ordered a couple sipura ata adapters to convert my analogue phones to sip phones.
I asked my parents to look into how much they are being charged for call to the US. I am not sure if it would be cheaper to get a UK number that forwards to my voip account in the US.

The general thought is that none of the VOIP providers appear to be prime time, but this is just to play around and investigate.