Telepresence upgrade with a minimum of effort

telepresence-upgrade-with-very-simple-parts

This telepresence upgrade lets an employee take part in the office from more than four thousand kilometers away. It’s an upgrade of their previous setup which used a laptop on a rotating platform to add a bit of control to the video conferencing experience. But all that original version could do was swivel, this one lets you drive your virtual … Read the rest

Loudest telepresence robot ever

This telepresence robot will never let your Skype callers sneak up on you. [Priit] built the project, which he calls Skype Got Legs, so that his distant friends could follow him around the house during chats. But as you can hear after the break, the electric drills used to motorize the base are extremely loud.

Noise pollution aside, we like … Read the rest

GSM-to-Skype bridge lets you lose those roaming fees

Here’s the scenario: you’re going to be traveling somewhere and you’ll be charged roaming fees if you use your cellphone. But there is free WiFi available in this place. You can save yourself money by leaving your SIM card at home and using a GSM-to-Skype bridge to take calls on your phone via WiFi.

[Trax] is using a USB … Read the rest

Bluetooth multimedia remote

[Mathieu] spent three months developing this multimedia remote control. It connects to a PC via USB or Bluetooth and communicates with Winamp to pull down track information for display on a Nokia LCD screen. It can also be used as a wireless headset via the two on-board jacks. [Mettieu] thinks it’s just a small hop away from working as … Read the rest

Eavesdropping encrypted compressed voice


A team from Johns Hopkins University has discovered a way to eavesdrop on encrypted voice streams. Voice data like the kind used by Skype for its VoIP service sends encrypted packets of varying sizes for different sounds. The team learned that by simply measureing the size of the packets, they could determine what was being said with a high … Read the rest

GPL vs. Skype back in court


UPDATE: Skype has withdrawn their appeal and accepted the original judgment.

Tomorrow the High District Court of Munich will hear Skype argue against the validity of the GPL. Last June, the court issued an injunction against Skype for selling the SMC WSKP 100, a Linux-based WiFi VoIP phone. After the initial GPL violation, a flier with the URL … Read the rest

SIP for the SMC WSKP100


[sprite_tm] made my morning by sending in his latest work. After opening up his new SMC WSKP100 (Skype wifi phone) to identify the hardware differences, he managed to shrink a flash image from the SMCWSP100 to fit on his new toy. Then he spent some time hacking the kernel from the former to work on his phone. The result? … Read the rest